Right now, AI adoption and investment in business are accelerating, yet sustained ROI is elusive.
Almost nine in ten companies now use AI somewhere in the organization. But when McKinsey surveyed them in late 2025, only 6% could point to significant value and a real bottom-line impact.
And yet only 18% say that AI has positively contributed to their workload and satisfaction in the last year.
True AI ROI won't materialize overnight. AI is changing what it means to operate, and that demands you stop, examine what you're actually doing, and rebuild it. You have to slow down before you speed up.
Karbon's Lead Product Marketing Manager, Lexi Beausoleil, calls this the AI slingshot moment.
The accounting industry has seen this before with practice management software adoption. The firms that invested in building those systems—migrating data, retraining staff, rethinking how work moved through the practice—had to slow down to do it.
At first, it was extra work. Then it made sense. And now there is a measurable and still-widening gap between the firms that did that work and the firms that didn't.
The same lesson is playing out again, at a much larger scale, with AI.
McKinsey argues that what matters most is not how AI will change the industry, but how it will change the economics of competition.
If you look at the path of past revolutionary technologies such as railroads, electricity, and computers, you may see how the disruption will unfold.
It’s predicted to occur in waves, with initial productivity improvements enhancing efficiency and true economic impact coming at a later wave. This latter stage is when business models change, new products emerge, and value chains are reconfigured.
The 3 waves of AI's impact on an accounting firm
For example, when electricity first arrived in factories, the first wave involved businesses simply replacing the steam engine with an electric motor. This increased efficiency but left everything else unchanged.
The breakthrough came later with the introduction of small motors that enabled workers to rearrange machines around workflows, and ultimately when companies redesigned their factories around electricity, creating new operating models.
What does this mean for accounting firms? Here is a breakdown of each wave of change, specifically through the lens of accounting.
3 waves of AI impact on the accounting profession
1. Productivity is the foundation
The first wave is the one most firms are riding now: AI makes existing work quicker and more consistent. Faster compliance work, faster admin, faster turnaround in general.
These gains are important, and they’re clearly spreading across accounting today.
According to The State of AI in Accounting 2026 Report, accounting professionals who self-report as advanced users of AI are saving around 82 minutes per day. And 87% are most excited about AI’s ability to increase speed across their work.
On top of that, 58% agree that automating routine and time-consuming tasks with AI will move the accountant’s role from compliance to advisory, with the role of the bookkeeper expected to see the biggest shift.
Client advisory meeting preparation is a good example of how AI can be used to both speed up and enhance a deliverable.
A well-prepared advisory meeting starts with knowing what's happened in the client's financials since you last spoke, what it means, and what you should do about it.
Painting that picture from scratch can take 30 to 45 minutes per client, multiplied across a week of advisory meetings and that's a significant chunk of time. That’s why so many accountants end up doing lighter prep than they'd like.
So what’s the alternative?
The AI-assisted advisory prep workflow involves feeding Claude or ChatGPT a client’s recent financial statements and a prompt that will deliver a structured brief that:
Identifies important trends, including what’s driving variances and whether they’re structural or one-offs
Flags risks the client may not have noticed
Prepares you to ask the questions that move the conversation forward
The whole process, from opening your AI tool to having a structured brief in hand, takes under 10 minutes.
Better yet, firms using Karbon have an advantage. Kai is Karbon’s AI coworker built directly into the platform where a firm's client history, workflows, and communications already live.
The advantage is context and centralized data. With the Claude or ChatGPT version of the AI-assisted advisory prep workflow, you will need to source a client’s information from separate locations to help inform the process.
But with Kai, you simply need to ask it for the prep. Kai will then reference everything available in Karbon and all integrations, including the client’s emails, internal communications regarding the client, engagement information, pricing, WIP, meeting notes and transcriptions, and more.
And because it’s part of Karbon, Kai already knows the rules and operates within the security and permission settings your firm has established in Karbon, so the right people see the right things.
Productivity is becoming the platform the next two waves build on.
2. Differentiation is where growth opens up
The second wave is where AI stops improving how work gets done and starts changing what you can offer.
In a study of 350 small business owners, 54% said they are willing to pay their accountant more when AI enables them to deliver new capabilities. And, according to The State of AI in Accounting 2026 Report, the number of firms offering (16%) or considering offering (42%) new services as a result of AI is rising.
In The Future of Accounting Report, Australian accounting firm owner Lauren Thiel predicted that in the next 10 years, the profession will need to capitalize on differentiation:
“We need to become better at sales,” she said. “To identify new gaps, know our clients better, create new value in what we do, and to communicate and ultimately sell that.”
In the same report, Joe Carufe, Partner at US firm Good Measure, doubled down on that sentiment: “The value proposition won’t just be fast service—it’ll be customized, intelligent service at scale. That’s how the best firms will scale intimacy. And that’s how they’ll win.”
What are some firms already doing to achieve this?
Mike Libbey runs Canadian firm YBL, and has just hired an AI Solutions Architect. The role will do three key things:
First, it’ll help drive efficiencies across the firm by eradicating manual steps across the whole suite of services.
Second, it will ensure the firm’s apps that have already been created stay polished, maintained, and enhanced.
Third, it will enable Mike and his team to serve their clients more deeply with custom micro niche apps built just for them.
“That's actually the part I'm most excited about with the greatest opportunity in my eyes,” Mike wrote in the first edition of his newsletter, The AI-First Firm. “Becoming a truly financially integrated partner, not just filing clients' taxes. And that's not a phrase I'm just testing out, it's what I believe.”
