Snake Oil or Scale? A Field Guide to Cutting Through the AI Sales Pitch

                                       

By: Paul Ursich

Partner, Advisory

Three times this week, I sat through demos of “revolutionary AI accounting solutions.” Two of them were just macros with better marketing. The third? Actual AI, but it solved a problem literally no one has.

This is the market right now. And if you’re a CFO trying to separate signal from noise, you’re not alone in feeling lost.

The Promise vs. The Product

Here’s what we’re seeing after putting hundreds of solutions through testing: Most vendors are selling aspiration, not automation.

They’ll show you glossy case studies. They’ll reference enterprise clients. They’ll promise 80% time savings and seamless integration. Then you get under the hood, and it’s a rules-based system doing basic if-then logic.

That’s not AI. That’s Excel with a subscription model.

Real AI learns. It adapts. It gets better with use. It handles exceptions without someone manually coding a new rule. If the demo requires the vendor to explain all the scenarios they’ve “trained it on,” you’re not looking at intelligence—you’re looking at a very long instruction manual.

The Five Questions That Matter

When a vendor pitches you, cut through the presentation and ask these:

What does this replace in my current workflow? If they can’t name the specific task or role, they don’t understand your business. Solutions looking for problems rarely solve anything.

What’s the actual implementation timeline? Not the pilot. Not the “quick wins phase.” The full deployment. If they hesitate or talk about “it depends on your readiness,” add six months to whatever number they give you.

Who owns the data quality issue? AI is only as good as what you feed it. If your chart of accounts is a mess, AI won’t fix it—it’ll just process the mess faster. Ask what happens when the tool produces an error. Whose problem is that?

What’s the total cost of ownership? Licensing fees are just the entry price. What about implementation? Training? The internal resources you’ll dedicate to managing it? The opportunity cost of your team learning a new system?

Can you show me the failure cases? Any vendor who claims their tool works perfectly for every client is lying. The honest ones will tell you where it struggles, what it’s not built for, and which clients it’s wrong for.

Real ROI vs. Theoretical ROI

The case studies vendors show you are best-case scenarios. Often from clients who had perfect data, dedicated implementation teams, and executive buy-in that bordered on obsession.

Your situation is different. You have legacy systems. You have staff who are already stretched thin. You have clients who need deliverables next week, not next quarter.

Real ROI accounts for the friction. The learning curve. The integration challenges. The “it works differently than we expected” phase that every implementation has.

We’ve found that actual time-to-value is typically 3-4x longer than vendors estimate. Not because the tools don’t work—but because organizational change takes time. Budget for that reality, not the sales pitch.

Why Leadership Buy-In Matters More Than the Technology

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: The best AI tool in the world will fail without investment from the top.

That investment isn’t just budget. It’s attention. It’s willingness to let people experiment and fail. It’s protecting the time it takes to implement properly instead of expecting everyone to “just add it to their plate.”

We’re seeing firms hesitate on AI spending because it impacts short-term results. The technology costs money. Implementation consumes resources. Your EBITDA takes a hit.

But the alternative is watching competitors build capabilities you’ll need to catch up on later—when it’s more expensive and more urgent.

The firms winning with AI aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones whose leadership said “we’re doing this” and then cleared the path.

The Actual Test

Before you sign any contract, ask yourself: Does this solution make my team more strategic, or just more efficient at tactical work?

Efficiency is valuable. But if AI just lets you process more transactions without changing what you deliver to clients, you’ve bought a faster horse, not a car.

The tools worth investing in shift your value proposition. They free your people to do analysis instead of data entry. They let you answer questions clients didn’t know they could ask. They change conversations from “here’s what happened” to “here’s what to do next.”

That’s not snake oil. That’s scale.

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