The Accounting Disruptors

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 examine why time savings don't automatically translate into lower costs or greater value. It's an honest conversation about defining what AI should accomplish, delivering better information to clients, and helping employees answer an increasingly personal question: "What's my job now?"
 
The Accounting Disruptors is produced by Wiss, an AI-optimized CPA and advisory firm serving privately held and venture-backed businesses. 

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 shape people’s relationships with their employers; how COVID and remote work disrupted traditional measures of commitment; and why specialized knowledge may become less valuable as AI makes information more accessible. They also discuss the need for clearer leadership communication and what EY’s dramatic audit quality gains reveal about combining technology with workflow redesign and talent development.
The Accounting Disruptors is produced by Wiss, an AI-optimized CPA and advisory firm serving privately held and venture-backed businesses.
 

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 conversation about the gap between AI’s promised future and its current capabilities, the loss of community within accounting, and why leaders must acknowledge the human impact of disruption while helping their people move from fear to confidence.
The Accounting Disruptors is produced by Wiss, an AI-optimized CPA and advisory firm serving privately held and venture-backed businesses.

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 they believe the accounting profession has drifted away from treating people with humanity. It's a personal, unfiltered conversation about grief, resilience, and what leaders owe the people who work for them.
The Accounting Disruptors is produced by Wiss, an AI-optimized CPA and advisory firm serving privately-held and venture-backed businesses.

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 portfolio management process, and what that experience revealed about what CFOs are actually paying for when they bring in AI tools: trust, not time savings. This episode covers CFO cost structure, accounting ecosystem history, ERP adoption, and why accounting as an industry remains significantly underpriced.
The Accounting Disruptors is produced by Wiss, an AI-optimized CPA and advisory firm serving privately-held and venture-backed businesses.

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, why fully self-driving cars sitting unused in driveways are the best analogy for accounting's resistance to change, and why the "capacity paradox" (accountants too buried in manual work to learn the tools that would free them from it) is the real barrier to adoption. They also cover the trust gap around AI-generated financial data, why data cleanliness matters more than the model itself, and what CFOs and controllers should actually be asking before they roll out AI.
The Accounting Disruptors is produced by Wiss, an AI-optimized CPA and advisory firm serving privately-held and venture-backed businesses.

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 management tactics like Q4 vacation blackout policies, and why openness is becoming Rillet's biggest competitive advantage after its latest funding round. From there, Paul and Matt tackle the accounting talent shortage head-on: 600,000 open positions, a 40% drop in first-time CPA exam sitters since 2016, and the uncomfortable truth about why accountants keep devaluing their own work. They close with a look at what the intelligence layer means for the future office of the CFO.
The Accounting Disruptors is produced by Wiss, an AI-optimized CPA and advisory firm serving privately-held and venture-backed businesses.

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 AR problem, and what it takes to deploy AI agents responsibly in cash application and collections. They cover DSO reduction, the swivel chair problem, and why credit card payments alone won't fix your order-to-cash process. 
This Week in Accounting AI is produced by Wiss, an AI-optimized CPA and advisory firm serving privately-held and venture-backed businesses.

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 workload without the right systems in place, why your ERP can't see the data trapped in your team's spreadsheets, and why AI adoption forces accounting and tech departments to finally talk to each other. 
This Week in Accounting AI is produced by Wiss, an AI-optimized CPA and advisory firm serving privately-held and venture-backed businesses.

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 often experience a sense of "grieving" as AI changes the nature of their work. They also talk about why the organizations that acknowledge those emotions will be better positioned to lead through transformation.
The conversation examines why AI is making accountants and knowledge workers more productive rather than replacing them, what the latest market data says about AI's impact on software companies, and why businesses that delay adoption risk falling behind. Along the way, Paul and Matt unpack lessons on leadership from the world of sports, explaining why the best leaders double down on their strengths instead of making fear-driven decisions.
This Week in Accounting AI is produced by Wiss, an AI-optimized CPA and advisory firm serving privately-held and venture-backed businesses.