Here’s what we think junior accountants should do in the age of AI. 👇 For decades, junior accountants developed their skills by doing the work. Building schedules, preparing workpapers, reconciling accounts and working through client data wasn’t always exciting, but it built understanding. Now, AI can increasingly do parts of that work for us. This isn’t the first time new technology has changed accounting, and it won’t be the last. AI is ultimately a tool, not a replacement. The responsibility now is learning how to use these tools while still developing the knowledge and judgment required to evaluate their output. So, if we were junior accountants in 2026, here are four things we’d be doing: 👉 1. Learn the tools before you need them. Be curious. Experiment with AI and emerging accounting technology. Understand what can be automated, where tools save time and where they can go wrong. 👉 2. Don’t become a “human proxy.” If AI produces something and your contribution is simply copying, pasting and sending it on, you’re not developing much expertise. Understand the output, challenge it and know enough to spot when it’s wrong. 👉 3. Understand where your value is shifting. Your value is becoming less about manually putting together a schedule and more about understanding how it was compiled, validating the underlying information, confirming assumptions and applying professional judgment. 👉 4. Do it manually the first time. There is still enormous value in doing the work manually. The first time you build a workpaper, schedule or reconciliation, do it yourself. Understand the mechanics before you automate them. We see the same principle in crypto. You can use custodians and wallet providers without ever touching the underlying infrastructure, but one of the best ways to understand how blockchain transactions actually work is to create a wallet and execute a transaction yourself. Sometimes you need to do something manually before you can intelligently automate it. AI is shifting where value sits across professional services. For junior accountants, the opportunity isn’t to compete with AI on the tasks it can do faster. It’s to become exceptionally good at understanding, validating and applying judgment to the work it produces. And that could ultimately help us develop better accountants, not fewer of them. @JeremyNauCPA @BTCmePLZ @TripleEntryCPA @ClaytonLowery #TheNetworkFirm #Accounting #AI #FutureOfAccounting #PublicAccounting