In September, I spent two days on the 27th floor of the AICPA / CPA.com office on Sixth Avenue in New York. In the room: 44 accounting tech companies. Senior leaders from AICPA and CPA.com. A handful of partners and leaders from some of the biggest firms in the country.
It is rare to get that many builders and buyers together with nothing on the agenda but where the profession is headed.
Every company got five minutes at the podium to explain their product, talk through the exciting problems we are tackling in the industry, and what the greatest adoption gap is when working with firms. By adoption gap, I mean the distance between a firm buying new software and its people actually using it every day.
Five minutes is not much time. It forces you to decide what you really believe about your product and say it plainly. It also made the room easy to compare. When 44 companies answer the same question back-to-back, the patterns show up fast.
After around the tenth pitch, it became clear that there is a force in the industry. Everyone is building agents for accounting. Agents for tax. Agents for audit. Agents for CAS. By the end of the day, most of the room was pitching some version of automating accounting work.
The details changed from pitch to pitch, but the shape stayed the same: take a task a person does today and have software do it instead. Listening to that many versions in a row, you start to hear the same promise in different words.
I don't say this flippantly, these are smart founders with great products. I was thoroughly impressed with some of the businesses that were built.
You should be very excited for the amount of talent and money that is building for accounting firms. Firms will have more options than ever. The harder question is no longer whether the technology exists. It's which tech a firm can actually adopt, trust, and get its people to use.
I opened with one line: "We help firms make more money through cross-sells."
Then I told them Ping started as a notetaker for accounting firms. That's still true. What we've built since is the intelligence layer for the firm. We pull in meetings, emails, and documents, keep the whole client relationship in context, and surface missing revenue and a health score on every account.
For the adoption question, which was really asking what keeps firms from getting value out of software they have already bought, my answer was messy data. Every firm structures its clients differently. One client is almost never one entity. The map of who owns what usually lives in a partner's head. A lot of what we build right now exists just so a firm can get its data in shape to use the product at all.
I flew home with three things on my mind.
If you feel like it's hard to keep up with all the new tech that is coming out, you're not alone. I am a software guy and it's hard to keep up with, and that's my job. Over those two days, I saw products I had never heard of from companies that have been building for a while. If the people who do this full-time can't track everything, a partner with a full client load certainly can't.
Firms don't need to know about every tool. They need a trusted way to separate what matters from the noise, and the companies that serve them should help with that.
If you build for firms, you owe it to them to know what they need and want. A lot of the premier tech companies are hiring elite accounting operators in-house to help guide product, and it shows. The best pitches I heard came from people who clearly understood how a firm really runs: how work moves between teams, how partners think about client relationships, and why something that looks simple on a slide is hard to roll out across a few hundred people.
You can't learn that from a demo environment. You learn it by spending time with the people doing the work.
Almost everyone in that room had good tech. When the tools are this capable, and this many teams are building similar things, the technology alone stops being the differentiator. What's hard to copy is expertise in the market, distribution, and brand. A competitor can ship a similar feature in a quarter. It takes years to earn a firm's trust, to understand its clients, and to be the name a partner thinks of first when a problem comes up. That's where I think the real advantage gets built.
I flew home fired up. We're building in the right place, and there is so much work to be done.
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