By: Shawn Mars
For years, the largest accounting firms have had an advantage that went well beyond money or brand recognition.
They had infrastructure.
Large firms could afford dedicated technology teams, specialist advisers, engineers, internal sales systems and years of experimentation. Regional firms, by comparison, often had to be much more selective about where they invested their time and capital.
As artificial intelligence becomes a larger part of professional services, that difference is becoming more important.
Oakspring Labs believes it may also be creating an opportunity.
Founded in 2025 by former Big Four Tax and Advisory professionals, Oakspring works with CPA firms that want to expand into AI and technology advisory without building an entire technical organization themselves.
The thinking behind the model is straightforward. Regional firms may not have the budgets or technical headcount of the largest accounting organizations, but many of them have something equally valuable: longstanding relationships with clients who already trust them.
That may be one of the most important advantages they have.
What Large Firms Figured Out Early
One lesson the largest accounting firms learned years ago was that technology could do more than make existing services more efficient.
It could also help uncover opportunities inside relationships the firm already had.
Oakspring founder Val Kharkover saw that firsthand while working in a Big Four environment.
Kharkover participated in a client expansion initiative that combined Salesforce with AI-assisted prioritization to identify likely opportunities across an existing client base. According to Oakspring, the effort surfaced a substantial number of cross-sell opportunities the firm had not previously mapped.
That finding needs context.
The challenge was not necessarily finding more clients.
It was understanding existing clients better.
For regional CPA firms, that distinction matters.
Accounting firms often spend enormous energy trying to win new business while existing clients may already be struggling with automation, cybersecurity, fragmented data, inefficient workflows or broader technology decisions.
Those problems may sit outside the traditional scope of accounting, but they are becoming part of the same conversations CPAs are already having with business owners.
The question is whether the firm has the ability to help when those needs surface.
Why Competition Is Getting Tougher
Technology is also changing who regional firms compete against.
Large accounting firms have spent years investing in systems that make traditional services more efficient. AI is increasingly being used across areas such as tax, bookkeeping and payroll.
When technology reduces the amount of labor required to perform certain work, the economics begin to change.
Clients that may once have been considered too small for a national firm can become more attractive when much of the work can be completed faster and with fewer people.
That puts regional firms in a different competitive environment than they faced a decade ago.
The competitor is no longer always the accounting firm across town.
It may be a national firm, a private equity-backed professional-services group, a technology-enabled provider or another organization with a much larger investment budget.
Clients are changing as well.
Business owners are asking their advisers about artificial intelligence, automation, cybersecurity, data governance and generative AI. They want to know which tools are useful, what happens to company information when software connects to internal systems, and which processes are actually worth automating.
Those questions increasingly end up with CPAs because CPAs are already trusted advisers.
For regional firms, that creates both pressure and opportunity.
Where Regional Firms Still Have an Edge
Large firms have scale.
Regional firms often have something different: familiarity.
A CPA who has advised the same business owner for ten or twenty years may understand the company in ways an outside technology consultant cannot quickly reproduce.
The accountant may know where margins are thin, which employees hold critical institutional knowledge, how management makes decisions, and which operational problems have existed for years.
That kind of understanding is difficult to build during a short consulting engagement.
A technology company can enter a business with deep technical expertise and very little knowledge of how the organization actually operates.
A longtime accounting adviser may have the opposite problem.
The firm understands the client extremely well but does not have engineers, cybersecurity specialists or implementation teams sitting in-house.
Oakspring’s model is designed around that gap.
Rather than asking regional firms to become technology companies themselves, it gives them access to technical capabilities that can sit behind the relationship they already have.
The Risk of Referring Too Much Work Away
For years, referrals were the obvious answer when a client needed help outside an accounting firm’s core services.
If a business needed cybersecurity support, the CPA referred a cybersecurity provider. If it wanted automation, a software consultant was brought in. If the company wanted to experiment with AI, another specialist entered the relationship.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that.
In many cases, referring to the right specialist is exactly what a trusted adviser should do.
The strategic problem appears when too many important client problems are consistently handed to someone else.
The outside provider begins to learn the business. It gets closer to management. It becomes involved in technology decisions, operations, and strategy.
Over time, some of the influence that once sat around the accounting relationship can move elsewhere.
That does not mean every regional accounting firm should build a technology practice internally.
Doing it properly is expensive.
Engineers, cybersecurity specialists, technical salespeople, implementation teams, training and support all require ongoing investment. Technology also changes quickly enough that maintaining those capabilities is not a one-time expense.
For many regional firms, building everything from scratch may be difficult to justify.
Where Oakspring Fits In
Oakspring Labs is positioning its Oakspring Advisor Partnership as an alternative.
The program is designed for mid-tier, regional, and boutique CPA firms that want to offer AI and technology advisory and build stronger relationships with their existing book of business.
The CPA firm remains in front of the client.
Oakspring works behind the scenes, providing support ranging from opportunity analysis, sales assistance, engineering, implementation, and ongoing delivery and maintenance.
That structure is central to the model.
The model gives CPA firms a way to broaden the services they offer without adding technical headcount, and to stay involved in work that would otherwise move to an outside provider.
The Opportunity Inside Existing Clients
The Big Four example is especially relevant because it challenges one of the most common assumptions about growth.
Growth does not always start with finding another client.
Sometimes the better opportunity is already sitting on the client list.
A company may have a manual process consuming hundreds of employee hours every month. Its information may be spread across several systems that do not communicate well. Its sales team may be relying on outdated workflows. Important operating knowledge may exist almost entirely in the heads of a few employees.
The CPA may already know some of these problems exist.
Historically, the harder question was what to do about them.
Oakspring says it starts with the business problem rather than the technology.
That approach is important because much of the AI market often seems to work in reverse.
A new tool appears, and companies immediately start looking for somewhere to use it.
That can lead to expensive projects that look impressive in a demonstration but accomplish very little inside the business.
A more practical process starts with the company itself.
Where is time being wasted? Where is money being lost? Which processes create bottlenecks? What information is available? What does the company actually need to improve?
Only after those questions are answered does it make sense to ask whether AI belongs in the solution.
Sometimes it will.
Sometimes a simpler process change or conventional technology solution will make more sense.
The point is not to use AI for the sake of using AI. The point is to solve the problem.
AI Is Creating New Security Questions
The rapid adoption of artificial intelligence is also creating a second set of concerns.
Employees are experimenting with public generative AI tools. Departments are connecting software to internal information. Low-code platforms are making it easier for employees without engineering backgrounds to build applications. AI agents are beginning to receive access to company systems and data.
In many organizations, experimentation is moving faster than governance.
Oakspring Labs plans to expand the Oakspring Advisor Partnership into broader cybersecurity and data-governance capabilities beginning September 1, 2026.
The timing reflects how closely these issues are becoming connected.
An AI system generally becomes more useful when it can access company information.
The moment that access is granted, however, businesses have to think more seriously about permissions, credentials, sensitive data, monitoring and accountability.
The more capable the system becomes, the more important those controls become.
Oakspring’s approach is to treat artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and data governance as related parts of a broader technology advisory conversation rather than completely separate services.
That may prove increasingly important for regional CPA firms because clients are unlikely to separate those issues neatly themselves.
They will simply ask the adviser they trust what they should do.
