A big firm just got caught by the thing I worry about most
The KPMG AI report failure was not an AI failure. It was a process failure. Why the firms that win will be the most disciplined about where a human signs.
19 June 2026
Articles
Articles
Writing on AI, accountancy, SME finance and professional judgement.
These articles are written from the perspective of a UK chartered accountant working inside a real practice, not from the sidelines of the AI debate.
Automation and 15m jobs lost in the UK …
In 2016, over lunch, Andrew Haldane told a room of accountants that 15 million UK jobs were exposed to automation. I was listening.
4 March 2016
How the Chancellor borrowed from Xero
The 2015 promise to end the tax return borrowed its design from cloud accounting: push feeds and auto-populated accounts, a decade early.
19 March 2015
The receipts
A decade of receipts: Number 11 in 2015, the 15-million-jobs warning in 2016.
How the Chancellor borrowed from Xero
The 2015 promise to end the tax return borrowed its design from cloud accounting: push feeds and auto-populated accounts, a decade early.
19 March 2015
Xero can help the Chancellor with new Dividend Tax
I met George Osborne at Number 11 and told him his Dividend Tax needed a reporting mechanism. Real-time data was the answer even in 2015.
11 September 2015
Automation and 15m jobs lost in the UK …
In 2016, over lunch, Andrew Haldane told a room of accountants that 15 million UK jobs were exposed to automation. I was listening.
4 March 2016