Grant Thornton's $5B buy shows AI adoption is harder than the deal
The accounting world just witnessed a massive bet on artificial intelligence, but the real story isn't the $5 billion price tag—it's the quiet admission that buying technology is the easy part.
Grant Thornton’s planned acquisition of CBIZ Inc.
represents the sector’s largest deal, yet the firm’s own leadership has already signaled where the real challenge lies: making people actually use the new tools.
Grant Thornton Advisors LLC CEO Jim Peko told Bloomberg Tax that the deal is primarily about expanding AI capabilities.
His phrasing, however, reveals a deeper truth. “Adding that additional level of scale really does give us greater flexibility to invest even more, not just in tech and AI, but to invest in our people as well and the training that’s necessary and help drive adoption in AI,” Peko said.
Notice the sequence: first the tech, then the people, then the training, and finally the elusive goal of “adoption.” This ordering suggests that adoption is the bottleneck, not the purchase.
Our analysis points to a pattern common across industries: companies spend billions on AI systems, only to find that employees resist, misunderstand, or underuse them.
Grant Thornton’s deal is a bet that scale will solve this—that a larger firm can afford better training and change management. But the history of enterprise software suggests otherwise.
Adoption is a cultural and behavioral problem, not a financial one.
Throwing more money at training doesn’t guarantee that senior partners or junior staff will trust the algorithms over their own judgment.
For smaller accounting firms and independent professionals, this deal carries a warning.
If a $5 billion acquisition can’t guarantee smooth AI adoption, your own modest investment in ChatGPT or automation tools likely faces even steeper odds.
The key takeaway is not to skip the purchase, but to budget equally for the human side: dedicated training time, internal champions, and a slow rollout that lets people see value before feeling forced.
For ordinary businesses watching this, the advice is simple. Before you buy any AI tool, ask yourself: who will teach my team to use it, and what happens if they don’t?
The deal between Grant Thornton and CBIZ is a reminder that the hardest part of AI isn’t the code—it’s the people who have to change how they work.
Credit: Original reporting by Bloomberg Tax, featuring comments from Grant Thornton Advisors LLC CEO Jim Peko.
