For many CPA firms, the debate over artificial intelligence is colliding with a much older reality: busy season.
Deadlines arrive one after another. Staff work through incomplete source documents, late client responses, extensions and complicated filings. Partners spend their days reviewing work, answering questions and keeping clients moving toward immovable tax deadlines.
In many practices, that pace can consume five or six months of the year, leaving little room to ask a different question: what else does the client need?
That matters more as clients spend on AI, automation and software modernization, while larger accounting firms use technology to reduce the cost of traditional work.
Oakspring Labs founder Val Kharkover believes those forces are converging faster than many regional firms realize.
“The risk is not that regional CPA firms suddenly stop being valuable,” Kharkover said. “The risk is that they spend half the year buried in compliance work while national firms are automating more of that work, moving down-market and building broader relationships with the same kinds of clients. Firms need to become harder to replace before those economics fully change.”
Myron Kharkover, co-founder and head of technology at Oakspring, sees the same shift from the technology side.
“Automation changes who a national firm can serve profitably,” he said. “When document review, research and routine workflow require fewer hours, larger firms can pursue smaller clients while still offering technology and advisory services around them. Regional firms do not need to become software companies, but they do need a more differentiated reason for clients to stay close.”
Busy Season Can Hide a Growth Problem
The immediate problem is not poor client service. Firms are busy precisely because they are trying to meet client obligations.
The problem is what they do not have time to pursue.
A business owner may be struggling with manual reporting, evaluating an AI product or trying to automate a back-office process. Those needs can become advisory opportunities, but they rarely arrive labeled that way.
A tax discussion can reveal an inefficient process. A reconciliation problem can point to weak systems. A headcount complaint can reveal an automation opportunity.
During the months when CPA teams are up to their necks in deadline-driven work, those signals are easy to hear and difficult to act on.
A partner may recognize the issue but have no realistic capacity to diagnose it, develop a proposal, source technical talent and oversee delivery. By the time the pressure lifts, the client may already have gone elsewhere.
That can leave revenue on the table even when the CPA firm owns the relationship that created the opportunity.
The Client Relationship Is the Real Asset
Regional CPA firms have traditionally competed with an advantage that is difficult to reproduce quickly: trust.
A CPA who has advised the same owner for years may understand the business far beyond the financial statements, including where margins are pressured, where cash gets tight and which systems repeatedly cause problems.
Historically, the CPA was often one of the first calls because that relationship already existed. The concern is what happens when technology begins answering more of the first questions.
A business owner who once called an accountant for a quick analysis or reporting question can now ask an AI system first. Complex judgment still requires experience and accountability, but the behavior itself matters.
AI does not have to replace a CPA completely to change the relationship. It only has to remove enough routine interactions that once kept the accountant close to the client.
If clients become accustomed to going first to software, an AI platform or an outside technology provider, the firm can lose visibility into the problems that create future advisory opportunities.
AI Is Changing the Competitive Economics
The pressure is also coming from larger competitors.
National accounting and professional-services firms have spent years investing in technology that makes tax, bookkeeping, research, document review and internal workflow more efficient.
When the labor required to deliver a service falls, a client once considered too small for a national firm can become more attractive. PE-backed and technology-enabled providers can make similar investments.
The regional firm may now be competing with a larger organization that can serve smaller clients economically, an AI-enabled provider with lower delivery costs or software that lets the client handle portions of the work internally.
None of those forces requires AI to become a perfect substitute for an accountant. They only require it to make parts of the relationship easier to unbundle.
For smaller firms, the response is not simply to automate faster. It is also to become stickier: solve a broader range of problems and offer services that are harder to compare on price alone.
The Revenue Opportunity Inside Existing Clients
The same shift that creates pressure also creates opportunity.
Clients are already spending money on AI, automation, cybersecurity, data infrastructure and software modernization. The question is whether those dollars remain connected to the CPA relationship or move entirely to outside providers.
For years, the default answer when a client needed technology help was often a referral. That can be appropriate, but repeated referrals have a consequence. The outside provider learns the business, gets closer to management and becomes involved in technology and strategy.
Eventually, that provider may become the person the client calls first.
Val Kharkover says one lesson from his prior Big Four experience was that technology could do more than improve delivery. It could also help firms identify where existing client relationships could expand.
Kharkover participated in a client-expansion initiative using Salesforce and AI-assisted prioritization. According to Oakspring, it identified significant untapped cross-sell opportunity across existing client relationships.
The important part is where the opportunity came from. The firm already had the relationships. Technology helped surface where they could expand.
That logic may be especially relevant for regional firms whose strongest commercial asset is already sitting in their client list, but whose partners have little time to pursue adjacent needs.
A Partner Model for the Months When Firms Have No Time
Oakspring Labs was founded in 2025 by former Big Four Tax and Advisory professionals around that gap.
Its Oakspring Advisor Partnership is designed for mid-tier, regional and boutique CPA firms that want to add AI and technology advisory capabilities without building a complete technical organization themselves.
The model sits behind the CPA relationship. The accounting firm remains the trusted adviser, while Oakspring can analyze opportunities, support sales, provide AI engineering, implement solutions and handle ongoing technical delivery.
That structure is particularly relevant during busy season. Rather than asking a tax partner to become a technology salesperson or project manager, a specialist team can handle most of the commercial and technical work with limited day-to-day demands on the CPA team.
Successful engagements can create recurring advisory revenue while keeping the CPA firm connected to the client. The objective is not to turn the firm into a software company, but to avoid forcing a choice between serving tax clients and participating in technology spending those clients are already making.
Start With the Business Problem, Not the AI Tool
Companies are also being offered enormous numbers of AI products before they have clearly defined the problem they are trying to solve.
Oakspring says its process starts with operational and economic questions: where is money being lost, which processes create bottlenecks and where could technology increase revenue, reduce cost or create capacity?
Only then does the technology question come next. Sometimes the answer may involve AI. Sometimes a conventional software integration, workflow redesign or better data structure may be more useful.
For the CPA, this kind of conversation is familiar territory because it begins with the economics of the business rather than the novelty of the technology.
AI Is Also Creating a Security Problem
As AI becomes more useful, it generally needs access to more information. Public AI tools, low-code platforms and connected agents are creating new questions around company data, permissions and accountability.
Oakspring has also been expanding the Advisor Partnership toward broader cybersecurity and data-governance capabilities, reflecting the growing overlap between AI adoption and the controls required to use it responsibly.
For CPA firms, that creates another way to remain close to the client rather than referring every technology-related issue away.
The Strategic Question
The most important question may not be whether AI will replace CPAs as a profession. That framing is probably too simple.
A more immediate question is whether regional firms can protect and deepen client relationships while the economics of professional services change around them.
Trust, judgment and knowledge of the client remain substantial advantages. But those advantages are stronger when the firm can connect them to the problems clients are trying to solve now, including technology.
For regional firms, acting quickly does not mean replicating a national organization. It means becoming stickier and capturing opportunities even when partners are fully occupied.
Busy season will not go away. Neither will the deadlines, incomplete documents or demanding clients that consume so much of a CPA firm’s attention.
The strategic question is what happens while everyone is busy.
If clients spend those same months building deeper relationships with AI platforms, national competitors and outside technology advisers, the market may look different by the time the deadlines finally slow down.
