The CEO of the unicorn AI accounting startup, Rillet, says AI is changing who consulting firms hire

For years, upgrading the software companies use for bookkeeping consumed a consultant's entire job.

"It's no fun being a consultant implementing your third instance of Oracle Fusion and having three years of your life basically go by in a blink of an eye because you're transforming Excel spreadsheets and trying to wrangle a very old system," Nicolas Kopp, CEO of AI-native accounting startup Rillet, told Business Insider.

Oracle Fusion is a suite of cloud software that large companies use to manage their finances and operations. Setting up systems like this can take years of consulting work. Rillet is betting AI can make that process faster by keeping a company's books up to date as transactions come in.

Its "objective function" is simple, Kopp said: "To reduce the time spent that humans go around clicking buttons in applications."

Rillet's growth also offers a glimpse of how AI could reshape consulting talent. As the software takes on more routine accounting work, firms are looking for people with deeper domain knowledge and the technical skills to work with AI and large data sets.

Rillet is part of a new crop of startups, including Light, Campfire, and DualEntry, using AI and automation to pry finance teams away from decades-old ERP systems, the software companies use to manage their finances, human resources, and much more.

The company, which emerged from stealth two years ago, said last week that it raised a $100 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation. It has also raised $200 million across three rounds in the past year and doubled new annual recurring revenue last quarter.

The company now serves more than 600 public and private customers, including Mercor, Neuralink, Temporal, and Skild AI, and says 40% of its customer base is outside tech and AI in sectors like healthcare, financial services, retail, and biotech. It has captured half of its customers from legacy ERP systems, including NetSuite, Workday, Oracle Fusion, and Sage Intacct, while the other half comes from Intuit, according to the company.

AI-native startups like Rillet are turning the monthly ritual of closing the books into something similar to a normal workday.

Take a smarter break in your day - and see how far you get.

In an Andreessen Horowitz analysis of 56 Rillet customers, 87% had fewer than 1% of their bookkeeping entries left to review when the end of the month rolled around.

The shift is part of a broader shake-up taking place across enterprise software. Investors have dubbed the recent sell-off in traditional software companies the "SaaSpocalypse," as advances in AI raise questions about whether businesses will continue paying for large numbers of software seats or whether newer AI-native products can replace them.

Kopp said he expects the way companies buy software to change. Charging customers based largely on how many employees use a product, he said, is likely to become "a thing of the past" as more work is performed by AI agents rather than people clicking through software themselves.

If AI changes how enterprise software is used, then it also changes the kinds of workers consulting firms need to deploy and manage it.

In April, Rillet announced a "corporate development alliance" with EY. It now also works with several consulting firms, including RSM and KPMG, Kopp said.

In the near term, he believes the biggest opportunity for consulting firms is in "change management and implementation." The longer-term opportunity is to turn their decades of accumulated accounting expertise into "skill files, repositories, agents" that can be layered onto AI systems like Rillet.

"I think building agents is a huge opportunity," Kopp said. He added that Rillet is already helping a consulting firm build analytics and reporting agents for forecasting dashboards, as well as tools for controls and risk monitoring that make it easier to review large data sets rather than relying on manual testing.

That shift is changing the human talent they need, especially as the accounting profession continues to grapple with a yearslong talent shortage.

"Number one, the bar is going up," Kopp said. "AI is a great leveler of information. So you need very highly skilled accountants and accounting professionals at these firms. Otherwise, the AI can kind of do your job." Kopp also believes that "generalist" entry-level work will increasingly be absorbed by AI in the coming two to three years and create more demand for domain-specific experts.

At the same time, there's a new class of workers who are tech-savvy, innovative, and eager to experiment with AI — the kind Silicon Valley calls "forward-deployed engineers." They are essentially tasked with working directly with customers to help put AI tools to use. Job postings for the role were up more than 5,000% year over year in April, according to data from Indeed.

Kopp expects demand to keep rising for these types of workers, especially those who can handle large data sets, work with AI, and build agents as consulting firms take on more transformation projects. That's already consistent with a broader shift in the industry: Consulting firms are hiring more technical specialists as AI automates more traditional junior work.

He also sees the AI shift as a recruiting tool in its own right.

"There's a new wave coming. It's worth your time to go into consulting," he said. "They use this a little bit as a lighthouse, I think, for the younger generation, the people that are more tech forward, to come join their firms."