A Moment In Time

Someone said something to me last night that perfectly encapsulates how I have been feeling.

We were at dinner, and the conversation drifted the way it often does into what is happening in the broader business world and AI implementation. Somewhere in the middle of it he said, almost in passing, “This is a moment in time.”

He did not elaborate. He did not need to. I knew exactly what he meant, because I have been feeling the same thing for months and have been trying to find the right way to say it. I am going to try.

Every profession has these moments. For accounting firms, the last one was probably the move to cloud software in the early 2010s. Before that, e-filing. Before that, spreadsheets replacing ledger paper. Each of those shifts looked optional for a while, until suddenly they were not. The firms that did not adapt found themselves behind in ways that were hard to recover from. What feels different about AI is both the speed and the depth of the change. The tools available today are more powerful than what a Big Four firm had access to just a few years ago. The cost to experiment is low. The cost of not experimenting, of waking up in 2028 and realizing every workflow has been reshaped around tools you did not help define, is much higher. The playbook has not been written yet.

Right now, there is no standard way for a CPA firm to use AI well. There are vendors selling tools and consultants selling advice, but nobody really has the playbook. That is because the playbook is being written in real time by the firms that are actually building, testing, and learning. That is what makes this a moment instead of just another trend. A few years from now, there will be standard approaches. The firms that got involved early will have helped shape them, and they will have the experience to use them well. Everyone else will be buying the playbook from the people who showed up on time.

At Simple Accounting Solutions, we have decided to be builders rather than spectators. We are mapping our workflows, identifying the places where AI genuinely helps us do better work for clients, and putting those pieces in place deliberately. Some of it will work. Some of it will not. We will learn as we go.

This window is smaller than it looks. I would rather spend it building than watching.