HLB International, one of the world's networks of independent accounting, advisory and tax firms, held its second Tech and Innovation Symposium in Barcelona, according to UKTech News. Colleagues from more than seventeen countries travelled to Spain for the event, which focused on developing practical applications of AI and automation to address the challenges facing accounting, advisory and tax professionals, with the explicit goal of delivering better outcomes for clients. That a network of this scale is dedicating a second consecutive symposium to AI and automation, rather than a one-off pilot, tells its own story. The profession that sits closest to SME finance functions, the accountants and advisors who prepare the numbers, is now treating AI as a working discipline rather than a curiosity.
What this means
For a founder, a PE portfolio-company operator, or the finance lead at an SME running deals in the five to fifty million range, this is not really a story about a professional network's conference agenda. It is a signal about where the baseline is moving. When the firms that produce your management accounts, run your audits, and support your tax filings are actively rebuilding their own workflows around AI and automation, the gap between how they work internally and how your own finance function still operates is likely to widen quickly. Many SME finance teams are still built around manual reconciliation, spreadsheet-driven reporting and email-based approval chains, the very bottlenecks that a symposium like this exists to remove from advisory firms themselves. The businesses that treat this as background noise will find themselves slower, less accurate and less attractive to acquirers or investors who now expect clean, automated data as standard.
The wider picture
This symposium sits inside a broader shift across professional services, where AI and automation are moving from marketing language to operational reality. Accounting, advisory and tax firms are natural early adopters because their work is document-heavy, rules-based and repetitive in exactly the ways that current AI tools handle well: extracting data, reconciling records, drafting first-pass reports and flagging exceptions for human review. What is notable about a global network convening specifically to share practical applications, rather than theoretical possibilities, is that it confirms the technology has moved past the pilot stage for firms with the scale to test it properly. Lower-mid-market businesses do not have the luxury of running their own research symposium, but they face the same underlying pressures: rising expectations from investors and lenders, tighter reporting timelines, and finance teams stretched thin. The direction of travel is the same for a five-person finance team as for a global network. The only real variable is how deliberately a business adopts the tools, and whether the people who understand its finances are the ones setting the guardrails.
How we think about it
Our view is that AI automation only earns its place in a finance function if it is governed from the outset, not bolted on afterwards. We work with SME leadership teams and PE portfolio companies to map where manual effort is going, the reconciliations, the monthly reporting packs, the diligence data rooms, the approval chains that depend on one person's inbox, and then design automated workflows that remove the bottleneck without removing oversight. Every workflow we install carries an audit trail: who approved what, what the system changed, and where a human checkpoint sits before anything material happens. We do not treat automation as a replacement for judgement. We treat it as a way to free your best people from repetitive, low-value tasks so they can spend their time on the analysis and decisions that move a deal or a business forward. That is the same principle behind the shift firms like HLB are making internally: automation for the repeatable work, human control for everything that carries risk or judgement.
Where we can help
If your finance function is still absorbing the cost of manual reporting cycles, slow month-end closes, or diligence processes that eat weeks of senior time, that cost shows up directly in valuation conversations and in how quickly you can respond to a buyer, an investor or a lender. We help SME owners and PE-backed management teams install AI automation into the parts of the finance function that are ready for it, reporting, reconciliation, data preparation for diligence, without handing over control of the judgement calls that still belong with your team. The result should be a finance function that moves faster and produces cleaner information, while the people who understand the business stay firmly in charge of the decisions that matter.
HLB's symposium is a reminder that the advisory world is moving toward automated, auditable workflows as standard practice, not a future ambition. If you want your team's productivity lifted without losing control of the numbers that matter, Book a consultation.
