Basis offers AI agents, love letters and an ode to accounting
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Administrative Matters
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Basis co-founder and CEO Matt Harpe said Accounting Today about how his billion-dollar business has honored the accounting profession by naming conference rooms in its New York offices after accounting and finance pioneers like Luca Pacioli and Alexander Hamilton while
“There’s a lot of talk out there about AI, and people are really excited, and I think rightly so,” Harpe said. His company provides AI technology for accounting, tax and auditing, and estimates that its technology is used by about 40% of the top 25 companies in the United States, and more than 25% of the top 150 companies. Earlier this month, Sikich, a Chicago-based Big 50 company,
“To our knowledge, we are the most deployed AI platform among accounting firms,” Harpe said. “The way we do it is we try to connect with amazing mathematicians and some of the most powerful researchers and engineers in New York.”
Companies use it in their accounting, tax and research activities. “For all of these companies, they use it extensively in at least one of their areas of operation,” he said. “We have not been in all the work areas for all these companies. The general approach we take is that we want to collaborate with them to help them become more of an AI culture. We really work with companies that are deploying across the entire project. It is not something where one person or 10 people can use it. For all those work areas, we think of Basis being really in this area of AI strategy.”
New York AI
The company has all of its 120 employees working in its New York offices, where it competes with AI giants such as OpenAI and Anthropic for intelligence.
“Our goal is to be the home of AI in New York,” Harpe said. “There are many engineers and researchers in New York. We are lucky that many of them have chosen Basis. They want to work on the limits of the challenge in AI, not building a chatbot or just bolting something on an existing product, but actually figuring out how we can build more sophisticated agentic systems that are actually accurate enough to be used in the real production of partflows. They want to contribute to other projects. It’s interesting that these agents are doing real things and it’s not just something that people are asking stupid questions on the side.
All of Basis’ R&D efforts take place in New York, not in Silicon Valley like many AI companies. “We’re certainly not the size of OpenAI or Anthropic from a perspective, so there’s an opportunity for people to take real responsibility in building these systems, as opposed to being one of many,” Harpe said. “This is interesting from that perspective.”
Unlike those AI giants, his company focuses on the accounting profession. “Our goal is to figure out how we can make AI as capable and accurate as possible to calculate as much as possible, and if you do that, it will end up being useful,” Harpe said.
Making AI reliable enough for accounting
He believes AI can reliably automate tasks for accountants. “Our goal is really to give every accountant in the company this AI that can go out and take a bunch of the most parts of their work and report back to them and complete those things on an ongoing basis,” Harpe said. “I think we have a strong track record of real driving results. AI can be trusted because it is comprehensive and capable of handling these complex tasks with a high level of accuracy.”
Generative AI giants have been accused of “hallucination,” generating deceptively similar information from the vast amounts of information they pilfer from the internet and social media. Harpe believes that the products are getting better now.
He added, “Actually, I think the trust aspect is very important in accounting.” “Accounting is all about trust. This is a big part of what the profession is dedicated to doing. You want to plan and organize all the economic activities that take place in and around these organizations, and then you know you can trust this connection. This is the work of accounting, so trust is important, and I think that most AI companies do not focus on accuracy. What we prioritize above all else is ability.”
Basis has a deployed Intelligence team that helps accountants increase reliance on AI in their companies by demonstrating consistency.
“We have this program that we go through where we get them to take the work methods that they’re familiar with, and they know it inside and out,” Harpe said. “We have them use AI to start working on these tasks, so they can see directly what it can do and what it can’t do. This helps them build intelligence and confidence. It’s like you join a new person in your team, and you give them some things, see how they do it, and then move on to the next thing. We help them build that confidence as part of this process.”
A big part of that trust involves preventing private customer data from being sucked into public-facing AI systems.
“It comes down to trust, too,” Harpe said. “Customers trust me. This relationship is very sacred, and now you want to make sure that you don’t end up putting this data in a place where it will be exposed in any way. It is very important to have real security policies and clear AI policies, since you can really assure the companies that this data will be completely siloed. We are actually not just a silo data firm by the customer. We actually have a very strong security guarantee around that.
He found that companies now have detailed questionnaires that ask technology providers like Basis. about how they manage the specific situations and web credentials they hold.
“Certainly people are gaining experience and making sure that the right measures are in place,” Harpe said. “We are religious about ensuring that data integrity is maintained. No data can be shared on a public system, and no data can be transferred from one customer instance to another customer instance.”
The impact of AI on jobs
Many accountants are worried about losing their jobs to AI, and while the tools can be useful from an efficiency perspective, they can be seen as a threat.
“I believe there is a lot of accounting that needs to be done in the world that is not being done,” Harpe said.
He cited his previous experience working on developing machine learning systems for the healthcare industry. “To my knowledge, no hospital in America can tell you how much it costs to provide a procedure for a patient,” Harpe said. “If you are going to have an MRI in a hospital, the hospital does not know exactly how much it costs. This is a problem, because if you are a hospital, one of your main goals should be how to reduce the cost of care over time. You can either increase your costs or provide more important care to patients. The fact that we cannot do this, in my opinion, is a challenging system. What is happening in the organization and around, and after spending all the time to focus on compliance activities, there are all these things that you can’t come to, I’m a believer that if we can free people from spending time on these aspects of work that everyone looks at and says why can’t we get a computer to do this, then it will allow people to spend time on many things that we will actually do more than five years.
He compares it to the impact of AI on software engineers, and how such workers are still needed. “Software engineering is ahead of the curve in terms of AI adoption,” Harpe said. “No engineer in our company writes meaningful code anymore. Almost none of them write code, but of course, that’s part of what they do all day long. But our engineering and our machine learning team are working as hard as ever. The truth is it’s allowed us to build things that before we wouldn’t have considered building because humans are more capable.”
When he was asked what his company is building with the money he has received so far, he said that it is mostly for hiring and accounting. After initially focusing on outsourced accounting technology as its bread and butter, Basis has expanded to tax and audit, and is devoting funds to continue building organizations that can support companies across the country in these areas. To date, Basis has raised over $130 million in funding from investors including Accel, Khosla Ventures, Google Ventures, BTV, NFDG, Box Group and former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. They look after recent volatility in technology stocks.
“We have investors who are long-term, so we always focus on building long-term that we think is important, not just day-to-day,” Harpe said.
Basis’s Ode to Accounting website is also about the long term, depend on it
“One of the things we care about is making it clear that accounting is really important, and that accounting has an important role to play in this coming AI era,” Harpe said. “We have been working on the Ode to Accounting for a year, and it is about the history of accounting and how we got here. The first artifact of human writings was accounting. In our opinion, the introduction of how the entire market economy works is the ability to understand what is happening in each important group of decisions. Sometimes, the profession also loses the right way in this future decision. It is really important to understand that accounting is what actually allows us to participate in these more complex types of economic interactions where you have AIs interacting with each other.”
