AI Native Dispatch: What "AI-Native" Actually Means

From a working thesis to a product marketing slogan, and back to something useful

When we launched the AI Native Accounting Podcast last June, “AI-native” wasn’t a buzzword. It was a working thesis — a way to describe firms and products being built differently. Not retrofitted, or bolted-on...but rather, organizations and products that were designed with AI intentionally from the start.

Almost a year later, the phrase is everywhere. It’s on product pages, keynote slides, sales decks, and boilerplates. Somewhere along the way, it stopped being a thesis and became a marketing slogan.

A quick note before I continue: I in no way coined “AI-native” in launching the podcast. I first heard it in a CEO roundtable at the beginning of 2025 and the phrase stuck with me. The pattern itself is borrowed as “cloud native” came before it, and “digital native” before that. The earliest formal definition I can find is Ericsson’s 2023 telecom white paper, A detailed study of the AI Native concept, where they describe AI native as “AI implemented as the first thought in the system and not as an afterthought.”

That’s a broad stroke definition, and based on feedback from the community, I think it would be helpful for the accounting and finance profession to try to define it more specifically for our ecosystem. Here’s how we are thinking about it at the Foundation:

An AI-Native firm is structured around automation-first operations, with roles built for strategy and not workflows or processes. Agents handle the routine work like data wrangling, the document review, and recurring reconciliations which collapses overhead and frees staff to do the part of the job that machines can’t: interpret, advise, and exercise judgment. The org chart in an AI-native firm looks different from a traditional practice and the career paths vary as well. I would argue that the economics and billing structures are also wildly different than a traditional firm that is focused on the billable hour, as AI collapses time.

The really strategic firms go even further. They zoom out, take a holistic view of the firm, and rethink their workflows from scratch. They have to, because AI doesn’t just speed up what you do today — it compounds it at an exponential rate. If you bolt agents onto a broken process, then you get a faster broken process.

So that’s a firm…now for solution providers, we define an AI-Native product as built AI-first from the ground up. The workflow, the data model, and the user experience all assume AI is doing much of the work and is not a feature bolted onto an existing UI, but as the core tenant of how the product functions. The product isn’t “powered by AI.” The product is AI doing the job, with the human in a directing role.

Both definitions matter, and they matter together, because an AI-native firm implementing bolted-on tools is going to plateau faster than it expects. This is the frame we’ll keep coming back to in this Dispatch and on the Podcast. If “AI-native” is going to remain a useful label, and not just shelf-talk, practitioners and buyers need a way to test products and firms against the definition.

If you’ve seen either done well (or done poorly) I’d love to hear about it. Comment on Substack or send us a note.

—Kacee Johnson, Executive Director

New Episode Drop!

I sat down with Allan Koltin, CEO of Koltin Consulting Group, and arguably the most influential M&A advisor in the accounting profession. Accounting Today has named him one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in the profession for 26 consecutive years, and he’s been ranked in the Top 10 for the past seven.

This conversation gets at something much bigger than M&A though. It’s about how firms must evolve from service providers to value creators in a landscape that’s changing faster than most leaders are willing to admit. On the latest episode of the AI Native Accounting Podcast, we dive into:

• The PE wave reshaping the Top 100, and what it means for the rest of the market

• Why the billable-hour leverage model is on borrowed time

• Allan’s bold predictions for the profession in 2030

• His breakdown of the gap between top-tier, mid-tier and lower-tier firms

You can stream the full episode on your favorite podcast platform and CPE is available via Earmark. Here’s a link to the full episode on YouTube.

Welcome to Our Newest Sponsor: Black Ore

The work of the Foundation is made possible by organizations that believe the profession needs independent education, research, and responsible AI implementation. Our sponsors are not just technology providers, they’re partners in advancing how the profession learns and adopts AI. They support the Foundation’s mission and the initiatives that we are driving.

We’re grateful to Black Ore, an AI platform for financial services, for joining the ecosystem and standing behind our mission. Its flagship product, Tax Autopilot, automates end-to-end tax preparation for CPA and accounting firms, combining proprietary domain-specific AI with comprehensive federal and state tax code coverage.

To learn more about all of the partners supporting the Foundation’s mission, visit our Ecosystem page.

Got a question or topic suggestion? Comment on Substack or connect with us on LinkedIn!