The journey of Pilot is a very personal one for me and my co-founders. It was about solving pain we had in our previous ventures. With a company of any kind, a tech company, a coffee shop, a doctor's office, you start the business because there's something you want to do in the world. What you inevitably find, in the process of creating a thing or delivering a service, is that there's all this back office work you have to do to have the business exist.
That work is important. It's really, really important, but it's not why you started the business, and it's not your area of expertise. We struggled with this ourselves in our previous companies, and one of the particular hot spots for us was the accounting, the tax prep, the financial back office. So when we started this company almost a decade ago, we said, there's got to be a better way. Can we make a better experience for entrepreneurs and business owners everywhere?
The key idea was this: there's a huge chunk of the work an accounting firm does that really wants to be done by the computer. The computer can do it more reliably, more consistently, more efficiently, and more accurately. And yet that work is done very manually everywhere today. So we said, we think we can do something about this. We can bring software to bear on this problem and make keeping a company's books up to date much more accurate, much more reliable, and much more seamless.
From cruise control to self-driving
The key thesis of Pilot when we started the company in 2017 was that the computer could do a ton of heavy lifting in supporting our accountants with the monthly close, and more generally with the financial back office. As we envisioned it then, the work fell into two buckets. There were portions the computer could truly do end to end on its own, where it would just do the step and you wouldn't have to worry about it. And there were parts where the computer would essentially be your assistant: tools you'd use to do the work more accurately, more reliably, more consistently, and faster.
Like most things, Meridian is not an overnight development. It's built on nearly a decade of slow and steady work here at Pilot. In the early days, we were building tools for our own accountants: tools that either fully do parts of the close or, in the hands of a talented accountant, let the accountant work dramatically more efficiently and dramatically more accurately. If you like, it's the Iron Man suit for the accountant. You strap in, you get superpowers, and you're much more effective than the unaided accountant.
One of the interesting developments, really within the past year or 18 months, is that advances in LLMs have let us get the work from, let's say, 90% done by the computer to truly 100% done by the computer for some of Pilot's clients. That difference between 90% and 100% is huge. What we had before was a car with cruise control and lane following. It helps you drive in a lot of cases. But you're expected to intervene. You have to have your hands on the wheel. It demands your attention. What we have now is essentially Waymo. You get in. It's self-driving. It's autonomous. You can focus on the higher-impact, higher-leverage activities, because the core accounting work is done by the system end to end.
Nobody asks for more accounting software
Meridian is the AI operating system for accounting firms. If you're a firm owner, or an accountant who works in an accounting firm, the highest-leverage thing you can do is make the end client successful: engaging with them about their financials, the trajectory of the business, who they can afford to hire, what investments they can afford to make. If we can take the foundational work that enables that off your plate, that empowers you to do it. If we can do the reconciliations, the categorizations, the month-end close, if we can give you super solid books you have high confidence in, you and the client can spend time on the things that actually make the business more successful.
I've never talked to a business owner or an accountant who said, you know what I really want? More accounting software. What the accounting firm owner wants is for the work to be done, so they can focus on the things that work enables. So rather than saying we'll speed up your close by 20%, or we built some workflow tools that will make you marginally more efficient, we felt it was much, much more powerful to say: the work is complete, you're welcome to review it, and now you can go do actionable things based on it.
The proof is in the pudding
The challenge with AI in accounting is that everyone has been excited about it. And the problem with everyone being excited about it is that there's been a lot of snake oil. Over the past decade, companies have said, we have software that does the close, or we have AI that does X, Y, and Z. When you dig into what they've actually built, maybe it's a workflow coordination tool. Maybe it saves you 10% on a limited set of tasks.
What we're excited about with Meridian is an AI operating system that actually does the close, fully, end to end. And you don't have to take our word for it. The proof is in the pudding. At Pilot, we're doing this ourselves, today, for thousands and thousands of clients every month.
Battle-tested in our own firm
Meridian comes out of Pilot, which is simultaneously an accounting firm and a technology startup. Our engineers and our accountants sit side by side. In fact, we make the engineers help the accountants out with the close, so they very viscerally understand the problem to be solved. So when we give you Meridian, we're giving you the same technology our own accountants at Pilot have battle-tested every month across thousands of clients. We've seen what it can do for our firm, and we're excited to see what it can do for yours.
One of the things I really like about the system we built, and it's an example of how you know it's really working, is that as a founder of this company, even in my nights and weekends time, I'm able to support 100 of our clients. That's because the core month-end close is done by the system. I manage the customer correspondence, but it's an amount of leverage you could not get from any other system on the market today.
We always knew we were building something special. Even pre-LLM, our own estimates were that our software made our internal accountants five times more efficient than the unaided accountant. We thought that was interesting, but the real unlock, the thing that makes now the time to bring this to other accounting firms, is that LLMs have gotten good enough that LLMs plus Pilot's tools enable the full automation of the close. What that means for our firm and for yours is that you're no longer supply constrained. Over the years, we had a ton of demand knocking on our door at Pilot, and we couldn't hire talented accountants fast enough to meet it. What we're really excited about is that that problem doesn't exist anymore.
The firm of the future
If you're an accounting firm owner today, I think very reasonably you have a lot of fear about what the future might look like. On one hand, there are accounting staffing shortages across the U.S. Fewer and fewer people want to become accountants, and the labor pool is very limited, so you're concerned about your ability to serve your clients. On the other hand, you hear all these mumblings about AI changing the workforce for everyone. You have an opportunity for this to benefit the firm, or the fear that it will set your firm back.
The real opportunity of Meridian is to say: you're an accounting firm, and this is how you put yourself on a path to being the firm of the future, the AI-enabled accounting firm. For you personally, it lets you work very closely with clients on the things that will make their businesses more successful, which ultimately translates into stronger client relationships and better outcomes for the firm.
The firm of the future is focused on business outcomes for the client. Yes, of course, the firm of the future does accounting. The firm of the future does tax preparation. But more importantly, the firm of the future is a real thought partner, a trusted partner to the business owner in helping make their business more successful.
If you'd like to see what Meridian can do for your firm, schedule a call with the team.