Hi there,
Today I’m going to talk about an incident where an influencer partnership Xero had in the UK led to a backlash from accountants. I think this isn’t actually a clumsy marketing mistake, but it’s exposing why software vendors have a lot of opportunity in the AI era, and intermediaries like accountants and other professionals face enormous risks.
This influencer claimed she could save £800 a month for management reports that previously an accountant performed. This was via a read-only Claude MCP connection to her Xero account. This use case is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what sorts of things business owners who pay accountants lots of money will choose to do themselves.
I think that a lot of the initial reaction shows a lot of accountants haven’t thought through the strategic risks they actually face from AI disruption. Just because the current tool is read-only doesn’t mean that other AI tools that exist today can’t use browser use and computer use and access to APIs to do many more things that they thought they might be safe from disruption on.
