Joe Woodard Explains How Accounting Firms Can Transform in the AI Era

Accounting firms are entering a new phase of work where AI is changing how routine tasks are handled. According to a Stanford report, AI is augmenting professionals, not replacing them, leading to a 55% increase in weekly client support and a 7.5-day reduction in monthly close timelines.

Data entry, reconciliations, research, and other repetitive processes are becoming faster, but the shift also exposes gaps in traditional firm structures. The challenge is no longer just adopting AI tools. Firms need to rethink workflows, redefine team roles, protect accuracy, and use automation to deliver faster, more valuable client outcomes.

In this conversation hosted by Ace Cloud Hosting, Seth Fineberg, Founder of Accountants Forward, sits down with Joe Woodard, CEO of Woodard. As an author, consultant, business coach, and national speaker, Joe has trained over 125,000 accounting and business professionals in areas of practice development, changing technology trends, strategic consulting, and how to maximize the use of accounting software in their practices. Together, they discuss how accounting firms can transform in the AI era.

Drawing from decades of experience, Joe explains how AI is changing the nature of work at the task level, why roles are evolving rather than disappearing, and how firms can approach this shift with clarity. The discussion focuses on practical ways to adapt, from using AI for structured research to rethinking team responsibilities, helping firms move forward without losing control of quality, people, or client relationships.

Transcript:

Seth: Hello again. Seth Fineberg, on behalf of Ace Cloud Hosting, and I have a person for you today. I am super happy. I know I’m always excited for the people that I speak to, but Joe Woodard and I go back. Joe Woodard, say hello.

Joe: It’s great to be here, Seth. Great to be here.

Seth: Excellent, Joe. So, thank you for taking the time out of your schedule. I know you have a little bit of an event coming up. We can definitely get to that and touch on that as it is relevant, I think, to our topic today. We really want to go into firm transformation essentials.

Now, prior to recording this, you had mentioned something to me about, you know, the things that you basically, to paraphrase, the things you’re doing today, you know, they might not even apply, you know, tomorrow or a little bit further down in the future.

Joe: It’s changing at the pace of AI development, which is exponential.

Seth: Exponential. And I even wrote an article recently about the idea that the 10-year plan, the traditional 10-year plan, is pretty much dead.

Joe: Yeah

Seth: It’s just not realistic. You can’t run a firm or a business. You can have a vision, I think, for where you want to be, but the core planning that you do, it’s hard to imagine even a few years out. So, what would you say just right out of the gate, some of the key components, the keys to transforming your firm today, just in terms of thinking?

Joe: So, here’s the interesting thing, Seth. Even as technologies accelerate timetables and make our planning more volatile, it still comes down to the same seven fundamentals. Your brand, your services, your clients, your technology, your processes, your engagements, and your teams.

As long as all of those are pillars in your practice, you know everything around them may change.

I have a lot of interesting insights into what the team of tomorrow is going to look like. We can talk about that. But you’re still going to be managing teams. All right. AI is going to become a more and more prevalent technology, but you’re still managing technology.

So, the pillars never change. For your listeners that didn’t get them that fast enough, it’s brand, services, clients, technology, processes, engagement, and teams. Manage those, and you’re good.

Seth: Yeah. I mean, that’s really, you know, when you’re thinking about it all, and you’re, and you’re in it, um, it’s nice to at least have a bit of a punch card, a little bit of a list kind of floating around in your head.

Joe: A category. You’ve got to categorize your planning. If not, you’re just kind of a blinking cursor, and it’s overwhelming. A blank whiteboard. Where do I even start? Great. Just start with one of those seven areas of focus. There’s no right order to do them in. They are all symbiotic.

And then you can start to, you know, collect your thoughts and your brain, your ideation within those categories. And then build out from there. This is your level one outline for a business plan.

Seth: Yeah. And it’s not, it doesn’t all happen at once. And having those as you go forward, you know, really is going to help you in the long run. So, in accounting, one of the things you mentioned, AI and even technology in general, a lot of that core, you know, the core technology that’s available and has been available in terms of automation, deals with the work. What would you say is evolving most at the firm level regarding the work?

Seth: So I would say even by nature of like being an accountant and doing accounting work that’s fundamentally changing, but I’m throwing it to you.

