Scaling New Heights Recap

Last week, I attended the largest accounting technology conference in North America, Scaling New Heights, in Orlando, Florida.

The show floor was packed with the latest software and services, all now claiming the newest AI tech to improve our businesses.

There are new entrants in the accounting general ledger space, and it was interesting to see them report their phenomenal efficiency gains.

Then, at the lunch tables, we all shared our experience testing these products, and the conclusions were the same.

They are great until they aren’t.

One colleague shared how her first two months of testing were amazing, and then the third month brought a completely revised chart of accounts created by the AI.

Not a happy surprise.

These tools will get better. They already have. But for now, in these early stages, we’re still testing and learning.

I saw a lot of gains in the ancillary tools, like practice management software.

We have been on the same system since 2014, when I launched the company.

Now there is software that will let us actually use the frontier LLMs like Claude across our practice, within the practice management system itself.

These tools are designed to reduce software switching and to use AI to aid our work.

I’m excited that we are migrating to one of the premium tools in the space over the next two months.

This will let our team work more efficiently on client work and share our AI tools across the business in a secure manner.

From the breakout sessions, I learned so much about building AI agents for our practice, and our early work in this area is ongoing.

From the main stage, I loved Kate O’Neill’s take on things.

She’s a futurist, and here are a few of her thoughts:

• “The future is partly knowable and predictable, partly shaped by actions and decisions we’ve already made and those we will make today.”

• “Meaning is about what matters. Innovation is about what’s going to matter.”

• “Think futures, not future.”

• “The million dollar question.”

The formal learning and exploring new products, complemented by reconnecting with old friends and learning from them, was the perfect illustration of Kate O’Neill’s final quote: “Use human instinct combined with machine efficiency to make better decisions and do more future-ready work.”

Overall, we had a great time at the conference and are already planning and looking forward to next year.

There's no telling what kinds of things we'll be testing by then.

Cyndi