You want AI to make your firm more valuable, not simply more efficient.Our kick-off keynote introduces a practical formula for deciding where AI belongs in your firm, and where it doesn't. Put it to work on volume and process, and give your people more room for the judgment, advice and relationships that clients actually value.You'll see how real firms are applying the approach, and leave with a clear way to test decisions across your firm, so you know whether they're increasing your value or just adding more activity.

The fear about AI is that automating the work means automating yourself out of a job. The opposite is true. A system takes the reactive work, the approval-chasing, the after-the-fact reconciling, the data you compile by hand. What it leaves you is the judgment and the client relationships only you can provide. That's the work that makes you harder to replace, not easier. The catch is that in an ordinary week it's tangled up with everything else, and you can't redirect time you can't see. So this session gives you a way to separate it, sorting each task by whether a system could run it, guide it, or whether it genuinely needs you. Your task here is to audit one real workflow and find where your time is going to work a system could do instead.

The problem with AI in most firms isn't awareness, it's application. The advice tends to stop at "start experimenting," when what you need is a tested use case you could run this month. The capacity for advisory work already exists inside your firm. It's buried in prep, the pulling of financials and surfacing of numbers that happens before every client conversation. Hand that to an AI agent and it does the prep ahead of the call, which frees the people trained to deliver clean books to step into the client-facing work. That's the shift the session is named for, from doer, to reviewer, to advisor. You'll watch one of these agents built live, with Josh Schneider of Multiply Advisors showing how it runs inside his own firm.

Plenty of firms decide to do more advisory and then take whoever comes through the door, which is how you end up busy, underpaid, and pouring your best hours into clients who were never a fit. Richard Francis has built two advisory practices over 30 years, and what he's found is that advisory turns profitable when you get clear on who it’s for, not when you simply stack more services on top. This session is built around your Ideal Client Profile, the specific kind of client your firm is set up to serve well. You can't name that until you're clear on why you're doing advisory in the first place, since those reasons, commercial and personal, are what point you to the right clients. With benchmark data from 1,200 firms behind him, Richard walks you to that profile. You'll leave having defined your own ideal client, and with accountability in place to stop you drifting back to serving everyone.

Cash flow is the thing your clients worry about most, and helping them with it is advisory work, even when it happens informally and off the clock. This session is about turning that into something deliberate, a service you structure, schedule, and charge for. It splits the work into three parts. There's reporting what already happened (the Past) and planning the fix for what's next (the Future), both of which most firms do comfortably. The part that gets skipped is the middle, sitting with a client and asking what's actually driving the pressure right now (the Present). That's where the coaching happens, and it's where the value has been hiding.

Change is hard, and getting other people to change is harder. Moving clients onto better tools, shifting your team toward higher-value work, dropping processes that have outlived their use - the plan is rarely the problem. The problem is that people resist it, because they’re usually more comfortable with what they already know. In this session, Valerie Heckman draws on how technology companies think about product adoption, and applies it to getting your team and your clients on board. Some forces pull people toward a change, others hold them back, and learning to work with both is what makes a change actually take hold.

For most firms, hiring comes down to a good feeling in the room, and a good feeling has never once survived a bad hire. The next person who changes your firm might be across the desk or on the other side of the world, and either way you have the same problem: knowing whether they're any good before you hand them real work. Caleb Johnson and Owen Pittman have run hundreds of interviews and built teams for more than 40 firms, and what they've found is that the firms who keep their people are the ones who hire on a repeatable system: vet, interview, onboard, rather than on instinct.

More advisory means freeing up your senior people, which means pushing their production work down to junior staff. It sounds simple, and yet it's where firms come unstuck, because you can only push work down if there's room below to catch it, and that judgement call usually comes down to a guess. Guess wrong, and the work bounces back up, or falls through the cracks. This workshop replaces the guess with a number, a real measure of what your team's time is worth once you account for what the schedule never shows.