AI is ‘middle-to-middle,’ not ‘end-to-end’

The accounting profession’s adoption of AI has intensified over the past year. At AICPA’s 2026 Engage conference, CFO Brew spoke with the CEOs of three software companies of different sizes to get their perspective on how ready accounting is for AI, how the technology might change the profession, and what pain points firms experience as they integrate AI.

Journalist-turned-entrepreneur Kashif Ali is CEO of AI tax assistant software company TaxGPT, which he founded in 2023. He shared his thoughts on what he’s seeing as the accounting profession comes to grips with AI.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What kinds of questions are you getting from clients or potential customers about AI?

First of all, people are trying to figure out how to work better. The conversation has changed a lot in the last year or so. Previously, people used to approach AI with skepticism, like, is it going to hallucinate? We still get asked those questions, but now they are secondary questions, and we have answers to that. We have hallucination control mechanisms, we provide sources, we build trust and relationships…

How to utilize it very effectively, that’s the number one ask that we hear from enterprises. The problem there is a lot of the time, enterprises…the way they are looking at AI, they’re thinking it can solve end-to-end problems…AI is still middle-to-middle. You define a task, and human judgment is required, so a human can jump in and help AI do work better…

In the mid-market and SMB, what we see is, people get it. People make the decision, and [think] like, “Oh, this is as helpful as Excel was back in the day”...They are adopting at a much faster pace as compared to anyone else.

How much education or training do clients need to work with AI?

A lot. Obviously the industry as a whole is very cognizant, very curious. People are learning on their own. There are a very few basic things that people can learn to be very productive. Just a year ago, prompting was a big part of it. I describe prompting as basic arithmetic. We have calculators, super computers that can do very complex computation and calculation, but we still teach kids in school today, two plus two is four.

So if we get that part right, the basics, then learning what context and memory is, what an agent is, what are connectors, what are skills, all of those things build on top of it, and people get really excited about it.

What are you seeing clients or customers doing with the time they save?

They are offering more high-quality services. They want to grow their firm, they want to rely less on offshoring…And for example, if a firm is doing, let’s just say, compliance work preparation, now they are adding advisory and planning…If previously they were doing bookkeeping only for small businesses, now they are offering payroll services, sales tax.

What would be your advice to a firm that wants to get started with AI or that wants to ramp up their capabilities?

Start today, learn as much as you can, test as much as you can.

Number two advice would be: Form real relationships with your customers, because we are not too far away [from the time] when agents are going to be doing tons and tons of work. This human relationship is going to be super helpful in the long term…This relationship is being their go-to advisor on everything when it comes to finance and accounting and taxes. That’s going to pay the dividend many times over.

How do you ensure that all the latest tax regulation changes are incorporated into your software?

The tax code is written for humans to consume. Start with the US Constitution, then Title 26, then the tax code judgment, and all of them. So you have to read it from A to Z. We made the tax code and all the finance and accounting knowledge consumable to AI…The second thing, how do we keep everything up to date? We created a mini Google where we added humanly sourced, 1,000-plus sources that are listening to everything that is coming into the pipeline. Imagine the IRS, all the 50 states, their department of revenues, EDD, SEC, all of that. So anytime anyone regulates and announces something, and that becomes the law, the same day, in real time, it is available in the knowledge base.