Sequoia just described what we've been building -Michael Cutajar

In 2019 I was sitting in an accounting firm in Malta, manually entering receipts into a spreadsheet for a freelancer who made thirty thousand euros a year.

I had an ACCA qualification. I'd trained at PwC. And I was typing numbers from a photo of a crumpled receipt into a cell, then looking up which VAT box it belonged in.

I remember thinking: I spent years learning how businesses actually work -audit, compliance, financial strategy -and I'm doing data entry. This isn't unique to me. This is what the entire profession does. Smart people, doing stupid work.

Last week, Sequoia Capital published an essay called "Services: The New Software." Their argument is bold and, I think, correct: the next trillion-dollar company will sell work, not tools.

They call these companies "autopilots" -AI systems that do the job, not just help the professional do it faster. Not a better spreadsheet for your accountant. An AI that does the accounting.

They specifically called out the accounting profession. 340,000 accountants gone in the US. 75 percent of CPAs approaching retirement. A profession that's haemorrhaging talent because the work is mostly reconstruction -piecing together what already happened from documents and bank feeds.

I read the essay and thought: we've been building this.

The firm is becoming the software

Accora is an AI accounting firm. Not software for accountants -the firm itself.

A freelancer sends receipts. AI does the books. A certified local accountant reviews the exceptions -the judgement calls that actually require human intelligence. No dashboard to learn. No accounting knowledge required. Just compliant books and a human you can call when you need advice.

I started calling this "the firm is becoming the software" about a year ago. Sequoia calls it the autopilot model. The language is different but the thesis is the same: the work budget is bigger than the tool budget. Stop selling tools. Do the work.

What Sequoia doesn't say

The Sequoia essay is written for founders and VCs. It's about market size and opportunity. What it doesn't explore -because that's not its audience -is what this means for the profession itself.

It means accountants stop being data processors and become reviewers and advisors. The human judgement layer. The best accountants won't serve fifty clients and spend most of their time on data entry. They'll serve five hundred clients and spend their time on the decisions that actually matter -tax planning, business advice, spotting the risks before they become problems.

It means the architecture of the firm changes. No more offices full of juniors doing bookkeeping. No more filing cabinets. No more reconstruction. What remains is the judgement, the client relationship, and the regulatory sign-off. Everything else dissolves into code.

Twenty-eight million Europeans

Here's the number that drives everything we do: there are 28 million self-employed people in Europe. Most of them can't afford a traditional accountant. The software that exists assumes accounting knowledge they don't have. And every country has different rules -different VAT thresholds, different filing deadlines, different tax codes.

Nobody is solving this at scale. Not because it's impossible, but because it requires building the firm as software from the ground up. Country by country. Rule by rule. A deterministic compliance engine wrapped in an AI that learns from every accountant correction.

We've done one country. Twenty-six to go.

I'm writing a book about this. It's called The Firm Is Becoming the Software, and it's about what happens when AI dissolves professional services into infrastructure. What it means for the accountants, the clients, and the billion-euro industry sitting between them.

More soon.