Q&A: FloQast and the Rise of Autonomous Accounting

Mike Whitmire, CEO and Co-Founder of FloQast, has built his career around solving the challenges he experienced firsthand as an accountant, from audit through to supporting a company’s IPO journey. 

Those early frustrations with inefficient, manual processes ultimately led him to launch FloQast, a platform designed to help accounting teams work more effectively.

Today, Mike focuses on product strategy, staying closely connected to customers to ensure the company continues to address the real, evolving demands of the profession.

In this Q&A, Mike shares how FloQast has grown from a collaboration tool into a platform driving what he describes as “autonomous accounting”. 

He explores the role of agentic AI in reshaping decision-making, the importance of transparency and auditability and how automation is changing both the day-to-day work and long-term future of accounting.

How is agentic AI transforming enterprise collaboration and decision-making?

On the collaboration side, that’s always been the foundation of what we do as a platform. 

AI doesn’t fundamentally change how teams align – that’s more about having a shared system and clear workflows.

Where AI is having a real impact is in decision-making. 

It’s really shifting accountants’ roles, away from checking whether data has been entered correctly toward deciding whether a transaction has been accounted for correctly. That’s a much higher-value role and it’s much closer to what accountants are actually trained to do.

Why is transparency in AI-generated numbers critical for boards and regulators?

At its core, accounting is about trust and accuracy. 

Boards rely on financial statements to make decisions and those decisions are only as good as the numbers behind them.

Regulation sits underneath all of that. Every accounting team has to go through audits, and those audits ultimately roll up to the CEO and CFO sign off – so it’s critical they understand how their systems are producing financial results. In reality, they’re placing a lot of trust in the technology and the teams behind it.

That’s where CIOs come into the picture. If AI is being deployed in accounting, it has to be transparent enough to stand up to audit scrutiny. If it can’t, you’re introducing real risk, not just to the financial statements, but to the executives who are accountable for them. 

Transparency is what allows everyone, from auditors to the board, to rely on those numbers with confidence.

What does ‘auditable AI’ look like in practice?

Auditable AI means the work being done by the system can be clearly understood, validated and traced back by an auditor. 

In practice, that requires a purpose-built platform where all workflows and outputs are centralised.

An audit is really an audit of workflows. You can have humans doing everything manually, but that increases workload and time. Or you can spread workflows across multiple tools, but that approach introduces complexity because each system has to be understood, validated and maintained, which increases risk over time.

When everything sits in one platform, auditors can see how a transaction moved through the process, how the AI handled it and how a human reviewed it. 

For the CFO and CIO in particular, that whole process lowers the burden that comes from proving compliance across a fragmented stack. Not to mention the lower risk of something being missed. 

How is agentic AI improving productivity and work-life balance?

It’s taking hours of manual work off people’s plates and it’s usually the kind of work lots of people don’t enjoy. 

When I think back to my time in accounting, a lot of my day was spent pulling data from different systems, reconciling it and making sure everything was tied up before I could even start the real work.

If you automate that, you get to focus on judgement and analysis. That’s more interesting and it changes how your day actually feels. 

You’re not just moving data around, you’re applying real accounting knowledge.

There’s also a very real personal impact.

I started FloQast because I wanted accountants to go home early.

I’ve heard too many stories of people missing their kids’ soccer matches or leaving a dinner halfway through because they’re stuck closing the books late into the evening. 

When that manual work disappears, that poor work-life balance starts to ease too. 

How will agentic AI reshape the accounting profession?

We’ll see a clear shift from preparer to reviewer. AI will handle much of the foundational work and accountants will spend more time reviewing outputs and applying strategic guidance. 

That’s a better use of their training and experience and it puts them in a position of owning the future of accounting with AI, rather than reacting to it.

It also comes at the right time. There’s a real talent shortage in accounting and automation helps bridge that gap without overloading existing teams. 

At the same time, new roles are emerging, like accounting transformation officers. People who understand accounting but can also build and manage AI-driven workflows.

The people I set out to help are now spending close cycles doing data prep, patching AI agents and explaining chat logs to auditors. That’s not transformation, that’s just a different kind of grind.

Adoption will take time, though. The technology will move faster than the market, as it always does. 

Some companies will move quickly, others might take years. But the direction is clear, and it fundamentally makes the profession more interesting and sustainable long term.