The Lunar New Year is upon us, and with it comes the Year of the Fire Horse, one of the most significant years in the 60-year Chinese zodiac cycle.
The Fire Horse, orbing-wu (丙午), combines two extraordinarily dynamic symbols: fire, representing passion and bold action, with the horse, embodying speed and perseverance. For accounting firms in this current AI landscape, he symbolism couldn't be more apt.
From snake to horse: What's Changed
Last year was the Year of the Wood Snake. Snakes shed their skin; they move fluidly, adapting and transforming. That energy defined 2025 for many firms: AI vendor pilots here, a few champions testing tools there, maybe a Copilot rollout to a select group.
That was appropriate for 2025. It is no longer sufficient for 2026.
Here's what I've observed: While many firms were experimenting, a subset was doing something different. These firms took AI enablement dead seriously and began methodically laying the groundwork: upskilling their staff, creating data homogeneity and standardization, modernizing their technology stack.
This is unglamorous work. It doesn't make headlines. But when firms finally adopt AI at scale, it makes them look like they upgraded overnight. In reality, their ability to progress was built upon years of preparation, getting the firm AI-ready before the AI itself was ready.
The future Is already here
Agentic AI, AI that doesn't just assist via LLM but actually execute tasks, is no longer the future approaching.
Some of you may have noticed the recent headlines about OpenAI's GPT-5.3-Codex and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6. These are frontier foundation models that were primarily written by AI. Early in February,
What started as tools for software engineers has expanded into white-collar professional use. I now work out of a Claude Code setup with AI agents in parallel. Once I personally experienced the compounding power of agents working together, I saw clearly: The future has arrived.
This isn't about fear. It's about recognizing the pace of change and having the imagination and courage to move toward a different, flourishing future.
Why momentum matters now
If the word for last year was experimentation, the word for this year is momentum.
If you are not starting to move methodically now, in one to two years you are going to fall behind your peers who have been doing the work and it will be significantly harder to catch up. Falling behind means losing talent to firms with AI-enabled environments, losing clients who expect AI-powered efficiency, and scrambling to compress years of work into months while competitors reap returns.
How fast you move matters now. You can no longer throw money at AI to "check the box," treat it as a side project or stay in paralysis.
The Year of the Fire Horse demands deliberate and intentional action.
Three ways to build momentum
Based on what I'm seeing work with firms that are pulling ahead, here are three suggestions.
1. Invest in your people first
The firms making real progress aren't buying tools and hoping adoption follows. They're investing in building AI fluency across their teams, not just technical skills, but the innovation mindset required to identify opportunities and embrace new ways of working. This means dedicated training time and creating space for staff to experiment without fear of failure. It means leaders modeling the behavior they want to see by using AI visibly in their own work.
What makes this investment durable is that accounting firms are a people business, first and last. The AI landscape will look different a year from now. But investments in your people, building their capabilities, their confidence, their adaptability, will pay dividends no matter what comes next.
2. Do the unglamorous data work
Fire transforms, but it needs fuel. Your AI strategy is only as good as your data foundation. I've watched firms invest in sophisticated AI tools only to discover a fundamental bottleneck: documents scattered across legacy systems, inconsistently named, devoid of meaningful metadata.
AI can't leverage what it can't find or understand.
The firms building momentum have made data standardization and process documentation a priority. They're preparing their information environment now so AI can actually deliver value.
While this is the work nobody wants to do, it's also the work that separates firms that get results from firms that get frustrated.
3. Think in systems, not individuals
The horse's strength comes from its entire body working in coordination, not from any single muscle. The firms pulling ahead aren't optimizing a single task or chasing one use case. They're thinking firm-wide: workflows end-to-end, technology stack holistically, people across service lines, impact of AI on growth, culture and business models.
Systems thinking means asking, "How do we become an AI-enabled firm?" rather than "How can AI help with this one thing?" It means looking at how your people, processes, technology and business model connect, and building AI capability across all of them simultaneously. It's harder. But it's also the only approach that compounds.
Which group will you be in?
This year, we will see accounting firms begin to break away from each other in AI capability. Some will have built the foundation and started reaping compounding benefits. Others will still be debating where to start.
Catching up from one to two years behind is possible, but it takes time you may not have. The work that needs to happen cannot be rushed through sheer investment.
The Fire Horse year is one of courage, bold action and swift progress. The question for you is simple: Which group will you be part of?
