This Week in Accounting AI

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...

After 25 years in the trenches together, Paul and Matt get candid about something most firm leaders won't say out loud: accounting has been a soul-crushing profession, and it didn't have to be. Sparked by a piece Paul wrote on the industry's broken culture, this episode unpacks why talented, hardworking accountants have spent careers feeling like they're failing, even when they're not. From the 34...

In this solo episode, Wiss CEO Paul Peterson gets candid about a question he recently put in writing: why does accounting sometimes feel soulless? Paul draws on real responses from accounting professionals and sobering industry stats to make the case that the profession has a deeper problem than a talent shortage. 340,000 people left the field during COVID CPA exam sittings hit a 20-year low in 20...

Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri break down the costly mistake venture-backed founders keep making — hiring a CFO before the fundamentals are in place, then watching the org chart balloon from the top down. They unpack the traditional finance build, why it creates mismatched roles and bloated headcount, and why that model becomes even harder to unwind once a company is locked in. The conversation s...

This week, Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri break down two buzzworthy a16z articles asking the questions everyone in finance is thinking: will AI kill Excel? And what happens to your ERP? Spoiler...neither is going anywhere. Instead, Paul and Matt make the case for an AI layer that works around your existing systems, eliminating the Excel workarounds that have quietly become your source of truth. M...

AI tools are advancing fast, but is your accounting team actually ready to use them? In this episode, Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri dig into one of the most overlooked obstacles to successful AI adoption: tribal knowledge. Those undocumented, person-dependent workflows that live in people's heads (and endless Excel files) can make or break an AI implementation. They discuss why switching to an A...

Everyone's asking how to implement AI. That's the wrong question. In Episode 1 of This Week in Accounting AI, Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri get into what's really behind the gap between AI adoption and AI results. Matt shares what he's hearing directly from CFOs — companies that have the tools in place but aren't moving the needle. The culprit? Not the software. It's what the software is sitting...