According to Forbes, a 2025 report from the Thomson Reuters Institute found that a massive 95% of accounting professionals believe generative AI will become central to their workflow within five years. But there’s a glaring disconnect: 64% of those pros have received no training on these tools, and 52% say their organizations lack policies for AI use. Despite that, 55% are excited or hopeful. Leaders from QuickBooks, Sage, Xero, and FreshBooks all agree AI’s primary role will be automating “non-negotiable” tasks like invoicing and bank reconciliation, shifting accountants from data entry to strategic review. They emphasize this is about job enhancement, not replacement, but admit overcoming a “trust barrier” is the central challenge for adoption.
The Non-Negotiable Problem
Here’s the thing about accounting work: a huge chunk of it is boring, repetitive, and absolutely essential. You can’t just decide not to pay bills or close the books. Sage’s CTO calls these the “non-negotiables,” and they eat up the time that finance pros could spend on analysis or advising clients. The entire pitch from these software giants is that AI will finally automate that drudgery. Think about a contractor who, without AI, waits weeks for his team to manually input bills to see which projects are profitable. With AI doing that tagging and entry automatically, those insights become real-time. That’s a game-changer. It’s not about firing the bookkeeper; it’s about letting them actually use their brain for higher-value work.
The Trust Barrier Is Everything
All this sounds great, right? So why isn’t everyone already using it? The report nails it: accuracy and reliability concerns are the top obstacles. And the CEOs are surprisingly candid about the limits. Sage’s Aaron Harris basically said, “Don’t let an LLM do math.” That’s a pretty humble admission for a tech leader. Xero’s Sukhinder Singh Cassidy put it perfectly: people wouldn’t hand their ATM card and PIN to a stranger. When it’s your money, you need to feel in control. That’s why the “human-in-the-loop” model is so critical, especially for that last 5% of high-stakes, high-judgment decisions. The goal, as FreshBooks’ CEO noted, is to make the AI “almost invisible” in the workflow—so reliable and seamless that the uncertainty vanishes.
An Unexpected Rebrand
Maybe the most interesting angle here is what AI could do for the accounting profession’s image. Let’s be honest, “accountant” doesn’t scream “sexy career” to most college grads. There’s a talent shortage. But if AI strips away the repetitive data-entry toil, what’s left? Strategic advisory work, tax planning, exit strategies—basically, being a business consultant. That’s a much more appealing pitch. As one CEO said, they’ve been told that “Xero makes accounting sexy again.” I think that’s a bit of marketing spin, but the core idea is solid. Far from killing the industry, AI could be the tool that revitalizes it, attracting a new generation of talent who want to analyze, not just annotate.
Bridging The Readiness Gap
So we’re at a weird moment. The vision is clear and compelling. The technology is advancing fast. But the readiness? It’s not there. A staggering 64% with no training is a massive implementation risk. It’s one thing for QuickBooks to build an intelligent agent; it’s another for a small accounting firm to know how to use it responsibly and within guardrails. The leaders are calling themselves “paranoid optimists,” which seems about right. They have to build for a future that’s coming, even if the current users are hesitant. The mandate now is for firms to move from interest to actual implementation—to get those policies in place and that training started. The ones who figure out how to treat AI as a reliable partner, not just a flashy toy, will be the ones who actually get that promised time back, their most precious resource.
