And also, the incentive problem: a vendor sitting on top of encoded expertise of hundreds of accounting firms has something way more valuable than the SaaS subscription revenue itself. They have the aggregate knowledge to do the work itself and cut off the middleman.
And just this morning, something about this came into my radar. The opening paragraph:
Every founder building an AI tool is asking the same question: what happens when the next version of Claude makes my product a feature? They’re right to worry. If you sell the tool, you’re in a race against the model. But if you sell the work, every improvement in the model makes your service faster, cheaper, and harder to compete with. A company might spend $10K a year for QuickBooks and $120K on an accountant to close the books. The next legendary company will just close the books.