The headline everyone shared was OpenAI buying accounting firms. It has not. OpenAI took an equity position in Thrive Holdings back in December, Thrive owns Current, the roll-up formerly called Crete Professionals Alliance, and OpenAI engineers go into those firms in exchange for more equity and access to the data. Alastair breaks the structure down and lands on how circular it is. What matters more than the deal is the taxonomy forming around it, with roll-ups buying legacy firms, platforms buying and re-tooling them, and AI-native challengers like Amsterdam's Neno starting from nothing.
Then the other end of the telescope. An accountant proofread a set of accounts produced in Xero Tax and posted what he found, including the wrong directors on the cover page and an inappropriate section 444 disclosure, in the same week Xerocon Denver was selling agentic workflows. Eriona is an advocate for AI in accounting and still lands on the obvious point, that an assistant saving you twenty minutes is worth nothing if you spend twenty minutes checking its output. John then admits Xero Tax double-counted the corporation tax on his own company, and blames his own chart of accounts rather than the software.
On the compliance side, Active have released accounts production, taking a firm from trial balance to a filed set of accounts inside one platform, with Companies House filing built in. John has been tracking it for the best part of a year and reads it as Active going at Silverfin directly. Workiro released Workflows in the same week, which routes every step of a job to the right person with an AI summary at each hand-off, and Eriona asks the fair question of why a practice management system cannot already do that.
The episode ends on Sodium and TaxCalc arguing publicly about an encrypted form, and underneath it a bigger question about who owns accounting data. Alastair's answer is the strongest few minutes on the pod. A vendor making it hard to move your clients' data has not built a moat, it has built friction, and the decision to use your own historic client data sits between you and your client.
Also covered: OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar's target of a zero-day close, and why John thinks the phrase is too ambiguous to mean anything. Prosaic, an AI-native cash-based ledger out of New Zealand now past fifty firms. The Xero Global App Awards, won globally by Gojee and Ignition, with ApprovalMax taking the UK and SuiteFiles the US practice award. Updates to Xero's Auto Bank Reconciliation and what "confident" is actually doing in that sentence. WorkGuru's rebuilt workflows. And Repodo in Copenhagen raising the largest pre-seed Denmark has recorded to launch an AI-native audit firm.
00:00 Intro
04:42 The zero-day close
14:25 Prosaic rethinks the ledger
26:27 Xero App Awards 2026
37:56 Somebody proofread Xero Tax
44:42 How JAX decides
54:51 Workiro releases Workflows
57:22 Trial balance to Companies House
1:00:54 OpenAI has not bought a firm
1:13:31 Who owns the data
1:23:47 Outro