I have been on the road a lot over the last several weeks with the Aiwyn team. You may have seen me this past week at AICPA ENGAGE, but this blog is looking back on a session I just can’t seem to get out of my head.
I was in Salt Lake City at the end of May/early June for AGN North America. Michael Platt of The Platt Consulting Group spent 100 minutes walking a room full of firm leaders through a question that doesn’t get asked often enough:
What does it take to stay independent when the industry is reorganizing around you?
I’ve been in a lot of sessions like this. Usually they’re heavy on urgency and light on specifics, but this one was different, and I’ll try to share the parts that were worth writing down.
97% of firms say they’re inefficient with technology. The fix isn’t more tools.
Platt opened with that stat and sat with it for a minute. Most firms don’t have a technology problem, he said. They have an adoption problem. Before anyone in that room chased the next AI application, they should be asking how well they’re using what they already have.
That framing resonated. A lot of the conversations I have with firm leaders are about evaluating new software. Fewer are about whether the software they bought two years ago is being used the way it was designed. Competitive advantage comes from mastery, not accumulation.
AI is changing what accountants are for, not whether accountants are needed.
The AI discussion was nuanced in a way I didn’t expect. The concern Platt kept coming back to wasn’t replacement — it was relevance. Technical knowledge that used to differentiate a firm or a practitioner is becoming increasingly accessible. What stays scarce is judgment, client trust, and the ability to translate data into a decision someone can act on.
Future-ready firms are already thinking about hiring for advisory capabilities alongside technical ones. Communication skills, business acumen, and the ability to build a relationship are harder to train than accounting fundamentals, and they’re becoming more important.
The pricing exercise was the most honest moment in the room.
Platt described a scenario: a CPA spends about 10 hours solving a client problem. The solution saves that client $300,000 a year. He asked the room what the invoice should be. Answers ranged from $5,000 to $50,000.
Nobody in the room was wrong, but the range itself told the story. Firms that still anchor pricing to time spent will feel real pressure as automation shortens the time required to do work. Value-based pricing isn’t a new idea, but a lot of firms are still in the early stages of building the internal confidence to pursue it.
Partners are often the most underutilized people in the firm.
This is the one I keep thinking about. Platt made the point that high-performing firms protect partner time aggressively, and not just for business development, but for the work only partners can do. When partners are spending time on tasks that could be delegated, the firm gets smaller in ways that don’t show up on the income statement.
It connects to something we think about at Aiwyn constantly: administrative burden is a real cost. Every hour a partner spends on billing, collections, or status-chasing is an hour not spent with a client or on the firm’s future. The firms that are growing fastest tend to take that tradeoff seriously.
There were other threads worth following, like governance evolution, client segmentation, the compression happening at the bottom of the traditional talent pyramid, but the through line across all of it was the same: transformation doesn’t happen after you’ve stabilized performance. It happens while you’re still performing.
That’s a hard thing to operationalize. It’s also the thing that separates firms that will still be independent in ten years from the ones that won’t.
Spiros Theodore is an Account Executive at Aiwyn,the first complete platform for leading accounting firms across payments, practice management, client experience, and tax.
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