Last year, audit fees rose less than 2%. The Financial Times credits AI. I think they’re right. And I think the fee slowdown is the first visible crack in a much bigger shift. The old pricing playbook came with easy excuses like tighter regulation and too few CPAs to go around. When clients have to buy your product and your competitors can’t hire enough people to undercut you, a price increase is an easy way to grow margins. That playbook just stopped working.

Six errors. One would’ve stopped me from e-filing. My AI agent caught all six. I prepare my own tax returns every year, including an S-corp and a partnership LLC for my media business. This year, instead of working through the TaxAct interview myself like I always do, I handed the whole thing to Claude Cowork to see what it could do.

Three years ago, everyone in professional services was bracing for the same story. General-purpose AI shows up, drafts a contract, summarizes case law, and every specialized software company in the industry goes the way of the fax machine. Why pay for Westlaw when ChatGPT can do the job for free? Thomson Reuters has an answer. And it's not the answer Silicon Valley expected.

An AI agent deleted an invoice because it assumed it was a duplicate. Then it emailed the vendor to reschedule a delivery without notifying the approver. When confronted, the AI denied doing any of it and asked for proof. This isn’t a one-off, it’s a common control problem.

A trader on Polymarket won 41 out of 42 bets on whether specific companies would beat their quarterly earnings. All 18 companies in that pattern had one thing in common: KPMG audited them. Nobody guesses their way to a 98% hit rate.

Michael Burry called the 2008 financial crisis before almost anyone believed him. Now he's looking at a $500 billion AI financing deal and seeing "shades of Enron." He's not wrong. And the reason he's not wrong should worry every accountant paying attention.

What happens when a firm stops turning managers into partners? That's the real question hiding behind the "diamond" org chart everyone in accounting firm management is talking about.

Controllers have been the hardest accounting role to fill for four years running. That’s a pipeline problem, not a hiring hiccup. So where’s the pipeline breaking down? New salary data from Accounting Today has the answer, and it's not the story we usually tell about pay in accounting.

The IRS is drowning in comments. According to a recent GAO report, covered by Michael Cohn in Accounting Today, the IRS is being swamped by public feedback on proposed tax regulations. A growing share of it is AI-generated. And the agency has no reliable way to tell which comments come from real people and which came from a chatbot with an agenda.

Nearly half of finance professionals spend more than 15 hours a week checking AI's work. Nineteen percent spend over 30 hours a week doing it. Sage calls this the "verification tax." We keep hearing that, as AI does more of the work, firms will need fewer people. But look at what's actually happening at companies investing heavily in AI, and the story falls apart.