Why making every hour of expertise count may matter more than adding more people
Executive Summary
The American accounting profession is entering an interesting moment.
Demand for accounting, tax and advisory services remains strong, yet firms continue to navigate a difficult talent environment while simultaneously confronting one of the biggest technological shifts the profession has experienced in decades. Artificial intelligence is moving rapidly from experimentation into everyday workflows, while clients increasingly expect their accounting firms to deliver more insight, responsiveness and value.
That creates an uncomfortable question for firm leaders: How much more growth can be achieved by simply adding more people?
The question matters because the economics of professional services make capacity particularly valuable. Every hour of a partner’s, manager’s or experienced accountant’s time carries an opportunity cost. When highly skilled professionals spend significant portions of that time on repetitive preparation, research, administration or coordination, the firm may be growing its headcount without proportionately increasing its capacity for higher-value work.
The opportunity ahead may therefore lie in leverage.
AI Is Accelerating the Conversation
The numbers suggest that American firms are moving quickly.
Thomson Reuters’ 2025 Future of Professionals Report found that 79% of tax, audit and accounting professionals expect AI to have a high or transformational impact on their industry within five years. Yet only 14% said their firms currently have comprehensive AI strategies. The same research found that organizations with visible AI strategies were twice as likely to report AI-related revenue growth as those with informal or ad hoc approaches.
That gap is revealing.
The challenge facing firms is increasingly less about whether AI will matter and more about whether they can integrate it meaningfully into the way work gets done.
The technology may accelerate a tax research task, summarize documents or assist with preparation. The real productivity opportunity appears when the surrounding workflow is reconsidered as well: who performs the work, who reviews it, what technology supports it, and where professional judgment enters the process.
The Workforce Question Is Changing
The talent equation is changing alongside the technology.
The AICPA’s 2025 report on accounting education, the CPA Exam and public accounting hiring found that three out of four firms that recruited new staff in 2024 expected to hire the same number or more in 2025. At the same time, the supply of accounting graduates remains an important concern for the profession.
Recruitment therefore remains essential. But recruitment alone does not answer the capacity question.
A more deliberate approach is to examine the firm’s workflow and determine where professional expertise creates the greatest value. Some activities require CPA-level judgment and client interaction. Others require strong accounting knowledge but can follow structured processes. Still others can increasingly be supported by automation, AI or additional talent operating within clearly defined controls.
That creates a broader workforce model in which people, technology and process are designed together.
The Firms That Create Leverage Will Have More Options
This is where the conversation about workforce strategy becomes particularly interesting.
A firm that relies primarily on hiring has essentially one major lever: add people.
A firm that combines recruitment with process improvement, AI, automation, professional development and carefully structured access to additional talent has considerably more options. That flexibility matters when demand changes.
It can allow firms to respond to seasonal workloads without permanently expanding every part of the organization. It can help experienced professionals spend more time with clients and on advisory work. And it can give smaller and midsize firms access to capabilities that might otherwise be difficult to build internally.
The objective is not to minimize the importance of professional talent. It is to increase the amount of value that talent can create.
Three Questions Worth Asking
For U.S. accounting firm leaders, that might make 3 questions particularly useful:
The answers will differ from firm to firm. The questions, however, may become increasingly important as the profession moves from an era of talent scarcity into one where talent leverage becomes a competitive capability.
Looking Ahead
AI will undoubtedly change accounting work. So will changing client expectations, evolving business models and the continued competition for skilled professionals.
The firms best positioned to benefit from those changes may be the ones that think beyond individual technologies or individual hires and instead consider the architecture of the work itself.
The competitive advantage of the next accounting firm may ultimately be measured by a deceptively simple question: How much more can your people accomplish with the right work, the right technology and the right capacity around them?
Global Staff Connections
Global Staff Connections works with accounting and finance organizations across North America and Australia to explore practical approaches to building sustainable workforce capacity. Our work sits at the intersection of people, process and technology, including structured offshore teams and, through our collaboration with Gaitcon, emerging AI-enabled solutions designed to complement professional workflows.
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