AI News for Accountants - 16 February 2026

Описание: The AI Bookkeeper Wars: Pilot’s Autonomous Accounting, $75M AI Tax Prep, and BILL’s New Agents

Peter hosts a weekly AI roundup for accounting firm leaders, focusing on what’s changing in bookkeeping, tax prep, and practice operations. He highlights “The AI Bookkeeper Wars,” including Pilot’s February 4 launch of the AI Accountant, a fully autonomous end-to-end bookkeeping system producing P&L, cash flow, and balance sheet with zero human intervention, backed by Sequoia, Stripe, and Jeff Bezos and already deployed with customers. He covers Canopy’s February 11 announcement of Canopy Bookkeeping, an AI module inside its practice management platform connecting to QBO and Xero, flagging issues in real time and turning them into workflow tasks, targeted for summer 2026, and Digits’ benchmark claiming its AI bookkeeper made 10x fewer mistakes than human-sourced accountants across 2,000 transactions. Peter advises CAS and bookkeeping teams to rethink pricing, staffing, and value by using AI to create advisory capacity rather than competing on basic bookkeeping.

He then reviews Accrual, a new startup launched February 5 with $75M in funding building an AI-native tax preparation platform where AI agents ingest documents (K-1s, 1099s, spreadsheets, and long statements), identify missing items, generate follow-up questions, and produce draft returns for review, with work already involving H&R Block, Armanino, and Creative Planning. Next, he details BILL’s February 10 release of new and enhanced AI agents, including an accounting agent for bookkeeping and month-end close, a W-9 agent that emails vendors, collects W-9s, and pre-validates tax info—eliminating over 80% of manual steps—and a reconciliation agent that codes transactions so receipts reconcile automatically, trained on over $1T in payments across 500,000 customers. Quick hits include Goldman Sachs deploying Anthropic’s Claude for accounting and compliance and calling AI agents “digital colleagues,” the launch of the AI Native Accounting Foundation as an independent nonprofit founded by Casey Johnson and Bebe Kim with nominations open for AI-native accounting awards, and a Journal of Accountancy survey finding 79% of mid-market CFOs have offloaded at least a quarter of finance work to agentic AI while only 14% fully trust it—framed as an advisory opportunity. He closes with a warning from CPA Practice Advisor’s “The Decline of Human Intelligence in Tax Strategy,” citing research showing a 47% drop in brain connections tied to focus and creativity when heavily relying on AI for complex work, urging firms to ensure AI amplifies judgment and critical thinking rather than replacing it. He directs viewers to theAIaccountant.ai for training and implementation support and asks them to subscribe and follow for daily updates.

00:00 Welcome to The AI Accountant: This Week’s Biggest AI Stories for Firms
00:37 The AI Bookkeeper Wars Begin: Pilot, Canopy & Digits Raise the Stakes
01:49 What It Means for CAS Teams: Pricing, Staffing & Moving Up to Advisory
02:17 Story #2 — Accrual’s $75M Bet on AI-Native Tax Prep Agents
03:22 Story #3 — BILL’s New AI Agents: W‑9 Collection, Close & Reconciliation
04:36 Quick Hits: Goldman + Claude, AI Accounting Foundation, CFO Trust Gap
06:07 The Real Risk: When AI Replaces Tax Judgment & Critical Thinking
07:01 Wrap-Up & Next Steps: Prepare Your Team + Training, Subscribe & Links

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