Joe: And it’s not so much the nature of the work that’s changing yet. I think it might be how we’re going about the work. Right. So, if we look at AI’s impact on not just the accounting profession but just on work in general, we want to differentiate between AI’s impact on tasks and AI’s impact on roles because a lot of people conflate those two things.““

If you treat it as what tasks are AI impacting, then it comes down to the person who’s responsible for the role or the overall outcomes. AI becomes a question not of who is displaced but what portions of a person’s work are then automated, or they have extreme efficiencies or effectiveness attached to them.

Um, so if we think uh even if you’re a sole practitioner in here and you haven’t had anybody ever reporting to you, you’ve never had an employee, I’ve got a news flash for you. If you use any GPTs in your practice, even the most baseline AI, that’s what a GPT would be. You now have an employee. It’s just an artificial one.

And that’s why I said I was going to have a fun kind of comment when it came to what the team of tomorrow looks like, right? So the question is, and if you think about it that way, if you think of a GPT as either a task handler or maybe an administrative assistant, but I think it goes beyond admin, it’s almost like a para professional, an admin assistant, then that’s the tasks you’re offloading it to.

But at the end of the day, your client’s still saying you’re the tax preparer, you’re the person signing my audit report, you’re the bookkeeper. Your role hasn’t changed just your work right now to answer your question specifically where am I seeing it intersect firms today it is in the task of research.

The research that they’re doing because research is concrete and it has a it has a fixed data set especially if you’re using the right GPTs like for example if you’re using TaxGPT and you’re doing tax research you’re going to get more structured tax data than if you’re going to ChatGPT so it matters which GPT you’re using.

But if you’re using the right one, you’re going to get really solid research data. Not perfect, but solid. Hallucination rates are down to 1% with a lot of GPTs. That hallucination rate, if you’re not familiar with the term, is just where it would make stuff up.

Seth: I’ve been hearing, you know, less artificial and more assisted, augmented things that are not as uh you know, lofty and foreign, and it’s more okay, I can get my hands on this, and it’s very exciting to see.

We could have a whole conversation just about AI, but this is really about, you know, firm transformation essentials. To that point, Joe, why now? What’s going on in the environment that is urging firms to make these types of adjustments?

Joe: The biggest driver of this is Private Equity infusion into the profession. Fun fact, as of 2020, not one accounting firm in the country had taken private equity money. That’s just six years ago. And now it’s approaching 50% if it hasn’t already crossed that mark.

And that is causing an urgency of valuation increase ahead of exit. And firms are getting serious about their planning to drive the EBITDA multiple. And then the firms that are on the buy side on the private equity funded side they’re more C-Suite driven than they are partner driven and that’s driving a different level of innovation and prioritization.

That prioritization is concentrating around CAS client advisory services because of the fact that you have 12 touches a year instead of one touch a year and you know in theory you don’t get 12 times the revenue but you can get six times the revenue depending on the value of the tax return. Each month cycle could be, you know, half of an annual tax return.

So, right, they’re looking at that just strictly as a monetization game, uh, and an upsell game so that they can then acquire, drive value up, and benefit, you know, the shareholders just like any corporation would do.

That’s a big now that all things all roads lead to AI, though, because the reason PE is investing all of these tens of billions of dollars, hundreds, I think it’s over a hundred billion dollars now into the CPA market, is because they see AI as a huge efficiency driver and a scale driver.

So, they want to come in, they want to innovate around CAS, create more touches, and then drive extreme automation through artificial intelligence. Um, but that’s what’s creating the sense of urgency.

Seth: Interesting. Yeah. I mean, look, you always have to wonder what’s behind driving, you know, this industry. Um, you know, obviously, there are some innovators, there are some leaders, there are folks who are making those decisions. They’re leading. Uh, some are maybe being, you know, pushed or pulled by their clients in either way. And, uh, others that are just simply being led. And it’s going to be very hard to just be that kind of firm anymore.

Uh, which brings me to my next question, really. What are you seeing as some of the missteps to avoid when you’re thinking about, “Oh, man. You know, I uh you know, there’s definitely a lot of pressure to change and I just so don’t like that, and I really just want to keep doing what I’m doing, but it’s very hard to just run a firm the way that you were running it for the last even 10 years. So, I got to change. I got to evolve.”

But what are some common missteps?

