Forward Deployed Accountants

AI-native accounting firms need a new kind of employee: part accountant, part builder.

What's a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)?

This idea for Forward Deployed Accountants came from the rise of forward deployed engineers, popularised by Palantir. FDEs are technical team members who are embedded within a customer in order to solve their specific problems directly.

This flips the previous approach to software development which saw an engineering team build a single capability for many customers. FDEs are building many capabilities for a single customer - pre-AI this would only make economic sense when the contract sizes were enormous. Embedding builders directly in the workflow means they can't hide behind abstractions. They see the messy reality firsthand, which leads to faster and better solutions.

Max Junestrand, CEO @ Legora (the legal AI startup) was explaining a related idea on the latest Uncapped podcast with Jack Altman last week - they actually hire Forward Deployed Lawyers. As AI coding tools reduce the cost and complexity of building software, the bottleneck shifts away from pure engineering capacity and toward proximity to the problem.

However, there's still a gap today between frontier AI models and messy workflows.

What's a Forward Deployed Accountant?

A Forward Deployed Accountant sits at the boundary of delivery and product: close enough to the client work to spot friction, empowered enough to spin up tools or workflows to resolve issues.

Legora is a software company yet the concept still applies to accounting firms like Flare where we're our own customer - we build software for internal accountants' workflows.

So we're not deploying engineers into our clients, rather we can equip our accountants with the latest coding agents and tooling in order to handle non-standardised tasks at the same level of efficiency as more predictable workflows which are increasingly handled by an internal agent.

In our experience running Flare, accounting is never identical between companies. Different operators have different preferences on how they want to see and action financial data. This can lead to one-off client work which doesn't scale to other clients. In the old model, it rarely made sense to pull engineering into one-off client problems. Now, as the marginal cost of building software collapses, it makes more sense to equip the people closest to the work with tools to solve those problems themselves.

For example, at Flare we often see bespoke client requests for quarterly investor reporting which happen in messy spreadsheets maintained by the client. It's easy to see how custom tools built by the account manager to automate updates would help.

Not only is this now feasible economically, it's an entirely better workflow.

The accountant has all the context of the client and their finances which previously would have had to have been explained to an engineer so they could then translate the requirements into code (I've been there and it's a frustrating process for everyone!).

Overall, this leads to accountants moving faster with higher quality output for clients.

How do you hire for this new role?

Max from Legora mentioned he was hiring tech savvy lawyers but I don't even think we need the tech savvy part. As long as they're curious and willing to pick up new tools then there's potential. That's particularly true when coding and building these tools is as easy as messaging a coworker on Slack.

By definition this means identifying talent based on their slope rather than their y-intercept.

Hiring for trajectory over polish: curiosity, systems thinking, and willingness to learn new tools matter more than whether someone already looks like a 'technical accountant' on their CV.

One step further: roll-ups

One variation on this role I think about is how it applies to rolling up other accounting firms. Driving change and adoption is the ultimate test of whether these roll-ups will work, so you could see how Forward Deployed Accountants into portfolio firms become the transformation layer and critical ingredient to driving margin.

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TL;DR: AI native accounting firms won't split accountants from builders. They'll merge them.