My dad is almost 70 years old and still working seven days a week. He's owned a small public accounting firm for forty years. He has ten employees, and he still works more than any of them. He's a firm owner, but in reality, the firm owns him.
He does everything (admin, tax prep, tax review, compilations, client questions) because his firm doesn't have the systems and processes to take any of it off his plate. Most of it is still manual. None of it is the kind of work he'd choose if he had any other option. He keeps doing it because his clients depend on him, and because there isn't an obvious way out.
I'm a second-generation CPA. I've watched this my whole life. And I've come to believe that the most important thing I can do for our profession right now is help firms like my dad's adopt AI well, so they can stop being owned by their work and start running their firms instead.
My path
I spent the first six years of my career at my dad's firm, Barmore Hammond, doing the work the way it has always been done: tax returns, workpapers, review notes, audit, advisory. I learned the fundamentals that still guide everything I do. But I kept feeling the gap between what the profession could be and what the day to day actually was, so I left.
I took a role in government, then moved into technology. At Better Bookkeeping, now Visor, I built out the tax function while working alongside the founders and the product team. It was my first time with a foot in both accounting and software, and my first real taste of automating the tax-prep process. From there I joined CoinTracker as tax lead, leading the tax function behind Nino, its agentic platform for tax and financial planning, working next to engineers and building the AI agents that put real CPA judgment into the product.
That is where it clicked. I stopped just drafting emails faster and started automating real work: reconciling transactions against statements, standardizing messy workpapers, structuring large volumes of documents into usable output. Tasks that took hours took minutes, not because the thinking disappeared, but because the mechanics did. I learned to structure prompts for reliable output, to choose the right model for the job, and to build the guardrails that make any of it safe to trust.
That experience is what keeps pulling me back toward the profession I came from. I am not all the way back in public accounting, but I am getting more involved, working directly with CPAs and other professionals on how to adopt these tools well. That is the role I want: the CPA who has actually built these systems, helping the people who will use them do it safely, with client confidentiality and professional judgment at the center, because responsibility for the work still rests with the CPA.
I am doing this because I want my dad, and firms like his, to thrive in the next decade, not just survive it, and because I would rather hand the next generation of CPAs a sharper axe than tell them not to swing it.