Mathias Celis

Eighty percent of audit and tax professionals worked more than 51 hours a week during the 2024/25 busy season. Firms blame volume. The 2025 data from Financial Cents, Inside Public Accounting, and Microsoft points to a different culprit: the chasing, the threads, the Excel request lists.

Inbox zero was never about how many emails sit in your inbox. It was about how much of your brain sits in there. Here is what the psychology research from Merlin Mann, Bluma Zeigarnik, Gloria Mark, and the Microsoft Work Trend Index actually says, and why senior professionals feel more anxious after archiving the last email, not less.

Two days, one fake pharmacy, and the hardest hire on earth is no longer who you think it is. AI skills just topped the global talent shortage for the first time in history. 52% of insurance leaders say client communication will decide who wins in 2026. This Signal unpacks what those shifts mean, plus the behind-the-scenes of how we showed our new product to the world at Accountex 2026.

Senior professionals in accounting, audit, M&A, and broking lose nearly a quarter of their week to email. McKinsey puts it at 11 hours. Microsoft puts the interruption count at 275 a day. Here is what the 2025 and 2026 data actually shows, and what to do about it.

87% of professional services firms are adding AI agents. Only 12% trust their own data, and 89% still verify every AI output by hand. New Kantata and HBR research shows why automation on top of unstructured external collaboration creates more work, not less, and what firms need to fix first.

PwC is cutting US entry-level hiring by a third. EY just deployed AI agents to 130,000 auditors and kept headcount flat. Two Big 4 firms, two opposite bets on what AI agents mean for people. Here's what the MIT research actually says about which approach works.

One big move from PwC, one quiet move from us. 73% of clients now expect real-time visibility into project status, while 89% of services leaders still manually verify AI outputs before sharing them. This Signal unpacks PwC's launch of PwC One, what mid-market firms should take from it, and a stat that might make you rethink how your team works with AI.

Same choice, different emphasis, yet decisions flipped based on what had a number attached. This bias isn’t just about hotels. It affects every decision we make, including how we choose audit software. Now, think about how this plays out in audit software selection.