AI and the Future of Offshored Accounting: A CEO Perspective

Why the next generation of global delivery will combine human judgment, digital capacity, and disciplined governance.

By: Greg Maslov & Dario Grassini, CEO, SAPRO, with contributions from SAPRO leadership

For years, offshoring has helped accounting firms address a familiar constraint: there is more work to be done than qualified people available to do it. Artificial intelligence is now changing that equation, but not in the way many assume.

The common question is whether firms will still need offshore talent once AI can complete more of the work. The more important question is how firms should combine people and AI to create greater capacity, stronger controls, and better client outcomes.

Our view is that the future is not AI or people. It is an integrated workforce in which professionals lead teams of human and digital contributors. AI will perform more routine execution. People will design the work, direct the systems, review exceptions, exercise judgment, and remain accountable for the outcome.

AI will accelerate work, and expand what firms can pursue

The first order effect of AI is speed. A process that once required hours of research, data entry, or reconciliation may be completed in minutes by several specialized agents working together. The second order effect is more significant: when firms can produce work faster, they can pursue opportunities that were previously out of reach.

Greater capacity can support more timely client communication, additional advisory conversations, faster turnaround, and new services. It can also expose a new constraint. Someone must assess the opportunity, engage the client, review the work, resolve exceptions, and make the final decision. In other words, AI can reduce the need for some repetitive tasks while increasing the need for professionals who can manage greater volume and complexity.

That is why we do not see AI as the end of workforce strategy. We see it as the beginning of a more sophisticated one.

The human role is moving from execution to orchestration

As routine work becomes increasingly automated, a larger share of professional value will come from orchestration. This does not mean that every accountant becomes a traditional people manager. It means that more professionals will manage workflows, digital agents, controls, exceptions, and client outcomes.

The skills that matter will shift accordingly. Process understanding, technical judgment, critical review, communication, commercial awareness, and the ability to instruct and supervise AI will become more important. Professionals will need to know what good work looks like, where the risks sit, and when a human decision is required.

This is a meaningful talent challenge. Firms cannot simply automate the lower levels of work and assume the next generation will develop judgment on its own. They will need to redesign training so people can build technical depth while learning to direct increasingly digital workflows.

Offshore teams will move further up the value chain

The same shift applies to offshoring. Historically, many offshore models were built around transferring defined, repeatable tasks to lower cost talent. That model will not disappear immediately, but it will become less differentiated.

The offshore team of the future will be expected to do more than process the work. It will help document and improve processes, identify automation opportunities, implement digital workflows, monitor performance, manage exceptions, and maintain the systems over time.

This changes the relationship between firms and their offshore partners. The conversation moves from, how many people can you provide, to, how can you help us redesign and deliver this outcome? The strongest partners will bring talent, technology, operating discipline, and change management together.

This is particularly relevant for midmarket firms. Many cannot build large internal transformation teams, yet they face the same pressure to modernize as the largest firms. Access to global professionals who understand accounting workflows and can manage AI enabled delivery may become even more important, not less.

Governance will become a permanent operating capability

The adoption of AI creates a new management responsibility. Every agent needs a defined purpose, approved data access, clear boundaries, review standards, and an accountable owner. Its output must be monitored, and the process must adapt as regulations, client requirements, systems, and business priorities change.

Firms will also need to manage the full lifecycle of their digital workforce. It is easy to launch a new tool or agent. It is harder to keep it accurate, secure, relevant, and integrated. Over time, organizations may accumulate agents that continue to run even after the process has changed. Those agents still consume resources and may introduce risk.

Disciplined firms will therefore maintain an inventory of digital agents, test their performance, assign ownership, update them when requirements change, and retire them when they are no longer needed. Human oversight is not a temporary bridge until the technology improves. It is part of the future operating model.

The economics must move from hours to output

AI also challenges the profession to reconsider how productivity is measured. The relevant question is not whether an AI agent is expensive or inexpensive in isolation. The question is what it enables the firm to produce, at what level of quality, speed, risk, and total cost.

Leaders should evaluate work output per professional, turnaround time, error and rework rates, capacity released, client responsiveness, and revenue enabled. These measures provide a clearer view of value than hours removed alone.

This does not make pricing or margin management simpler. Technology requires investment, and competition may place pressure on fees. It does, however, create an opportunity to build commercial models around outcomes and expertise rather than treating time as the only reliable unit of value.

A practical path forward

Firms do not need to redesign the entire enterprise at once. They should begin with a specific workflow where the volume, pain points, handoffs, and risks are understood. Document the current process. Remove unnecessary steps. Decide which activities should be automated, which should be augmented, and which must remain human. Define the controls before scaling.

Most importantly, involve the people who perform and review the work. They understand the exceptions, client expectations, and hidden dependencies that a process map often misses. Their experience is essential to building a model that works in practice.

The firms that succeed will not be those that adopt the most AI. They will be those that redesign work thoughtfully and build a workforce capable of managing it. That workforce will be more global, more digitally enabled, and more focused on judgment and client value.

The future of offshored accounting is therefore not a larger version of the past. It is a new delivery model, one in which global talent and AI operate together to create capacity, strengthen execution, and help firms grow.

Five questions for firm leaders

1. Which parts of our work should be automated, which should be augmented, and which require human judgment?
2. Who is accountable for the output of each AI enabled workflow, including exceptions, controls, maintenance, and retirement?
3. Are we using offshore talent primarily for task capacity, or are we developing a partner that can help improve and transform the work?
4. How will we measure the economics of AI through output, quality, speed, capacity, and client value rather than hours alone?
5. What skills must our people build during the next two years to manage human and digital teams effectively?