Joe: And some firms aren’t thinking that. So, I’m going to say the first misstep is not to recognize that the paradigm is changing. It’s the head-in-the-sand approach. And there, you know, if you want with anything in life, Seth, you know how it is to be a human. You can confirm any bias you have, just watch the right news channel, just read the right articles, read the right books, listen to the right podcast.

Seth: Get the right people in your ear.

Joe: Yeah. Exactly. Create the right echo chamber. Um, you can convince yourself once you have the bias that this is all just AI hype. Go out and confirm that in all these different places, and you lock in on that belief, and you do that to your peril. So that’s a misstep. A misstep is to believe it isn’t real.

Joe: The second misstep is to panic and act too quickly without the proper vetting of technology, process, and training strategy for your team, integration strategy, and privacy and security strategy.

So, if you want to kind of put those things into two extremes, you ignore what’s happening with all of these rapid changes to your peril. And I would include PE and mergers and acquisitions in that, too. You ignore all of it to your peril. You react to your peril. What you need to do instead is respond. Response is the right approach. It’s intentional. It’s methodical. It’s timely, but it’s not panicked.

Seth: You mentioned a couple of important points about missteps, especially security. It is still a very key issue and something that really cannot be ignored.

With AI, there are obviously a few things that need to be sorted out for it to evolve. In many ways, it reminds me of another disruption we saw not too long ago, probably around the time when you and I first started talking to each other.

Back then, business and accounting were going through the shift to cloud and cloud technology. It was met with a similar level of hesitation. Many people felt, “This won’t really do much for me.”

Joe: This won’t last, this isn’t helpful, and it isn’t safe. I heard all those.

Seth: Where does cloud fit in today, where would you say in terms of planning, thinking, and relevancy?

Joe: Yeah, so cloud, of course, just meaning internet connectivity is never going to go away. If you define it as just the way that two computers talk.

Joe: We’re in the middle of this thing right now called the SaaS apocalypse, right? And whether that’s a real thing or not, only the markets will tell. Right now, of course, if you own any shares of any traditional SaaS products, you’ve taken a real hit, as I have over the last quarter, and it was all at this inflection point of Anthropic launching a, you know, a certain version of their platform that sent a ripple effect through Silicon Valley and then through the markets.

And it was when Anthropic showed that it could code software, uh, when without you know, just by prompting and doing it. It’s always been able to do that a little bit, but to the degree it can do it now. And so you know, the prognosticators were looking out and say, okay, if this trajectory continues, then people won’t buy software, people will just tell GPT to generate whatever software they need at the time, based on the thing they’re trying to do at the time.

Seth: Yeah.

Joe: So you so you know the theory is that 20 years from now, you know, that that a user of AI would just simply type in I want a general ledger solution that integrates with my bank accounts that will manage all of my job costing for a construction company and by the way preload it with a chart of accounts and pre-connect it to all of my banks.

Seth: If somehow that doesn’t exist, right?

Joe: This doesn’t exist today. But the trajectory is that you would just ask for that, and it would appear like a genie in a bottle, and then you could use it without any licensing.

Right? So, when this trajectory happened, you know, whenever people are looking at that, they were going, “Okay, well then, you know, cloud is dead now”.

Now talk about an overreaction. You know I’ve held all of my holdings in software companies. I still have them. Everybody is saying hold don’t sell that this is an overreaction to the market but it still is an interesting thought exercise right because it because it’s a way to answer your question where’s cloud fit into all of this and you know the idea Seth that I’m going to pay for a human being to have a license to access the features in a product that’s the model that’s disruptible.

Instead, you’re going to find more and more software solutions charging you based on the outcomes of what that software product is doing. Now, Digital was the first one to come out with this. They issued a press release this week, this past week. We’re recording this in, you know, April 2026.

And they said that they’re going to start charging based on the number of bookkeeping cycles that they produce, not over the number of users who access their product. That’s very telling. And those kinds of companies that price on that model are going to succeed because a human doing a task is always going to be more expensive than a bot doing a task. And when you’re moving a budget from a human worker to a bot worker, you have a lot of room to work with.

So, I think work in the entry level is going to go down in accounting firms, and it’s going to be replaced with paying bots to do the work for pennies on the dollar.

Seth: Right? That kind of speaks to the question I had before about the work and like what the value is, and you know, where we’re at. It’s almost the age of, we’re entering the age of outcomes, and that’s why

Joe: The artificial worker, not just artificial intelligence.

