In June, Accenture shares fell nearly 20 percent in a single trading session, the worst one-day decline in the company’s history, wiping out billions in market value and becoming the clearest signal yet that AI is starting to erode demand for consulting sold by the hour.
But while Accenture’s leadership pointed to delayed deals and paused federal spending, and noted that its AI bookings actually grew 53 percent that same quarter, the market’s reaction still points to something narrower and more durable than an AI panic. Companies have stopped paying for hours the way they used to, and that same math is coming for every accounting firm still billing compliance work by the clock.
This hasn’t gone unnoticed by the industry. In its recent Rise2040 initiative, AICPA & CIMA named the transformation of business and operating models as one of six pillars shaping the profession’s future.
For decades, accountants have been paid to produce accurate information under deadline, filings, reconciliations, audits, tax returns, compliance output billed by the hour because producing it took real, scarce time. AI now produces that same information fast and cheap, and that production, not the professionals who used to sell it, is what’s disappearing as a paid service.
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What survives is a different kind of work entirely, and calling it insight almost undersells it: noticing a problem a client hasn’t yet recognized, and helping solve it. Insight requires a human who asks the question nobody assigned, because a system that only answers the question in front of it can never generate the one that actually matters.
Call this the shift from an answer economy to a question economy. Firms used to sell answers, correct, timely, defensible answers to questions clients already knew to ask. What clients need now, and what AI cannot manufacture, is someone asking the question they didn’t know they had.
Curiosity is the skill that produces that kind of question, and accounting has never trained for it directly. Firms built an apprenticeship model to transmit exactly one kind of judgment, the instinct a partner with thirty years in the field develops for which compliance risk to flag. That model produced excellent technicians. It was never built to produce people who notice something a client’s business needs that nobody assigned them to find.
For years, hiring practices reinforced this gap. Firms maintained strict GPA thresholds, sometimes as high as 3.4, which screened out well-rounded candidates whose people skills might otherwise have earned them a seat at the table. Most accountants also know little about their own firm’s full range of services, which makes it hard to ask a client about work outside their own specialty, even when the opening is right in front of them.
Imagine a routine client meeting where the client mentions, almost in passing, that they’ve just hired a new executive. A curious accountant hears an opening and asks whether that executive could use a coach, knowing the firm picked up a leadership coaching practice through a recent acquisition. A passing comment becomes a new advisory engagement.
There’s less time than firms think to reskill teams. The population of licensed, credentialed accountants in the U.S. has fallen from roughly 1.93 million to about 653,000, and credentialed roles now take far longer to fill than uncredentialed ones, which means firms don’t have the luxury of waiting for a new generation to arrive already curious. This contraction makes the training question more urgent than aspirational. Firms can’t simply hire their way to a more curious workforce when the pool of licensed talent keeps shrinking. In other words, existing staff need to develop these new skills. The shift is already visible where advisory work gets measured: the share of firms offering advisory services climbed from 83 percent to 93 percent in a single year, with the firms most active in AI adoption posting the strongest advisory growth of all.
Most firms still don’t measure, train, or pay for curiosity. Partner compensation is still built around individual book of business, hiring still filters for GPA and technical credentials, and curiosity is a word most accountants would never use about themselves. Private equity ownership is already accelerating this shift.
PE investors expect measurable, portable value rather than loose partnership culture, which is pushing firms to define and reward advisory contribution explicitly. Some firms are experimenting with scorecards that give partners credit for advisory services their clients use, even when the engagement doesn’t fall under their own name.
The firms without that outside pressure will have to make the same change on their own, deliberately, just as firms once built entire training programs around technical competence. That means hiring for curiosity and coaching it the way a detective learns to keep pushing for the next clue.
Firms that keep training accountants to produce answers faster will watch their advisory revenue go to the ones that trained their people to ask better questions.
Alice Grey Harrison is managing partner of AGH Consulting Group.
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