Navigating Complexity
This article was originally published in CPA Alberta‘s digital dividends magazine on October 16, 2027
By Jay Kiew, Innovation and Change Navigation Strategist
There are four distinct change mindsets every executive, business leader, and people manager should understand:
Defender (threat-focused, resistant): Defenders see transformation and change initiatives as attacks on their established systems. These are the leaders who champion sayings like “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Observer (opportunity-focused, resistant): Observers recognize innovation opportunities but remain stuck in their regular ways of working. They’re waiting for other companies to prove concepts work before committing.
Saboteur/Salvager (threat-focused, adaptive): Saboteurs/salvagers appear supportive but actively undermine innovation efforts. They’re adaptive in their resistance, finding creative ways to derail innovative initiatives while maintaining plausible deniability.
Fluent (opportunity-focused, adaptive): Fluent individuals are the change management champions and innovation leaders. They assume every disruption contains opportunity. Rather than asking “Why us?” they ask, “Why not us?”
The challenge is to identify your current mindset and figure out how to get to that fluent state.
Three core habits I’ve found that help move individuals into the fluent state are to: discover what’s possible (strategic foresight), design the future (design thinking), and differentiate from the standard (applied innovation).
To discover what’s possible
We can practice strategic foresight by applying it to a problem that accounting professionals ask often: where is AI actually useful today? The most credible use cases are the ones that combine high volume, repetition, and clear rules.
AI is typically most useful when it speeds up the first pass while a professional still does a follow up and owns the conclusion. The numbers back that up: Advisory work (44%) and tax planning (40%) top the list of AI applications, with compliance research and drafting close behind.
That is strategic foresight in practice: professionals using AI to see further and faster into what a file actually needs before they commit hours to it.
To design the future
When I think about applying design thinking to finance, I consider how we might take a workflow apart and rebuild it around where AI can safely carry the load.
Document intake and information consolidation are strong starting points because they are repetitive and relatively low risk: sorting files, extracting details, and organizing information for review. Close and forecasting are also advancing. OpenAI’s own finance team recently detailed how they reconcile data across systems, separate one-time noise from real performance, and refresh forecasts without breaking formulas (OpenAI, 2026).
To differentiate from the standard
The most impressive use case for applying AI innovation in accounting would have to be inside the spreadsheet itself. AI tools, such as Microsoft Copilot and Claude, can support core finance workflows, such as closing the books, building models, refreshing reports, and conducting variance analysis, all while emphasizing trusted data and traceable calculations.
You can even build dashboards or customized macros directly in your workbooks. These tools are no longer just chatbots.
Where to start
It’s easy to get caught up with shiny things. Picking one repetitive, low-risk workflow, document intake, tax research, or spreadsheet process is a better first experiment than handing AI a client-ready deliverable.
Define the review step with the human in the loop, protect sensitive data, and measure time saved and quality improved. Our goal should not be to “use AI,” but rather to redesign work responsibly.
Sources
CPA.com & Blue J. (2026). Blue J and CPA.com Survey Finds AI Adoption Among Tax Firms Has Nearly Doubled in One Year. https://www.cpa.com/news/blue-j-and-cpacom-survey-finds-ai-adoption-among-tax-firms-has-nearly-doubled-one-year
OpenAI. (2026). OpenAI on OpenAI: How Our Finance Team Uses ChatGPT Work.
https://webinar.openai.com/on-demand/cd89f13d-bd97-4b96-9261-818ffdcd2fc0
Microsoft 365 Blog. (2026). Copilot in Excel: Built for the Era of Frontier Finance.
Anthropic. (2026). Claude for Financial Services.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-for-financial-services
CPA Canada. AI and Automation for CPAs.