Seth: Working with it is going to be essential.

That leads to my next question, Joe. We know it is hard to predict exactly how the AI of today will be used in the future. But based on where we are right now, what are some of the more practical ways firms can get started if they have not already?

Beyond simply asking AI questions and seeing what it says, where should firms begin using it in a meaningful way?

Joe: So, if you’ve never gone to a GPT prompt in your entire life and you find it intimidating, just treat it like a search engine and ask it questions, and it is a search engine on steroids.

So the next step, what I would say if you want a very simple kind of applications, because you can build your own agents, you know, over here at Woodard, we’re training Anthropic skill sets so it can convert PowerPoints and convert Word documents and review articles and review curriculum, fact check us on things.

All right, so we’re building all these agents, and obviously, you know, firms, and especially in the top 200, they should have people in their firms building agents. Okay, but to really simplify it, to say okay, your first step is to use GPT as a browser, and do some simple research.

The second step is to invest in software that’s AI-enabled. Shift the burden off your teams trying to master this technology and let the software developers serve it out to you through the features in their various products. And when you’re doing that, it’s really important that you separate the hype from fact because AI becomes a marketing buzzword.

You can’t go to anybody’s website without seeing AI listed there somewhere, sometimes in a marquee. So, you’re going to want to research and vet and make sure that these are not just widgets and gadgets and sizzle, but that they’re organic to the way that the product works and that they provide tremendous value within that product. Um, those are a couple of really quick ways to get up and running.

Seth: I would add, if I may, I’m a big advocate of, you know, getting out of your comfort zone. All of this is pushing firm leaders and accountants alike into that area, but literally getting out to a live event like Scaling New Heights and some of the many others that are put on in the accounting profession to really see some of this stuff at work and talk to some of your colleagues about what you are doing.

I don’t know. I’m just getting going with this. Where are you at? I again saw that with cloud, uh, too, where some folks were several years into a cloud transformation, and others were just kind of going.

Joe: Lagging adopters. Yeah. But now, eventually, I mean, we’ve tipped, we’re on the other side of the bell curve, and so we really are, and there are risks in being an early adopter, there are risks in being a lagging adopter. So you need to find where that sweet spot is for all of you.

But thank you, Seth, for mentioning the conferences. There are several really good accounting conferences to go out to, but obviously, I’m not impartial.

So, we’ve branded this year’s Scaling New Heights as a “Strange New World 2026” because it feels that way. And we have Microsoft coming, their Copilot group is coming to lead a keynote as well as to co-produce a 10-hour workshop on Copilot prompting strategies for your firm that they’re leading with Randy Johnston.

So, this will not just be a come-to-scale and see what’s happening with AI. This is where you can come to SNH, and you can hear from Microsoft Copilot directly from their executives, and you can learn from Copilot directly with Randy Johnston in a 10-hour workshop as one of the tracks that we’re offering at the conference.

Seth: You need to find places a tool that that is you know allowing you to work with some of the Microsoft products that you already have. Um, you know, I always laugh at the people who want to, you know, we talk about things that have been declared dead. You know, how many times over has Excel been declared dead and right, it just won’t.

Joe: It’s still dominant in the market. Yeah. And Microsoft is more relevant than ever because they have Copilot plus they made an a five I think it is billion dollar investment in Anthropic early on. So, they have an interest there.

Seth: Yes.

Joe: And they own something like 25% of OpenAI. So, Microsoft’s not going anywhere in the age of AI.

Seth: No. I was just thinking Excel. Finally,

Joe: That’s all of it, right?

Seth: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You’re not going to get rid of it anytime soon.

Joe: I’ve got another fun fact for you. The Dynamics product line is 8.5 billion in global revenues, and the Inuit financial product line is about 8.5 billion in annual revenues. So, I know we see QuickBooks as king here, but when you start getting up above a certain size business, Microsoft Dynamics just they’re they dominate.

Seth: Yeah. They’re like when you’re ready for that next level of business, and I know that Intuit wants to be ready, too. And it’s interesting just from a company point of view to look at the positioning and, you know, where accountants still fit in.

