The standard line on AI in accounting goes like this: software takes over coding transactions, booking the monthly prepaid amortization, running depreciation off the fixed asset schedule, and then accountants move up into advisory. You'll hear it from software vendors, industry surveys, and most conference stages.
For some of your team, that's right. For others, it's the wrong answer. Some of your best people went into accounting because they like systems, precision, and problems with one right answer. They were never looking for more client meetings, and telling them advisory is the future tells them their future is a job they don't want.
So what do you do with the people whose favorite part of the job is the part AI now does?
Automation doesn't take judgment out of accounting. It concentrates it. What's left for people is deciding whether the work is right and what it means, and that judgment comes in two forms.
The first is judgment at scale. These people notice when something is off across many sets of books. They think in processes, trust a system only after they've checked it, and catch the mistake the tool missed.
The second is judgment in depth. These people want the full context of a client's business. They like messy problems, working with people, and being the one the client calls.
Most accountants lean one way, and both kinds of judgment grow the firm. One lets you serve more clients well. The other lets you go deeper with the clients you already have. You need both, and you need to stop treating one as the version of the job people graduate into.
It's tempting to tell each group they get to keep doing what they love. That isn't quite true, and your team will know it.
The judgment-in-depth path is the clearer one. Point these people at advisory, give them ownership of the client relationship, and let them go deep with a smaller set of clients. Take as much production work off their plate as you can.
The judgment-at-scale path changes significantly. Someone who loved working through transactions now oversees a system that does it. Their job is now to make sure the system got it right, provide feedback when it doesn’t, and make the system better: configure the tooling, design workflows for new clients, and decide what the machine should handle and what needs a person. It's closer to engineering than bookkeeping. With the mechanical work automated, one person can run far more clients than before, and their judgment sets the limit.
Pilot runs both models today. Our volume teams work across a high client count and lean heavily on Meridian. Our depth teams own the full financial lifecycle for a smaller set of clients, from bookkeeping through tax and CFO services, and Meridian gives them back the hours that used to go into the close. Same firm, same technology, two very different jobs.
What made it work was being honest with people about which job they wanted, about what each job now requires, and which one they were best suited for.
The failure mode is treating depth as the promotion and scale as the place people start before they move up.
That framing tells your best systems person that their ceiling is low and their way up is a job they don't want. It also moves people into advisory roles based on tenure instead of aptitude, and clients notice.
Build senior roles on both paths and measure them the same way: by the revenue of the portfolio a person is responsible for and how well they retain it. On the scale path, the portfolio grows by client count. On the depth path, it grows by what each client buys. Someone should be able to spend a whole career getting better at systems and scale and be recognized at the same level as the person running a book of advisory clients.
Automation raises the bar on both paths. The work that's left is the work that takes judgment, and not everyone will want one of the new jobs or grow into it. That's a real conversation, and it's better to have it early and directly than to let people figure it out on their own.
For most of your team, though, this is good news. The capacity you get back is only worth something if you have people who can use it. The person who loves client work gets more time with clients. The person who loves getting it right gets a system to make right, across more books than they could ever have handled by hand.
At first glance, AI can feel scary. Either you automate the work and let people go, or you keep everyone and push them into jobs they never wanted. But it does not have to go that way.
The capacity you get back is only worth something if you have people who can use it. The person who loves the client work gets more time with clients. The person who loves the numbers gets more books to be right about. To learn more about how to transform your firm, visit Meridian by Pilot
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