This Week in Accounting AI

Is accounting still a good career in the age of AI? Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri, hosts of The Accounting Disruptors, explore why they believe the profession’s future holds more opportunity than many young professionals realize. They discuss the uncertainty facing students and recent graduates, the growing demands on accountants, and how AI could help professionals move beyond basic reporting i...

Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri, hosts of The Accounting Disruptors, explore what basketball’s three-point revolution can teach accounting leaders about AI transformation. They examine how the ERP became the center of the CFO’s office, why adding AI tools without changing workflows can limit their impact, and what businesses need beyond closed books. They also discuss the evolving role of the CFO,...

Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri, hosts of The Accounting Disruptors, return from San Francisco Tech Week with a clearer picture of how AI is being put to work in accounting. They explore practical applications in accounts receivable, the risks of employees building agents in isolation, and why reliable results require shared business context, secure data access, and human oversight. Drawing on les...

Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri, hosts of The Accounting Disruptors, explore why using AI isn't the same as transforming an accounting firm. They discuss uneven adoption across the profession, private equity's influence, and the tension between immediate results and meaningful changes to how work gets done. Drawing on Wiss's own experience (including a doubling of monthly AI token costs), they exa...

Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri, hosts of The Accounting Disruptors, explore how AI is rewriting the psychological contract between professionals and their organizations. They examine research showing that AI can increase efficiency while also creating more work, expanding responsibilities, and raising expectations. The conversation explores how expertise, recognition, belonging, and security shap...

Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri, hosts of The Accounting Disruptors, explore why the rapid adoption of AI can feel like a grieving process for accountants and organizations. They talk candidly about fears of losing competence, control, professional identity, and job security, as well as the difficult reality that implementing AI often creates more work before it saves time. It’s an honest conversa...

On the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri, hosts of The Accounting Disruptors, step away from AI and accounting to reflect on where they were that morning and how the day reshaped their views on leadership and workplace culture. They talk candidly about the organizational divide it exposed at the time, the human need for connection during crisis, and why...

Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri, hosts of The Accounting Disruptors, unpack why most firms adopting AI right now are adding cost without changing anything about how the work actually gets done, using a real internal example: a Claude bill that jumps between $600 and $2,600 a month per individual. Paul and Matt also share how Wiss Labs solved a real operational problem inside its own investment por...

Only 10% of businesses are using AI for real, agentic work, even though 85% of accounting teams call it a strategic priority. On this episode of The Accounting Disruptors, hosts Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri unpack the newest AI adoption data from RAMP and FloQast to explain why chat subscriptions don't equal transformation. They break down what companies are actually spending on AI per employee...

Hundreds of billions in AI infrastructure spend from Google and Microsoft aren't landing where you'd expect on the balance sheet, and Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri open this episode of The Accounting Disruptors asking whether current accounting rules can even capture it. Using a deferred transfer fee case study from Manchester United as a jumping-off point, they dig into materiality, earnings ma...

Accounts receivable doesn't get the attention accounts payable does, but it's the function that actually gets a business paid. In this episode of This Week in Accounting AI, host Paul Peterson, CEO of Wiss, talks with Caitlin Luxana, co-founder of Fazeshift, about why AR aging buckets fail CFOs and controllers, how structured data, unstructured data, and tribal knowledge combine to create the real...

Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri, hosts of This Week in Accounting AI, break down two client calls that show exactly where AI is changing accounting, and where it isn't. One client wants his books closed weekly instead of monthly. Another discovered a six-figure tax exposure hiding inside a goodwill line nobody had questioned. Paul and Matt use both stories to explain why faster closes multiply the...

AI is forcing organizations to rethink more than their technology. It's reshaping leadership, strategy, and the way people adapt to change. In this episode of This Week in Accounting AI, Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri discuss why AI adoption is as much a human challenge as it is a technical one. Drawing from conversations with CFOs and recent industry research, they explore why professionals ofte...

AI adoption isn't just changing technology. It's changing how organizations lead.  In this episode of This Week in Accounting AI, Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri share lessons from an AI conference and discuss why the biggest challenges businesses face today are organizational, not technical. They explore why leading by example is more effective than mandating AI, the legal and governance risks ma...

Technology isn't the hardest part of AI adoption. Leadership is. In this episode of This Week in Accounting AI, Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri discuss why accounting firms and finance organizations are entering a new phase of transformation where culture, communication, and human connection matter more than ever. They explore what CFOs, controllers, CPAs, and firm leaders are experiencing as AI r...

When hundreds of Stanford students walked out on Google's CEO at commencement, most people filed it under "campus drama." Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri see it differently. In this episode of This Week in Accounting AI, the Wiss hosts unpack what that walkout signals about generational fear, why AI company leaders keep doubling down on job-displacement narratives that serve shareholders more than...

56% of CFOs say they've adopted AI. Only 7% say they're getting a return on it. This week, Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri open with that Gartner data, and make the case that most finance leaders aren't just underperforming on AI, they're measuring the wrong thing entirely. Speed to close is not the same as speed to the information that runs a business. From there, they get into the week's PE head...

Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri just returned from four weeks on the road — BDO's firm conference in Vegas, an investor summit in San Francisco, Boston Tech Week, and NYC Tech Week — and the takeaway is stark: the gap between accounting firms embracing AI and those waiting it out is widening fast. In this episode of This Week in Accounting AI, they break down what they saw across all four stops, u...

Netgain CEO Adam Riches joins Paul Peterson to expose why ERP systems deprioritized accounting decades ago — and why CFOs are still paying the price. They cover the history of accounting as a competitive advantage (from the Medici to Carnegie to the IBM mainframe era), how the spreadsheet became a 40-year Band-Aid, and what modern accounting infrastructure actually needs to look like. Adam breaks...

In episode 12, Paul and Matt get into the uncomfortable truth about accounting departments: too many of them are held hostage by a single person who has turned a process into a black box. From the controller who "bamboozles" leadership to the commissions guy who made Friday bagels a bigger priority than payroll, Paul and Matt unpack how power and control became baked into the profession, starting...

Fresh off the Wiss Labs Bourbon & Bookkeeping event, Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri unpack the three biggest questions a room full of CFOs, controllers, and founders brought to the table: How do AI agents handle audit trails? What about hallucinations? And the one everyone wants to ask — are accountants about to lose their jobs? Plus, why the new "intelligent layer" running over the ERP is ma...

Fresh off the BDO Annual Conference and meetings in San Francisco, Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri get real about what's actually happening with AI adoption in accounting, and what's not. Drawing on candid feedback from Wiss staff who piloted AI tools through busy season, they dispel two big myths: that AI means fewer accountants, and that AI tools can be distributed like traditional software. In...

For 30 years, ERPs have been built for operations, and the general ledger got bolted on as an afterthought. Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri argue that's exactly why so many finance leaders say "the accounting blows", and why it was never an accountant problem in the first place. Fresh off Rillet Recon 2026, Matt shares what he saw in the room: a community that feels more like an apprenticeship tha...

Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri make the case that offshoring is a bandaid, not a fix, and that CFOs evaluating accounting partners need to stop asking "how cheap?" and start asking "how are you building intelligence on my business?" They unpack why context is the new competitive advantage in the AI era, why tribal knowledge is the real moat, and the specific questions every CFO should be asking b...

Tax season is over. The real work is just beginning. In this episode, Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri pull back the curtain on what actually happens inside an accounting firm during busy season, and why, despite billions spent on software and a wave of AI optimism, this year was harder than the last. They get honest about the hidden costs of AI adoption, why offshoring is a band-aid not a fix, and...