My final question to you, Joe, is something that you know is not going to I think elicit, like you know this is the final answer. This is kind of more of a discussion that I think will continue, but to get your thoughts on so many of the tools that we’re talking about, you know, helping to replace or augment work that traditionally junior staff use, that I use in really very loose terms. I don’t even like using the terms so much, but you know what I’m saying.

You’ve been on the job for a few years. You’re just learning on, you know, how to do things. You’re, you know, you’re at a practice that, uh, you’ve been asked to, you know, even in a CAS practice or someone who has a CAS business, a lot of that core work has to get done, and it’s typically been done by uh, you know, more junior staff.

Joe: More junior staff.

Seth: So, as this work is getting augmented by technology, you know, how can they necessarily learn or be trained? I’m sure these questions have come up in your passing, too, from other firms.

Joe: They absolutely have.

Seth: Great you know this is this is doing a lot of the work but how do these how do these kids.

Joe: But they are, they’re the younger generation. Yeah.

Seth: How do these people learn? How do you keep them, you know, in thoughts? Great. I’m at a firm now that is really, you know, not even necessarily technology forward, but technology present. They’re doing the right things today. But you know what I’m saying? Like you’re the work that I’m doing is meant to teach me. Even though some of them might be 50, 60 plus.

Seth: Not the case anymore.

Joe: Yeah. Right. Well, the traditional path has been that I graduate from college and then I go and I, you know, work myself 80 hours a week making partners rich.

Seth: Possibly at a Big Four, possibly a large firm.

Joe: Right? paying my dues, often writing, often eating my time because I’m trying to learn on the job so that I can apply the conceptual principles of college into the real world of application, and then eventually work my way up to partner, where I can just supervise the people that are doing that work below me. And what gets missed in that entire cycle that wheel the clients missed, right?

So, if I were going to answer your question directly, I mean, the client’s a means to an end. They’re the book of business. I even hate that term because I don’t want clients to be a book of business. They need to be meaningful relationships with transformative impact. They’re not a book, right? So, I mean, insurance companies have a book of business. That’s a legitimate descriptor there, but that shouldn’t be the descriptor for accounting firms.

So, what’s happening now is we’re breaking the wheel. And the good news is, if you’re listening to this and you’re in that entry-level kind of position, or you’re about to be, especially if you’re an accounting student and you’re emerging into firms. First, it’s never been easier to start your own firm. That’s number one because now you have so many bot workers and technology pieces and so many different methodologies and systems like our ideal practice model. You don’t have to go invent the thing.

Second, you can generate revenue disproportionately to effort. And third, if I’m going to answer your question for people emerging into the existing firms, those firms need to focus on soft skills training. They need to focus on relationship handling. They need to understand that these entry-level people are delivery systems for transformation, where they are the ultimate sort of generator of the transformative and guide and coach.

So they’re coaching the entry-level people. The entry-level people are delivering that coaching and also coaching to the client. Now, the best model you can find for this is in the healthcare profession. And I would encourage if you can handle some manufactured Hollywood gore because it’s an ER room. And if you can manufact if you can handle a few f-bombs, then I would recommend that you watch the television show The Pitt.

And even if you’re not going to watch that, you just looked at the breakdown of an ER room. You’ve got the attending, who are the doctors that have been working in the ER for whatever 10-15 years? You got residents for five years. Then you’ve got to don’t even have them can’t even call them doctor yet.

And then you’ve got the people that are working through kind of the initial phases. They have just freshly earned their doctorate. You got all these degrees of people that of experience levels, but from the very beginning, the people who are med students are looking across from patients and they’re being trained and how to look them in the eye, how to talk to them compassionately, how to deliver bad news empathetically, how to ask questions to get to the real answers, not the answers that are contrived or manufactured, not to draw conclusions prematurely.

How to connect the science to the human. And Seth, if we can do more of that kind of training, if the attendings, which would be your partners in your firm, if the attending physicians could focus as much on relationship development as they do on application of theoretical skills, we’re going to function more like the health industry, which we should.

Seth: Excellent. Well, look, we could talk about firm transformation and a lot of other aspects of that all day, Joe, but this is just to kind of give folks a flavor. A little bit of a slice of your thinking, someone who’s been around and is very directly involved in the transformation of the profession.

Joe Woodard, thank you so much for your time today. On behalf of Ace Cloud Hosting and myself, I thank you for checking out this video and hope to see you out there in the conference world as well.

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