You want your people using AI? Great. So, what are they allowed to stop doing to do so? And don’t say nothing.
I keep hearing firm leaders ask for innovation while expecting every billable hour, every deadline and every old process to stay exactly where it is. They’ve bought the licenses and sent everyone to training. Now they want people to transform the firm somewhere between finishing the client work and picking up the kids.
Then somebody spends two hours experimenting, and a partner asks why their utilization is down.
Well, there it is. Your AI strategy just ran into your scorecard. And we all know which one wins when compensation comes up.
Congratulations on protecting the old way
Imagine someone figures out how to use AI to prepare for client meetings. They test it, get some garbage back, add better context and build something useful. Now they’re asking better questions and spotting issues they might have missed.
Meanwhile, the person next to them follows the same process they’ve used for years and logs every hour.
One person made the work better. The other logged more time. Guess who gets the better review?
We love to say accountants resist change. But if changing how they work hurts their performance review, why would they risk it? Your people understand your priorities perfectly. Be innovative after you’ve done everything that counts.
You bought a license not a skill
At the 2026 ADP Accountant Connect AI Forum, I said firms need to give people time to experiment. Whether that’s two hours a week or four hours a month, pick a starting point and actually make room for it.
Tal Goldhammer, founder and CEO of Find the Tailwind, put it simply when he said, “Access is not capability.”
Exactly! Somebody has to learn what to do with the tool. That means trying something that doesn’t work, figuring out what went wrong and recognizing when an impressive answer is nonsense. Some of that will take longer than doing the task the familiar way. Of course it will. They’re learning!
And if you give someone two hours to learn but leave every production target untouched, you’ve given them homework. Call it whatever you want in the partner meeting. Your staff knows what it means for their evening.
Partners, you can change the rules
You’re the partner. You can change the target. Your staff can’t. So why are they the ones expected to figure this out?
Put learning time in the workload. Decide what gets moved, reassigned or stopped. Make sure managers understand how that time counts in performance reviews. If one partner says “go experiment” and another says, “make up the hours,” spare me the innovation speech.
And open the tool yourself. Try something you don’t already know how to do. Let your team see you get stuck. You want people willing to work differently? Show them what that looks like from the partner’s chair.
Laci Buzzelli, senior vice president and general manager of small business services at ADP, said success will be defined by “the organizations that do the best job helping their people adopt it, build confidence in it and create new value.”
New value? Can we spend a little more time on that part?
Give someone a recurring problem to explore, then have them show the team what happened. Recognize the person who helps five colleagues work better. Ask about the client need someone uncovered, even if it hasn’t become an engagement yet.
That’s the part that excites me. People who know where the work gets stuck finally getting room to fix it. Accountants discovering that they can help clients in ways they hadn’t considered. Give them a reason to build that firm.
And when someone makes an old process unnecessary, celebrate it. Don’t hand them a utilization problem.
They learned the rules from you. Now give them permission to break a few.
