I had two separate conversations this week that landed in the same place, which is usually my signal that something’s actually going on rather than just one person’s opinion.
The first was with a controller I’ve placed before, checking in the way I do every few months. She’s six years into her role at a commercial real estate firm, sharp, technically strong, the kind of person who’d normally be an early adopter of anything that makes her job easier. When I asked about AI, she said her firm is still “figuring it out” — no real implementation yet, though the software they run has AI tools built in that they haven’t touched. She wasn’t embarrassed about it. It just hasn’t risen to the top of the list.
The second was a planning call for a professional accounting association event. The idea on the table was an AI-focused session for members, and the person I was talking to had just come back from a national conference where AI came up constantly but, in her words, without much real detail. Everyone’s talking about it. Almost nobody’s doing much with it yet.
A Pattern I See Constantly
I hear a version of this constantly, and it tracks with what I see day to day placing accounting and finance people across Dallas-Fort Worth. Ask most controllers and staff accountants what they’ve implemented, and you’ll get a version of “not yet, but I know we should.” It’s not resistance exactly — nobody I talk to thinks AI is a fad or a threat they can ignore. It’s more that the day job doesn’t leave room to experiment, and nobody’s handed them a clear reason to prioritize it over the close, the audit prep, the thing that’s actually due Friday.
That’s a familiar shape. I remember the same conversations about cloud accounting a decade or so ago — the same “we’ll get to it,” the same sense that the tools existed but adoption was somebody else’s job. Cloud accounting is just how the work gets done now. Nobody debates it anymore. I’d bet AI in accounting follows the same curve, just faster, because the tools are improving faster than cloud infrastructure ever did.
The exception that’s stuck with me: I know of one company, backed by a private equity firm, that brought in outside help specifically to teach their finance team how to use AI tools in their actual workflow — not a webinar, not a slide deck, hands-on training on real work. That’s a different posture entirely. It’s not “we should look into this someday.” It’s “this is now part of how we expect the work to get done,” and someone made that a budget line rather than a someday project.
I don’t think every company needs to go that far right now, and I’m not going to pretend I have a tidy five-step plan for AI adoption in accounting — I don’t, and anyone who tells you they do this early in the curve is overselling it. But here’s what I’d say to a controller or a firm partner reading this: the gap between “we haven’t touched it” and “we’ve built it into how we work” is where the next few years of competitive advantage in this field is going to show up. Not because the technology is magic, but because the teams who get comfortable with it early will simply move faster on the parts of the job that used to eat the most time — and that shows up in who gets promoted, who a firm can staff leaner, and who has bandwidth left over for the higher-value work that actually grows a career.
If you’re a hiring manager, it’s also worth asking about in interviews right now, gently. Not “do you know how to prompt an AI tool” — that’s the wrong question this early. More like: are they curious about it, have they poked around on their own, are they the type who’ll figure it out once it’s expected rather than waiting to be told. That curiosity is turning out to be a better predictor than I expected.
I don’t have a strong prediction for exactly when this tips from “someday” to “expected.” But two unrelated conversations landing on the same observation in the same week is usually a sign the tipping is closer than it feels from inside any one firm.