Friday, October 2, 2026

The Best Time to Bring AI Into Your Firm, Business or Job Is When It Is Already Changing

 

The Best Time to Bring AI Into Your Firm, Business or Job Is When It Is Already Changing

Yesterday someone tried to sell me a lead list. I said no to the list, but one thing in the pitch stuck with me.

The three sample "opportunities" he sent were all accounting firms in the middle of a change. One had just joined a larger network. One had been acquired and was folding its systems into the buyer's platform. One was the second acquisition in a month for a firm stacking up offices. His point was that a firm in the middle of a change is rebuilding how the work gets done anyway, and that is exactly when it is willing to try something new.

He was right about that. And it is not just true of accounting firms. It is true of any business, and of any job.

Nobody changes how they work on an ordinary Tuesday

Every firm, every business and every job has a way of doing things, and most of it was never designed. It accumulated. The month-end checklist is a document someone made in 2019 and nobody has touched since. The follow-up on unpaid invoices lives in one person's inbox. The welcome email for new customers has a paragraph nobody remembers adding. The weekly report you send your boss takes two hours because that is how long it took the first time.

On an ordinary week there is no reason to touch any of it. It works well enough, and changing it costs time nobody has.

Then something changes. A merger. A new partner. A move to new software. A key person leaves. You start a new role, or get a new manager, or take on someone else's work. Suddenly the old way of doing things has to be written down, explained, moved or rebuilt, and the cost of changing it drops to almost nothing, because you are changing it anyway.

That is the moment to bring AI in. Not as one more project on top of the change, but as part of how the new way gets built.

The change you can schedule: the off-season

Most of us are not in the middle of a merger. But every firm in tax has a change it can count on, and it is coming in thirteen days.

October 15 is the last extension deadline. After that, the season is over, the pressure drops, and for a few months there is room to think. The off-season is the closest thing a tax practice has to a planned rebuild, and most firms spend it recovering instead.

If you are not in tax, you have one too. Every business has a slower stretch, and every job has a quieter month. That is your off-season, whether you call it that or not.

Here is a different way to use it. Spend the next few months getting ready for a better busy season. For tax, that means a better April 15, 2027:

  • Write down the three jobs that hurt most this year. Not in general. The specific ones. For most firms it is the document chase, the organizer that nobody fills in, and the review backlog in the last two weeks. For a small business it might be the quote follow-up, the invoice chase and the weekly numbers. For a job, it is the part of your week you dread.
  • Pick one and hand it to an agent. One job, built properly, with quality checks, tested on old examples with the identifying details taken out. If the agent can do last year's version of the job on old data, it can do next year's on real data.
  • Build the rhythm before you need it. An agent that only runs when someone remembers is not a system. Set it to run on a schedule, so that when the busy stretch comes, the work starts on its own instead of in a panic.
  • Train the team while there is time. Nobody learns a new tool well in the middle of the rush. Everyone can learn it in the quiet months. If the team is just you, that applies to you too.

The people who do this will not have an easy busy season. Nobody does. But they will have a different one, where the work that used to eat the last two weeks is already moving months earlier.

I did this in my own firm

This is not theory for me. I did exactly this in my own firm: used the quiet months to change how the work gets done, so the next season ran differently.

The result is something I had not had in 36 years in this profession. Work-life balance. Not a lighter season, an actual life outside of it, for the first time in my career.

I am not saying that to sound impressive. I am saying it because I spent most of those 36 years assuming the crunch was just the price of the job. It was not. It was the price of doing the job the same way every year.

What it looks like in practice

The free course is where to start, and it is self-paced, so it fits around whatever you have on right now and then into the quiet months:

  • AI Skills Black Belt (free, for life): learn to use AI properly on the work you already do. This is the fall project.
  • AI Agent Black Belt (Builder): build one agent around one real job, with quality checks. This is the winter project. For a firm, the document chase is a very good first agent. For a business or a job, pick the task you would hand off first if you could.
  • AI Role OS Black Belt (Operating Systems): connect your people and agents into a weekly rhythm, so it runs without anyone remembering. This is what you have in place before the next busy stretch.

All three are updated as the technology changes, which matters when the tools you learn in October will have improved by spring.

The next two are $1,000 each. If you buy them in your first week after signing up for the free one, you get both for $1,000.

The cost of one tax return

Here is the easiest way I know to think about that price. Both courses together, in your first week, cost about what it costs to have one business tax return prepared.

If you run a firm, that is roughly the fee for one return. If you own a business, it is about what you pay someone to prepare yours. If you work a job, it is a single bill, once, for skills you will use every week for the rest of your career.

Now think about what that one return's worth buys if you spend it in the quiet months. The skills to build an agent that does one real job for you, over and over. A weekly rhythm that keeps it running without anyone remembering. If that saves you even a few hours a week, it has paid for itself many times over before April 15, 2027.

That is how you up your business game, or your career: not by working more hours next season, but by investing the cost of one tax return into how all the rest of your work gets done.

We would never tell a client, a customer or a friend to skip a $1,000 investment that pays back like that. Most of us are just not used to giving ourselves the same advice.

The point

The best time to change how you work is when it is already changing. If you are in the middle of a merger, a new hire, a new role or a software move, fold AI into it now. If you are not, the quiet months are your change, and for anyone in tax they start in thirteen days.

Nobody wants to change how they work, except during the three weeks when they have no choice. The off-season gives you three months. Use them.

AI does the typing. You make the judgment calls.

Where to start


Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)