The YBL team already maintains over 40 vibe-coded tools across the firm. One of those is TaxPilot. Once a client’s tax return is filed and complete, they can use TaxPilot to review their finalized tax data, explore savings opportunities, and plan ahead with DIY tools that simulate financial scenarios, benchmark expenses, create plans for major life events, and more.
TaxPilot by YBL
McKinsey notes that product, service, and business-model innovation can expand profit pools, but only when these innovations are protected by strong competitive moats. And what’s one thing that gives firms the biggest advantage?
Moving early.
When firms lean into AI, train their teams, and create safe guardrails, they learn faster than other firms and build capabilities that strengthen even as AI-enabled practices become the norm.
And clients recognize this. 81% see their accountant as more valuable if they use AI to automate routine tasks and then use that time saved to fund strategy calls with them.
Your value increases the more time you spend with clients, sharing your insights, expertise, and support. The longer you do this, the stronger your relationship with them. Which dovetails nicely into the third wave of AI impact across accounting.
3. Friction reduces, and value is found elsewhere
The third wave is the least obvious and, McKinsey argues, the most impactful.
Most industries rest on friction, and this is where intermediaries thrive. Energy retailers, for example, thrive because consumers find switching providers complicated and time-consuming. But AI levels the playing field by making information transparent and decision-making near instantaneous.
Consider what would happen if AI agents could automatically optimize a consumer’s energy plan by analyzing price and usage, and then connect directly with the energy wholesaler to complete the switch. What happens to the traditional role of energy retailers?
Banking is another example of how AI agents could increase an individual’s savings by switching providers to optimize rates. The friction of a person doing it themselves is what’s protecting a bank’s core value pool.
According to a McKinsey analysis on the future of banking, a third of the $70 trillion sitting in global consumer deposits earns almost nothing in everyday checking accounts. If AI agents moved 5–10% of that to better rates, banks' deposit profits could fall by 20% or more. That alone could reshape retail banking economics.
As AI becomes more and more embedded in day-to-day life and eliminates friction, organizations need to rethink their value.
McKinsey explains that one of those avenues is to “specialize in offerings where trust, judgment, and human accountability remain decisive, with AI augmenting rather than replacing expertise.”
In the study, participants were asked to sum up their accountant in one word. The most common answer was some variation of trustworthy, followed by reliable and professional. One person simply wrote lifesaver.
And when they were asked what AI can never replace in their accountant, not one of the answers was technical. Instead, clients all listed personal qualities that make their accountant the advisor they trust the most, with 68% resonating deeply with an accountant invested in their legacy, even at a cost to speed.
The study found that for the most part, clients see AI as a tool to help you deliver more of the personal side of the relationship: the personalized phone calls, the tough conversations, and the strategic advice that’s only possible because you’ve got years of deep knowledge of their business.
When predicting the future of accounting, Matthew May from Sorren, one of the fastest-growing firms in the US, said: “Anchor around what is not going to change over the next 10 years. Clients will still need help understanding and running their businesses… And will want a trusted perspective who has context over their businesses as well. Build to that."
The accounting profession is one of the best-placed to ride the third wave of AI impact.
Next steps: Creating real value in your firm with AI
Where is the best place to start with AI? Consider this 3-phase roadmap.
The 3-phase AI roadmap for accounting firms
1. Start with what’s already in front of you
This is about using AI to remove friction from work you're already doing. For example, invoice and document automation that eliminates manual data entry, and AI-assisted recruitment screening.
This doesn’t require you to rebuild your firm from the ground up—these capabilities should exist in tools that already sit inside your current workflows.
2. Build the foundation that makes everything else possible
Often, firm leaders will see a compelling AI demo, buy a point solution, and wonder why they don’t see results. Fragmented data is what’s causing the disconnect.
AI is only as good as the data you feed it. If your workflow, communication, engagement data, and time tracking all live in separate tools, the intelligence layer you need from AI simply doesn’t work. Garbage in, garbage out is more relevant now than ever before.
Phase 2 is about getting your data into a single system of record. Dan Astrachan, CEO of investor-backed accounting platform Bridgepoint Alliance, alludes to the significance of this: “When your firm's backbone is in a single, open system and you can bring all of your data sets together, the calculus changes.”
Once you have clean, centralized data and your team is actually using it consistently, you've unlocked something most firm leaders haven't even imagined yet: true intelligence.
Some of what becomes possible includes:
Early warning signals on client issues, surfaced before they become problems
Firmographic analysis that determines new service opportunities for specific clients
Predictive staffing models that flag burnout indicators
Proactive cross-sell indicators that let you grow revenue per client
This maps to wave two of AI’s impact. Here, AI has moved beyond simple efficiency enhancements and is changing what you can offer your clients.
You are your own differentiator
Will the three waves of AI impact eventuate precisely as McKinsey predicts? It’s impossible to tell for certain, but looking at the history of similar disruption and what’s already unfolding with AI, chances are high.
The accounting profession is ripe for evolution: there are productivity gains to be achieved, there is plenty of opportunity to diversify services, and you have the deep and unwavering trust of your clients.
So, will you treat AI as a strategic moment and ride the waves?
This is your crystal ball for the next decade in accounting, based on 14 predictions from 34 of the profession’s most forward-thinking leaders and innovators.
G2.com
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