AI Is Reshaping The Relationship Between Accounting Firms And Clients

The relationship between accounting firms and their clients is being rewritten. For decades, the relationship has followed the same, transactional model: Clients closed their books, and firms received the data, completed the work and delivered it back. Tax returns, audits and financial reviews happened in cycles, with clear handoffs and defined scopes.

That operating model no longer reflects how finance teams work or what they've come to expect from their accounting partners. In a 2025 Deloitte Center for Controllership poll of more than 3,300 finance and accounting professionals, 80.5% said they believe that AI-powered tools will become standard in the profession within five years.

As AI becomes embedded in finance operations, especially through agentic systems that act on behalf of organizations, the traditional boundaries between firms and clients are starting to blur and give way to something more integrated, more continuous and far more complex. Firms that understand this shift and prepare for it can play a very different role in their clients' businesses over the next several years.

Agentic AI changes those expectations. In our close and review work, we use AI to assist with journal entries and to validate data across the general ledger (GL). The system can suggest entries based on historical patterns and scan the GL for anomalies—unexpected account combinations, unusual timing or balances that fall outside normal ranges.

Our role is to review, challenge and approve those outputs, which shifts our time away from manual entry and toward judgment, risk assessment and client insight. We also use AI to run flux analyses with a turnaround that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. As soon as a client's books are updated, the system compares period-over-period activity, flags unusual variances and drafts initial explanations.

That allows us to focus our time on validating what matters and having higher-value conversations with clients about the drivers behind the numbers—often within hours of close, not days later. More takeaways: Check here