My name's Allie Nolan, and I'm the VP of Customer Operations at Pilot. My go-to explanation of my job is I manage the managers who manage the managers who manage the accountants who handle our client accounts. It gets a laugh, but it's also pretty accurate.
I've been at Pilot for over eight years, starting as an account manager and working my way up to where I am today. I've seen Pilot grow over the years, but this year was unlike any other at Pilot.
Pilot began with the founders learning the ins and outs of bookkeeping. They asked to handle the books for their fellow founder friends and as Waseem did the books, Jessica sat behind him and built software that matched the manual processes.
As they got more customers, they hired a team of accountants and I joined the team. Over the years, the software they used kept getting better and could handle more of the month-end close process. Eventually, it got so good that we realized it could be helpful to other accounting firms too.
That was when Meridian was born. But that also happened to be while I was out on maternity leave.
For me, AI arrived basically overnight.
We started testing it at Pilot while I was out on maternity leave. I left thinking I had a solid read on where the technology stood, but when I came back a few months later suddenly everyone was talking about “agentic bookkeeping.”
As someone who's spent a lot of time cleaning up messy books and training my team to do the same, I was pretty skeptical about AI. I've heard a lot of big promises. I know that you usually need to start scrappy, iterate for a while based on feedback, and then you actually build something that works over months of tweaking.
But once I started using it all my skepticism went away. As someone who went from directly handling accounting and client accounts to management, getting back into the work, using the AI technology, and seeing it for myself was incredibly eye-opening. It felt magical on day one.
Let me give an example of what Meridian can do: In the decade leading up to this year, customers and workflows weren't always a perfect match. Customers found themselves either hopping around looking for a solution that fit their needs, or they had to adapt their internal workflows, like payroll, invoicing, and billing, around the tools available.
The big change with Meridian is that standardization is no longer the only way to get things done. AI can adapt to the exact way our customers want to handle their workflows and present their financials so you no longer have to sacrifice the customer's experience for the sake of internal standardization. People can get exactly what they want and work in the way that feels best for their team. As the person supporting that process, it's a lot more fun and much easier to say “yes” all the time instead of “no.”
Closing the books still requires human judgment
Though I do think AI is pretty magical, AI can't run on its own. It's a tool that our account managers can use, but they still need to know whether or not the output it created is correct. You pay a CPA for their judgment and their willingness to stand behind a certain call. Bookkeeping works the same way.
Even crafting the right prompt is its own skill. It's an area where we're training our team on to ensure they have the training, resources, and confidence to prompt AI productively to get the right results.
Ultimately, using Meridian has shifted how we think about training our team. It's less about teaching someone to write a journal entry that corrects a past mistake, and more about helping our team know what a clean set of financials looks like. That is where the team will operate now because the manual work of producing the financials will be handled by AI.
What this means for the future of accounting
When I took this job, someone told me to read Managing the Professional Services Firm by David Maister. In the first chapter, he lays out the triangle every professional services firm has always had to balance: a great client experience, real career progression for staff, and enough profit to sustain the partners.
What's changing now with AI is that the organization flattens. Growth doesn't have to mean climbing a rigid ladder via pure business development. People get to keep doing the work they're actually good at, the modeling, the advising, the parts of the job that motivated them from the start, and still grow.
I understand why that's disorienting for some people. When your entire firm's playbook runs on billable hours and old staffing and delivery structures, it's fair to ask, “where's my value now?” But the professionals who've spent years building real judgment don't lose that value. It just gets pointed at something bigger.
Five years ago, my time was roughly 70% in the books making sure the numbers were right, and 30% talking to customers about where their business was headed. That ratio is flipping. Now that 70% that used to mean late nights, a fourth cup of coffee, and staring at bank statements trying to make two numbers match is shrinking. My team is slowly starting to spend more of their time helping business owners make real decisions about their finances.
With Meridian, our client gets a better experience, my team does more of what they enjoy, and the firm is seeing better outcomes. It's really a win-win for everyone.