This week, I spoke with Isaac Heller, the Founder and President of Trullion, an AI-powered accounting platform that automates financial workflows for accounting and audit teams.
It’s a sector long-viewed as conservative and slow-moving, but one that is increasingly vulnerable to disruption. The stakes are high, not just for young professionals entering the workforce, but also for the legacy firms that have dominated the accounting industry for decades and may assume their scale makes them untouchable to change.
Institutional firms like KPMG, PwC, Deloitte, and EY still loom over city skylines - but history offers a cautionary tale: dominance has a shelf life.
“If you drive down the highway in Tel Aviv on the Ayalon, or you’re sitting in Times Square and you look up, the biggest buildings have EY, PWC, or Deloitte, right at the top of the pearly white tower. These are massive companies that are critical to the financial ecosystem,” Heller explained.
Then he drew a comparison that cut close to home. “When I grew up in America, there were four dominant TV channels: Fox, NBC, ABC, and CBS. Then something called Netflix came along,” he said. “Now Netflix dominates.”
The lesson, Heller argues, isn’t that incumbents inevitably lose. But we can see how disruption doesn’t discriminate in who it dethrones. The accounting sector, he believes, is entering a similar moment. AI could either become the Netflix of the industry, or these companies will integrate this technology to keep their names on the tower.
Trullion has raised almost $34 million in funding from investors that include Stepstone Group, Aleph, Third Point Ventures, and Greycroft. The company was also voted as one of Calcalist’s Most Promising Startups in 2024.
The conversation then turned to young people and how AI adoption will transform these sectors and career opportunities. According to Heller, success will always rely on having a deep, foundational understanding of technology, culture, and business.
“If you’re entering into law, accounting, or engineering, there may be some cynicism about trying to learn some of the basic tasks that those industries are founded on,” he said. “However, if you learn and focus on those tasks before you get to the AI-powered stuff, you can actually be more powerful long-term.”
Those who work with AI tools will be at an advantage when faced with the problem of when those technologies ultimately fail. “When you work with AI tools in the industry, and they don’t work, which happens one to five percent of the time, you actually have to go back and fix the code, right? You have to keep going deeper to understand why it didn’t execute. So if you don’t know the fundamentals, you’re only going to be stuck on the shallow layer in accounting.”
In other words, AI won’t replace expertise. But it will expose who actually has it.
