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Here's where the hourglass gets practical.
The staffing crisis is a design problem
Every managing partner in the profession is talking about the same problem. They can't find enough people to do the work. The pipeline is shrinking. Fewer students are sitting for the CPA exam. Experienced staff are burning out and leaving. The standard response has been to throw money into recruiting, to raise starting salaries and to hope the pipeline recovers.
But what if the staffing crisis isn't a recruiting problem? What if it's a design problem?
The traditional pyramid says: "You need more people at the base." In contrast, the hourglass says: "You're asking the wrong question. You don't need more people in the middle. You need better people at the top and bottom, and you need technology to handle the compression zone."
This is a fundamentally different strategic conversation. Instead of competing for the same shrinking pool of accounting graduates and trying to fill seats in the production layer, you're investing in two things: 1. Senior talent who have genuine advisory depth, and 2. Client-facing professionals who have exceptional communication and relationship skills. Those are very talent profiles, recruiting strategies and compensation models from what we're used to.
And here's the part that most firms haven't considered: The hourglass actually solves part of the staffing problem rather than creating a new one. That's because you're no longer trying to fill a role that fewer and fewer people want (grinding through workpapers for five years to earn a shot at something more meaningful). Instead, you're offering two genuinely attractive career entry points: one built around client relationships, the other around technical mastery. Both of those skills are easier to recruit for, because both options feel like real careers from day one.
What this means for career paths
In the pyramid model, career progression is linear and well understood. You start at the bottom doing grunt work, you grind through the middle ranks over five to seven years, and you eventually earn your way to the top where you make judgment calls and manage client relationships. The middle is the crucible. It's where you learn.
In the hourglass, that middle rung largely disappears. So, the question becomes: How do you develop the judgment that partners need if the traditional proving ground doesn't exist in the same way?
The answer is that the entry points change. In an hourglass firm, you either enter through the relationship layer (client service, communication, project management) or through the advisory layer (technical specialization, advanced tax or audit expertise). And instead of learning by processing hundreds of returns manually, junior advisors learn by reviewing AI output, understanding why the model flagged certain items, and building judgment through guided review rather than repetitive production.
This path is arguably a better way to develop professionals. Instead of spending three years entering K-1 data to build "foundational knowledge," a second-year associate can spend that time studying how the K-1 allocations affect the client's overall tax position, and learning to make the judgment calls that matter. The learning curve compresses, and the learning itself becomes more valuable.
Think about what this means for the profession's attractiveness. One of the biggest reasons why young professionals leave accounting is that the first several years feel pointless. They didn't go to school to key in data. They went to school to learn how to advise, to solve problems and to work with clients. The hourglass lets them get to that work faster, and the firms that figure this out first will have a significant recruiting advantage over less enlightened peers.
What clients actually want
I sit on both sides of this conversation. As the founder of a wealth advisory firm, I see how high-net-worth families think about their professional relationships with their CPA, their estate attorney and their financial advisor. And here's what I can tell you with confidence: Not a single client has ever asked me how many people at their accounting firm touched their return. No one has ever asked whether a staff associate or a senior prepared their workpapers.
They just want to know: "Are the numbers right?" "What does this return mean for me?" "What should I be doing differently?" "Why didn't someone catch this sooner?"
Those are judgment questions and relationship questions. They're top-of-the-hourglass and bottom-of-the-hourglass questions. The middle rung (i.e., production) is invisible to the client and always has been. Clients don't care how the sausage is made. They only care that it's well made, delivered on time, and that someone they trust is standing behind it.
The firms that understand this will use AI to reinvest freed-up capacity into more advisory conversations, faster turnaround, year-round engagement and proactive outreach. Firms that don't realize this will use AI to cut costs, shrink headcount and compete on price, which is a race to the bottom in a profession built on trust.
A practical path forward
If you're running a firm of 15 to 50 people and this framework resonates with you, here's how I'd think about sequencing:
Invest in the document layer now. AI-powered document ingestion and data extraction are mature, reliable and available today. If your staff is still manually keying in data from source documents, that's the first bottleneck to eliminate. This is the lowest risk, highest returning AI investment you can make right now.
Redesign your review process. As AI handles more of the preparation, your review layer becomes more important, not less. Train your reviewers to focus on judgment calls, anomalies and client-specific context rather than data accuracy checks. The nature of the review shifts from "is this number right?" to "is this approach right?"
Elevate your client service team. The bottom of the hourglass is not an afterthought. It's a strategic asset. The people who interact with your clients directly, who manage the intake process, who follow up and communicate results, deserve more investment, better training and higher compensation than the industry traditionally gives them. They are the human face of your firm.
Pressure your software vendors. The biggest practical barrier to AI adoption in tax isn't the AI itself. It's that legacy tax software wasn't built for agent interoperability. If your vendor doesn't have an API roadmap, ask why. If they can't answer you, start evaluating alternatives. The firms that get the software integration layer right first will have an enormous structural advantage.
Hire differently. Stop looking exclusively for people who can process and start looking for people who can advise and relate. Your next great hire might not have a CPA license. It might be someone with exceptional client instincts and the ability to learn the technical side with AI-assisted tools.
Build around what won't change
Jeff Bezos built Amazon around things that would never change. CPA firms can do the same. Your clients will always want accuracy. They will always want someone who understands their situation. They will always want a trusted advisor who picks up the phone when they call. They will always want the process to feel easy.
The pyramid was built around something that will change: the need for large numbers of people to do production work. The hourglass is built around what won't change: the irreplaceable value of human judgment at the top and human connection at the bottom.
The firms that thrive in the next decade won't be the ones that adopted AI first. They'll be the ones that understood what AI was for: freeing up capacity to do more of what their clients have always wanted. Better advice. Better relationships. Better service. The tools will keep changing. Those things never will.
What is your firm doing to adapt to the new accounting firm structure? I'd love to hear from you.
