CEO Perspectives - The AI Race Is Accelerating. Professional Services Will Benefit

Last week I was in New York for the 2026 AICPA and CPA.com Executive Roundtable. The room was a genuine mix - established platforms sitting next to the AI-native startups that are reshaping accounting and professional services, plus the firm leaders and practitioners weighing what both actually mean for their firms.  

We talked about the pace of AI innovation, why ecosystem partnerships matter, and what firms need in order to adopt successfully. But the conversation that stayed with me was about trust - specifically, whether trust is what decides if AI will deliver on its promise for the profession.

That conversation sent me back to an Andreessen Horowitz piece I'd read in a16z just before the roundtable - "The Incumbents Are Coming." Its core argument: AI might make existing systems of record more valuable, not less. As agents take on more of the actual work, the platforms already holding the data, context, workflows and permissions become the foundation everything else must run on.  

But the piece doesn't stop there. It also makes a real case for AI-native startups, pointing out that a firm's work often spills past any single system of record, which opens the door for focused new entrants to pick up that overflow.

I think there is merit in both arguments. AI-native startups are injecting new ideas and energy into professional services, and they're doing something valuable just by expanding what firms think software is capable of -not merely recording the work but performing it. The harder problem, though, is making agents work reliably, at scale, across genuinely complex engagements, inside an environment firms are willing to trust. That's a different kind of problem which happens to play to the strengths of the platforms already sitting inside that workflow.

Established platforms are pairing AI momentum with scale and trust

The a16z article makes a further interesting point. The leading systems of record aren't standing still. They're bringing AI directly into the data, workflows and trusted environments firms already rely on, then building agents that can act inside them rather than alongside them.

We see this most clearly in audit and assurance, where the work itself is unusually dense - methodology, engagement information, evidence, testing, review, and professional judgment, all inside one established workflow.  

In May, we launched Caseware Verity, our AI offering for accounting and assurance, and we're now building out a substantial portfolio of purpose-built agents that draw directly on the context, methodology, evidence and governance already embedded in every engagement.

That gives us a genuinely different starting point. We can deploy agents inside a workflow that's already governed. Newer entrants, by contrast, usually have to build that entire governed environment from scratch, around the agent, before the agent can do anything useful. As deployment picks up speed, being both a system of record and a system of action turns into real advantage.

The faster AI moves, the more trust matters

At our CwX event in May, I introduced what we're calling the AI Trust Stack. It’s our model for the layers an environment needs before AI becomes genuinely useful and genuinely trustworthy in accounting and assurance.  

What's become clearer to me since then is that trust doesn't become less important as agents take on more responsibility. It’s quite the opposite. The more we ask agents to do, the more firms need to see: what context the agent used, what methodology it followed, what actions it actually took, and - critically - where a professional's judgment still sits in control.

We'll return to this theme at CwX UK in London on October 3, and at our CwX events around the world this fall. If I had to compress the whole argument into one line, it would be this: powerful agents need a trusted place to work.

That's not a caveat on the AI race in professional services. It's the race itself. The firms and platforms that take trust seriously now won't just move faster - they'll be the only ones still standing when the rest of the market finally catches up to what trust actually costs to get right.

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