Hesitancy over AI still affecting accounting firms

The accounting profession’s adoption of AI has expanded over the past year. At AICPA’s 2026 Engage conference last week, we asked John McGowan, CEO of tax software platform HubSync, and Pat Mihelic, HubSync’s director of product management, about AI readiness among accounting firms, the dovetailing of PE investment and AI adoption, and the education accounting professionals need to trust AI models. McGowan founded HubSync in 2019 after more than 20 years as CIO for global and US tax at KPMG.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What have you been seeing in terms of AI readiness across the accounting profession?

John McGowan: I had two clients over the last week use the same term: disorienting. I’ve heard a client say, “We don’t know when or how to jump on the merry-go-round. It’s changing. We jump on it now, and we make a decision, it could be outdated.” 

Do you see commonalities in the types of firms that are early adopters?

John McGowan: It’s a mix. I would say, without question, the larger firms are all going hard, and certainly we can talk [about] private equity. The industry is driving a ton of AI push.

With private equity, is it more of a push or a pull toward AI? Do firms want to partner with PE so they can invest in AI, or are PE backers investing in AI for the firms they’ve bought into?

John McGowan: I think it’s mutual…There’s definitely a push coming from PE, but I do think the reasons why, at least the firms we’ve talked to, are doing this is, number one, obviously the capital to grow and scale…And there’s also been this desire for a long time, especially at the upper end of the market, [to] start to compete against the Big Four…

Once it happens, there is definitely the PE push to inject technology very, very rapidly, and our clients generally embrace it. I think the only friction that I see is the pace at which they want to do it. The people on the ground who are deploying the technology are like, “There’s only so much we can do in a six-month window.” If we push too much technology change on the firm, it causes stress.

What kind of roadblocks do you see in terms of AI implementation?

Pat Mihelic: Education…Because many folks don’t fully understand what’s going on underneath the hood.

A lot of our discussions center around security, and data security and what’s going on, essentially, with the models…We’ve spent a lot of time making sure that as we’re continuing to release features that those [security concerns] are top of mind…We’ve been in conversations with customers, we’re showing them the traceability, and they’re giving us feedback of what they’d like to see around that decision for them to trust those interactions.

I think education around that is a part of our user experience…I think a lot of it’s making sure that our product overlaps with that customer’s mental model of the challenge.

Do you have a way of measuring ROI?

John McGowan: For each step of the process, we have ROI templates to walk through data collection and savings. We have a value creation analyst…and he’ll sit down with the firm to walk through ROI.

What’s the one most frequent question you get from potential customers?

John McGowan: It’s “Where do I start? What do I do with the hours that are freed up if I’m successful?” This is not a new discussion. I would have these discussions back in the Big Four days with automated e-filing of tax returns.

One of our clients just said, “How can we just get that [tax] partner in that review seat as quickly as possible?” What everybody wants to do, ideally, is more of the consultative advice.

And then I’d say the last question we get is, how much does it cost?

Pat Mihelic: One of the big things that is a focus of our client discussions is…“How do I identify additional opportunities with our customers?” And with HubSync, we have all this great data, and…so that’s something we’re looking at toward the second half of this year, is helping to support those firms to identify those additional opportunities.