4 AI Mistakes Leaders Keep Making | Accounting Voices

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There's lots of accidental and reactive adoption going on with the AI.

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The economics have to change, the center of gravity has to shift from compliance to advisory.

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And these are the four mistakes that I keep seeing. Number one is treating AI adoption as an IT project, as an IT isolated problem.

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And this is more of a leadership and strategic conversation that belongs in a partner's meeting or at board level or private equity level, it's not the IT committee or the tech department.

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that is a mistake that some firms are making, they're rushing too quickly into adopt, get AI going, get the technology going, but not aligning that to the vision, the direction of the firm. Mistake number two is confusing speed with strategy.

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the earlier episode named this a little bit and it's worth returning to, doing the same work faster doesn't give you a different firm.

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And and these are tangible gains, I get that, but if the time saved is not deliberately deployed into deeper client conversations, into advisory capacity, into leadership development.

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That enterprise value of the company. The strategic cost is this, you improve your position in a model that's already been disrupted, rather than building the model that survives the disruption.

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Mistake number three is skipping the operating model conversation. Firm structures, operating models are under severe pressure at leadership. And this is the one where the advisory ambition gap, if you want to call it a gap, lives.

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The firms that are saying AI is going to freeze up for more advisory work, they're the same firms where comp models are still on billable hours, partners are still measuring utilization, client conversations still begin and end with those compliance deliverables.

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It removes a lot of the repetitive work that used to develop junior staff into capable middle or senior operators, but it doesn't replace what that work was building, which was a firm and a funnel of talent going up through the gears, building commercial acumen, building leadership capability.

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These days it seems accountants are more and more reviewing the output of AI than they are doing it themselves and acquiring those skills.

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Faster is good, but capability is a problem. And in three to five years from now, what does your succession look like when the next partner should be stepping up, the next cohort of partners, the next cohort of managers, the bench is shallower than it needs to be.

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And the strategic cost of this one is the erosion of capability and leadership skills that don't show up in this year's numbers, but you're kicking it down the road. It's already compounding inside the firm right now.