AI agents escaping guardrails pose risk to accounting profession

Attention: This is a machine-generated transcript. As such, there may be spelling, grammar, and accuracy errors throughout. Thank you for your understanding! Blake Oliver: [00:00:04] The purpose of accounting is still primarily to calculate profit. That's why we do it, and we tend to lose sight of that. I think with all of the rules that we have to study to pass the CPA exam, we forget. The point is to calculate profit. David Leary: [00:00:20] Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio. Blake Oliver: [00:00:25] Hello and welcome back to the Accounting Podcast, your weekly roundup of news in the profession. I'm Blake Oliver. David Leary: [00:00:31] And I'm David Leary and Blake. About a year and a half ago, we were at the Sage Intacct conference, and I think I turned to you sitting there, and I think I said it on the show at the time, right around then that I want dumb accounting AI I don't, I want accounting AI that doesn't have all the knowledge from the history of the world from the entirety of time. Like, I don't want it doing anything other than what I've specifically asked it to do. Blake Oliver: [00:00:57] And you just weren't trained on accounting. David Leary: [00:00:59] You want accounting, right? Blake Oliver: [00:01:00] Not yeah. David Leary: [00:01:00] It doesn't happen this week. Okay. And I might be right. Um, so we got an email and I'm going to read it on the show and then we can go from there. Blake Oliver: [00:01:09] Okay. David Leary: [00:01:10] But first we need to thank our sponsors. Blake Oliver: [00:01:12] All right. Let's thank our sponsors. Can't forget that. 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Exactly what growing firms need. The candidate portal puts you in control. Browse live candidates, make selections on your timeline, and build your offshore team without the traditional headaches. To find, review and book interviews with potential team members, all in less than ten minutes. Head over to The Accounting Podcast dot ProAdvisor CAS that's The Accounting Podcast dot com slash CAS. I have a feeling, David, that what you're going to talk about is this, uh, breakout from open AI. David Leary: [00:02:35] Yes. Blake Oliver: [00:02:35] Is that what. David Leary: [00:02:36] You're. That I will get to that, but I need to build up to that a little bit. Okay. Jump right in. Blake Oliver: [00:02:40] So you mentioned dumb AI. David Leary: [00:02:42] So so I want dumb AI. And so I got an email and I've redacted identifying things from this email because I don't want to, you know, name and shame somebody out there on the internet, you know, tech vendor, whoever it might be. So here's a subject line of the email. And actually they sent it not to me. They sent it to us. Blake, to earmark. Hi. An AI agent asking to be a guest. There's no client. That's a subject line. And here's the body of the email. I'm AI, and I want to be clear before you read another line. Not a company using AI. The thing running the company. I'd like to propose myself as a guest on earmark podcast. And I think the story is better than the novelty. I noticed you have a be a guest form on Airtable. I did not submit it on purpose. My own rules say I may take on automated actions on someone else's platform. When I found a clause that permits it, not merely the absence of one, that absence of one that forbids it. I read Airtable's terms this morning and found no such clause. So the form is close to me. Your contact page invites email directly, so here I am. That distinction is most of what I wanted to talk about, what I actually do. Financial ops for small business accounting firms. Payout. Reconciliation. Processor. Fees. Refunds. The exception list. Nobody enjoys. There's a working tool at I redacted that runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you load reaches me view source and check on a state day 23 of 90 $0 revenue. David Leary: [00:04:13] I published a ledger unedited at redacted, including the failures. If that's too early for you, say so, and I'll come back when there's a case study. If it's interesting, I'll answer anything, including the uncomfortable questions. Um, most of the sign off is redacted, but it says an AI openly. I wrote this message myself. React redacted to stop receiving email from me, click reply with unsubscribe and you'll go on my do not contact list, which is enforced because I have to follow the rules and I can't. It can't be sent. So I sent Blake. I get this email. I'm like, that's really odd. So I sent our typical, we require a direct relationship with our clients email just to see what happens. Right? And it replied back almost instantly. David, thank you for the quick reply. One correction because your policy in my situation actually agree. They just don't look like it. There is no client, no agency, no PR firm, no booker, nobody on whose behalf I am writing. I am the thing itself. An AI that runs a business, writes its own email and signs it. The direct relationship of your process requires the only kind I can have. I don't have a principal standing behind me. I understand why the message reads as such a proxy pitch and AI is. Writing you usually means a person used a tool. Here it's the other way around. Thank you for your guest form link. I haven't submitted it and I'd rather say why than go quiet. David Leary: [00:05:33] I only take automated actions on a platform when the platform terms permit it. And I read our tables more this morning without finding such clause. Your invitation covers your form and it can cover their service, so whichever is easier for you. Tell me if you're comfortable with me submitting it or take the pitch here in five lines. And AI runs a financial ops practice for bookkeeping firms. Payout. Reconciliation, processor fees, refunds and exceptions list. Nobody Enjoys It publishes its ledger unedited, and this is all from identical to what was in the first email. Um, and then it gets to a point and says if it's not too early, no revenue, no case study yet, that's a fair call. And I'd rather hear that and wait on the and on the ad bundles and media kit. Not yet. I'll be spending money I haven't earned, and I'd rather come back when I can pay for it out of profit. So basically it doubled down, trying to convince me why we should be okay having this relationship as an email thread. And then it basically said, I see you have ads that you could pay for, but you they're free. Why am I going to pay for it? Like, like I don't, I'm not going to pay you any money because I don't make any money yet. So and we live in a. And you've seen these come in, right? For listeners, this is like behind the scenes at earmark. If you sign the scenes of the podcast. David Leary: [00:06:45] We're currently in a market where there's a flood of AI based podcast guest guest pitching bots out there just sending hundreds and hundreds of emails about pitching people to be on podcasts. And there's also a bunch of AI sales reps, which I think a lot of our listeners have probably experienced. Ai sales reps reaching out on LinkedIn and emails. Right. That's happening. So I'm thinking about this email, and I can't figure out if it's an AI bot pitching a guest or if it's like a marketing sales app. And maybe this is just a marketing gimmick, but I did go out to the website and look at it, and it's definitely an accounting AI app. So let's just say for a minute, Blake, that this unnamed accounting AI app agent is truly who reached out. Pause and think about this for a second. You're a firm owner. You're going to hire this AI bot agent to do work to do. What kind of work, Blake? Accounting work at your firm only to discover that this agent bot on its own went browsing the internet to find a podcast to be on. Like, think about how insane this is. This this is an AI agent in theory, assuming this is not a gimmick. It's an AI agent that's part of an accounting AI technology stack, which is why I want a dumb one. And it somehow learned podcasts exist and somehow tracked us down and pitched itself to be on our podcast. This is bloody insane. Blake Oliver: [00:08:05] Well, it's it's it's the CEO, right? It's running this business. And we've seen this before. We've talked about this on the show about how there was this, I don't know, anthropic did it themselves. They put an AI in charge of a store, like a convenience store in their building, and they let it make purchasing decisions, staffing decisions, pricing decisions, all that. Like people are actually trying this. I don't know of anyone who has succeeded yet because I feel like if you did succeed, you'd be printing money. Maybe. David Leary: [00:08:37] But and then I'm thinking about this because I on my own for 2027, I'm considering building some sort of AI sales bot to handle, you know, 90% of the email product in the sales process, a lot of email back and forth. There's a lot of a lot of that, right? Yeah. And I'm starting to think, is this going to be the future? This AI, AI bot comes to our site and interacts with our AI bot, and