The Unsettled Feeling
I’ll be honest with you about something.
For a while, the feeling was just unsettledness. A sense of being behind.
Everyone around me seemed to be racing ahead, and I was standing still.
Then I sat in on a Tony Robbins AI summit, and one idea reframed the whole thing for me.
Learning and mastery, the way we experienced them in the past, are not the way things work going forward.
The technology is changing so fast that we likely won’t master any of it before something new arrives.
That gave me the permission I had unknowingly been needing. Permission to go at my own pace.
Maybe you need that permission too.
The Deeper Fear
Underneath the unsettledness was a deeper fear I had.
Would AI replace the need for my business?
Would it do the accounting and the advisory work and take the place of my team?
Those fears kept me up at night.
Diving In Anyway
So I did what I always do. I went digging.
Facing the very thing I was afraid of felt like the only real option.
Claude is where I landed, and I dabbled, and I played, and I fell in love with the ease of the answers.
That season was pure wonder, but the honeymoon did have rocky moments.
The calculations were sometimes just wrong.
My years of experience and judgment around numbers caught them every time.
Checking and double-checking became non-negotiable.
Rebuilding all the work in Excel the hard way was how I made sure.
Over the span of a few months, I watched the models themselves get noticeably better.
From Using AI to Building With It
Then I read a book by a friend in the UK, Alexis Kingsbury, called Accrual Intentions.
He documented building an entire accounting firm run by AI agents, with himself as the only employee.
That book moved me from using AI to building with AI.
And the building came with its own rocks along the shore.
Where Judgment Still Matters
Comparing legal agreements with Claude was one of my early experiments.
Leaning on it being directionally right felt reasonable, even while my attorney reviewed the same documents.
Then my attorney’s advice pointed a different way.
Here’s what I came to understand.
Math is easy to check, but your own thinking is not.
That judgment layer, the conversation with my attorney about how I actually feel about risk, is exactly where our true value lives with our clients too.
Guardrails I Use Now
Even now, with all of it working, I feel a quiet undercurrent.
Did I check it fully? Was I trusting the answer too much? Had I let its certainty steer my thinking?
Finding a few answers helped settle that undercurrent.
Three instructions now live in my Claude settings.
Answer first, then the reasoning, then how it could be wrong.
Never state a specific number or date from memory without flagging it as unverified.
If my question and my real goal seem different, say so.
My results are richer now.
When I finish an analysis, I ask it to rate itself from zero to one hundred, and to tell me where it excelled and where it could have done better.
Tending to Myself Through It All
And I keep tending to myself through all of it.
Journaling. Painting. Daily walks with my pups. Meditation.
I’d love to know if AI anxiety is real for you and how you’re coping if so.
Send me a reply and let’s talk about it.
Cyndi
Quick Summary
Cyndi Thomason shares her personal journey through AI anxiety, from feeling behind and fearing AI might replace her business, to finding freedom in the idea that mastery is no longer the goal in a fast-moving field. She describes experimenting with Claude, catching early calculation errors with her own financial expertise, and being inspired by Alexis Kingsbury’s book Accrual Intentions to move from using AI to building with it. A moment where AI advice conflicted with her attorney’s guidance taught her that judgment and risk conversations, not raw output, are where real advisory value lives. She now uses specific prompting guardrails (answer-then-reasoning, flagging unverified figures, and self-rating outputs) to keep her own thinking in the loop.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is AI anxiety?
AI anxiety is the unsettled feeling many business owners and professionals experience as AI tools evolve quickly, often tied to fears of falling behind or being replaced.
Will AI replace accountants and financial advisors?
AI can speed up calculations and analysis, but judgment, risk assessment, and understanding a client’s real goals remain a human responsibility that AI cannot fully replace.
How can business owners safely use AI tools like Claude for financial work?
Verify calculations independently, ask the AI to flag unverified figures, request its reasoning alongside its answer, and have it self-assess where it may have fallen short.
What is Accrual Intentions by Alexis Kingsbury about?
It’s a book documenting how the author built an accounting firm run largely by AI agents, which inspired Cyndi to move from simply using AI tools to actively building with them.
