Goldman Sachs recently raised an interesting problem with AI: junior professionals may increasingly be expected to manage AI before they have spent years developing the judgment traditionally required to manage people.
That dynamic matters because AI can give someone extraordinary capability very early in their career. A junior tax professional can research a complex issue, compare strategies, analyze client information, draft a response and explore planning alternatives at a level that once required far more time, experience or support. In that sense, AI can make professionals feel almost superhuman.
But capability and judgment are not the same thing, and that distinction may become one of the most important issues tax and accounting firms face over the next decade.
AI Is Forcing Junior Professionals to Become Managers Earlier
For generations, professional development followed a fairly predictable path. Junior staff did the foundational work. They researched issues, prepared workpapers, reviewed documents, answered routine client questions and learned by seeing thousands of small situations over time. Eventually, those experiences accumulated into judgment.
AI changes that progression.
A young professional can now delegate significant portions of research, analysis, writing and information gathering to an AI system. In practical terms, they may be managing an intelligent digital worker before they have ever managed another employee.
That creates enormous leverage, but it also creates a new responsibility. The professional has to know what question to ask, what information matters, whether the output is credible, what assumptions may be missing and when the answer simply does not make sense. That is management, and increasingly, professionals may need to learn it from day one.
AI Gives People Senior-Level Leverage Earlier
This is the part of AI that I find most interesting for our profession.
A tax professional who once needed hours to research a technical issue can potentially understand the landscape in minutes. A partner who could never manually review hundreds of client situations can use AI to surface the handful that deserve attention. A professional can compare strategies, model scenarios, summarize documents and prepare for a client conversation without spending hours gathering the underlying information first.
That does not make the professional less valuable. It can make them dramatically more capable.
Suddenly, one person can operate with access to information and analytical capacity that once required a much larger team. That creates the possibility of moving professionals up the value chain much faster, but only if they understand what the technology is doing.
Read: The IRS Just Drew a Line in the Sand on AI. Here's What Every Tax Professional Needs to Know.
Leverage Without Judgment Is Dangerous
This is where firms need to be careful.
AI can produce an answer that looks polished, confident and sophisticated. That does not mean the answer is right.
A professional who understands the subject matter can challenge the output. They can recognize a questionable assumption, identify missing facts, test the conclusion and decide whether the recommendation actually makes sense for the client. Someone without that judgment may simply accept the answer.
That is not augmentation. That is outsourcing judgment.
AI can make that problem worse because weak analysis no longer necessarily looks weak. A poorly reasoned answer can now arrive beautifully written, neatly organized and delivered with confidence.
The scarce skill is no longer simply producing an answer. It is knowing whether the answer is good.
The Real Opportunity Is Accelerated Professional Development
There are two very different ways firms can use AI.
The first is to treat it primarily as labor replacement. Automate the work, reduce the time and produce more with fewer people. There will certainly be some of that.
But I think the bigger opportunity is using AI to accelerate the development of professionals.
Imagine a junior tax professional who can explore ten scenarios instead of one. They can ask why a strategy works, compare competing interpretations, examine the underlying authority and see how changing one fact alters the conclusion. They can analyze more client situations in a year than previous generations might have seen in several years.
Used correctly, AI becomes more than an efficiency tool. It becomes a learning accelerator.
That is much more powerful.
Firms Cannot Automate Away the Apprenticeship Model Without Replacing It
This may be one of the least discussed consequences of AI.
A great deal of traditional tax and accounting work was repetitive, but it was also educational. Reviewing returns taught professionals where problems appeared. Research taught them how tax law fit together. Preparing workpapers taught them how financial information flowed through a business. Answering routine client questions taught them how to explain complicated subjects clearly.
If AI removes a meaningful amount of that work, firms cannot simply celebrate the efficiency and assume expertise will somehow appear five years later. They need a new development model.
Professionals will need more structured review, scenario analysis, client exposure and supervised use of AI. Managers will need to ask better questions: Why do you agree with this recommendation? What assumptions is the AI making? What information might change the answer? What authority supports the conclusion? What alternatives did you consider? What would you tell the client, and why?
Those questions are how judgment develops. The training model has to evolve along with the technology.
Related: The Tax & Accounting Firms Winning with AI Aren’t Replacing Professionals
AI Should Move Professionals Up the Value Chain
For years, tax and accounting firms have had a talent problem. Highly educated professionals spend enormous amounts of time searching for information, moving data between systems, preparing routine communications, reviewing documents and finding information that already exists somewhere in the practice.
Much of that work is necessary, but very little of it represents the highest value those professionals can provide.
AI changes the economics of that work. If technology can handle more of the searching, organizing, summarizing and first-pass analysis, professionals regain something our industry has always struggled to create: time to think.
That means more time to identify planning opportunities, understand what is changing inside a client's business, talk with clients before problems become urgent and provide actual advice.
That is where AI becomes transformational. It is not simply helping someone write an email eight minutes faster. It is giving professionals the capacity to do work they previously did not have time to do at all.
Human Expertise Becomes More Valuable, Not Less
There is an irony in the rise of AI.
As producing information becomes easier, expertise may become more valuable. When everyone can generate an answer, knowing whether the answer is right becomes more important. When anyone can create an analysis, knowing what deserves analysis becomes more important.
When information becomes abundant, judgment becomes scarce.
Experienced professionals understand context, clients and consequences. They understand that the technically correct answer is not always the best recommendation.
AI can amplify those abilities, but it cannot replace them. That combination is where the real advantage exists.
The Firms That Win Will Combine Human Judgment With Machine Capability
I do not think the winning tax and accounting firm of the future will be the firm that simply has the fewest employees, and I do not think it will be the firm that avoids AI in the name of protecting traditional expertise.
The winning firms will learn how to combine human judgment, professional experience and client relationships with artificial intelligence, information processing and automation.
Used together, those capabilities allow professionals to operate at a level that neither humans nor machines can achieve as effectively alone.
The question for firm leaders is no longer whether AI will make their people more productive. It will. The bigger question is whether that productivity will produce better professionals.
Used poorly, AI can create people who know how to generate sophisticated answers without understanding them. Used well, it can compress years of learning, expose professionals to more situations and move them into higher-value advisory work earlier in their careers.
That is the opportunity.
Do not use AI to eliminate the path to expertise. Use it to accelerate the path to expertise.
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