Why I'm Not That Worried About AI, and How to Position Yourself for What’s Coming

I just got back from Firm Growth Forum, and as you'd probably expect, three topics dominated pretty much every conversation: outside capital coming into the space, how firms are managing talent (which is what I presented on - more on that in a future edition), and of course, AI.

It's that last one I want to talk about today, because the room was genuinely split on it.

One of the things that excites me about AI is the ability to focus on your best and highest use which is serving clients rather than getting tangled in the weeds with bad systems and workflows.

Instead of having five different systems open all day just to see where a return stands, Canopy brings everything into one place. By connecting clients, tasks, documents, and even a built-in AI Coworker, you can stop jumping between systems and get a quick snapshot of exactly what's going on. Visit getcanopy.com to make it easier to manage your firm today.

A Tale of Two Conference Conversations

On one side, a lot of people were really excited. Several leaders shared that they wished they were starting their careers right now, given the opportunities AI is opening up. The logic goes like this: AI takes the repetitive work off the plates of staff-level employees, which means firms have to get people into client-facing, advisory roles much earlier in their careers. Instead of spending your first three years being the person who executes the lower value, repetitive tasks, you get pulled into the interesting work sooner.

(To be fair to the people early in their careers right now, I'd note the obvious asterisk here: the low-level lingering anxiety around layoffs and job instability is a very real negative that the "I wish I was starting now" crowd tends to gloss over.)

On the other side, there was genuine worry, and it was most pronounced on the young professional panels. The people representing the voices of employees earlier in their careers weren't doom and gloom, but they were uncertain. And uncertainty is scary, especially when you're the one with the least leverage in the room.

My Take: Cautious Excitement

After all the conversations I've had with firm leaders, AI builders, and employees at every level, I keep landing in the same place: cautious excitement. And it's rooted in two experiences from my own career.

The first one is from my time as an intern and tax analyst. I was lucky early on. I got real exposure to complex transaction work and found myself in client interactions much sooner than most people at my level due to a mixture of luck (who my coach and mentor was internally) and self advocacy, that I really wanted to do that kind of work. And then, every time things got really interesting, I'd get pulled away. We were being inundated with basic tax compliance work, and it wasn't fair to ask a senior to handle that while I worked on the fun stuff. I understood the logic, but it put a serious damper on my morale. I wanted that next layer of work and the compliance grind kept holding me back from it.

That's exactly the kind of work AI is starting to absorb. The thing that capped my job satisfaction as a junior is the thing on the chopping block.

The second one is from my time in industry, on the other side of the table. I saw firsthand how underserved clients are. Firms would quote us on a narrow scope of work, deliver exactly that, and nobody had the capacity to walk in with their eyes open to what was happening more broadly.

Here's the example that still gets me. A firm helped structure some things around a funding round for the company. Solid work, scope delivered. But once the money was raised, it just sat in an account generating no interest. No treasury plan, nothing. That was costing the company in excess of $500K annually in returns we weren't seeing on money they’d worked hard to raise. The funny part? A month or two of that missed return was worth more than the entire cost of the engagement with the accounting firm. It was years before those funds were deployed to generate any kind of return at all, and by that point we were already making headcount reductions.

Nobody at that firm was incompetent. They just didn't have the capacity to drive the ball any further than the narrow scope of the engagement. And this is happening all over the place. Founders are routinely left without proper QSBS / LCGE multiplication structuring because the people who could do that work are bogged down in tax compliance and too burnt out the rest of the year to take on the work with a much higher ROI.

We're Leaving Money (and Satisfaction) on the Table

Put those two stories together and the picture gets clearer. We're a deeply supply-constrained industry. There is an enormous amount of high-value work that simply isn't getting done, and that's hurting firms and their clients alike.

And it's hurting employees too. One of the strongest correlations with low job satisfaction in the data we collect at Big 4 Transparency is an excess of hours worked. So if something can come in and take away a meaningful chunk of the repetitive task burden, there's real room for everyone to come out ahead: clients get served properly, firms capture work they're currently leaving on the table, and the people doing the work get more interesting careers with fewer soul-crushing hours.

That's the excitement part. The caution part is that I'm not going to pretend there isn't a lot of uncertainty right now, particularly at the junior levels. There is, and it's fair to feel it.

How to Get Ahead of It

Here's the part I'd actually act on if I were earlier in my career right now.

With AI taking on the level of work it is today (and likely will over the next few years), appetite for junior hires feels like it has come down a bit, while appetite to hire managers feels like it's at an all-time high. We see this directly in the roles firms bring to us.

The only real way that imbalance resolves is firms guiding new entrants into client-facing, advisory roles much earlier in their careers. The traditional path of "grind compliance for 4 years, then earn the right to talk to clients" doesn't make sense when the grinding is increasingly automated.

So if you're early in your career, the move is to run toward the client-facing work, not wait to be invited. Raise your hand for the calls. Learn to explain things to people who don't speak accountant. Get curious about your clients' businesses beyond the scope of the engagement, because as my story form my time in industry shows, that's where the highest-value opportunities are hiding. The skills that AI makes more valuable are exactly the ones the old career path made you wait years to build.

The people who get there first won't just survive the transition. They'll be the ones firms are competing over.

P.S. If you're a manager (or honestly, anyone at any level, but demand for managers is particularly strong right now) who's open to new opportunities, take 2 minutes to check out the Big 4 Transparency talent pool.

We're working on a LOT of roles in both Canada and the US right now for some truly fantastic firms. These are firms using Big 4 Transparency because they care about staying on top of compensation trends in the market, which tells you something about them. And if we place you, we'll pay you $1,000 once you make it past the 3 month mark with your new company.