David Toth
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In a recent episode of Making Waves, David Toth, Chief Growth Officer of Winding River Consulting, sat down with Gian Pazzia, Chairman & Chief Strategy Officer of KBKG and MBP | Leadership Accelerated Alumni. Below is a summary of their conversation.
Gian Pazzia has spent nearly 25 years building KBKG into the national leader in cost segregation, R&D credits, energy incentives, and other specialty tax services. What started as a spinout from a small Pasadena CPA firm in 1999 has grown into a 170-person firm with offices coast to coast. Along the way, Gian has helped clients save over $10 billion in taxes and established himself as one of the most recognized experts in the cost segregation field.
Today, his attention is focused on a different kind of challenge: figuring out how to lead a specialty tax firm through a period of rapid technological change, where the rules are shifting faster than most firms can keep up.
Why Specialty Tax Has to Lead Its Own Disruption
Gian is clear-eyed about the position KBKG occupies in the broader landscape of AI adoption. Large generalist firms can point to major technology vendors investing heavily in modernizing their workflows. In specialty tax, no one is making that investment on your behalf.
"As one of the leaders in our space, we really have to be the ones that are doing the disrupting and making the investment. Coming to that conclusion, and understanding how we're going to make those investments, has been really the focus of our leadership team over the last 24 months."
That recognition has shaped every decision KBKG has made around technology in recent years, starting with some hard lessons.
A Costly Lesson in Vendor Selection
About 18 months ago, KBKG made an early bet on AI by signing up for ChatGPT Enterprise across the entire company. Getting employees onto a secure, enterprise-grade platform was the right call. What came next was harder.
Eager to accelerate, the firm engaged a third-party vendor that promised to use large language models to automate core elements of KBKG's specialty tax work. Five to seven months and somewhere between $150,000 and $200,000 later, the engagement had gone nowhere. The vendor's promises hadn't held up. The project was abandoned.
The experience made one thing clear for Gian: meaningful AI transformation couldn't be outsourced to a vendor. It required dedicated internal leadership. His advice for firms still navigating vendor conversations: invest in a recruiter who truly understands the technology before you go to market. The cost of a misstep far outweighs the cost of doing the search right.
Coming out of that experience, KBKG made a more deliberate hire: a CTO with hands-on AI and machine learning experience who had actually built and directed AI-native teams before.
Gian is emphatic about what that distinction means in practice. Everyone in the market claims to have AI expertise right now; but the difference between someone who has truly led AI development and someone who has consulted around it is enormous, and it shows up quickly once they're in the seat.
Building KBKG's AI Brain: An Iterative Approach to Firm-Wide Adoption
With the right leadership in place, KBKG moved into the build phase. At the time of this conversation, the firm was in the process of releasing what they've internally named their "AI Brain," a proprietary tool built around their actual workflows. The rollout is iterative by design: release, collect feedback, improve, and repeat.
Gian noted that this approach feels different from traditional software rollouts, where a rough first release could permanently damage adoption. With AI, the iteration cycle is faster.
"With AI, if you release and people have issues, those issues can be fixed rather quickly. Whereas five years ago, if you released a piece of software and it really wasn't working well the first time, people were never going to use it again."
On the cultural side, two things mattered most. Getting enterprise-grade tools in place early gave employees a safe place to experiment without worrying about client data. And identifying the people who were genuinely excited about the technology, and giving them room to spread that enthusiasm, helped adoption move organically through the firm.
On longer-term platform decisions, Gian is cautious. KBKG has paused on long-term software contracts for non-essential tools. The pace of change makes multi-year commitments feel premature, and the firm wants the flexibility to reassess as the landscape continues to shift.
From Compliance to Consultative: How Gian Sees the Role of the CPA Evolving
For Gian, the trajectory is clear. As AI takes on more of the mechanical work of compliance, pricing pressure on traditional services will follow. What clients will pay for is the relationship — the forward-looking advisor who helps them see around corners and act on opportunities they haven't yet thought to ask about. He comments:
"The role of CPAs is going to be: how can I keep helping this client? The CPAs that are forward with a consultative approach are going to be the successful ones."
That shift has real implications for how firm leaders think about their businesses. The firms that thrive will be the ones that invested early in building advisory capability, developed their people into trusted advisors, and started running their firms with an eye toward enterprise value and long-term growth.
Gian closed with a message for the next generation of managing partners stepping into leadership at this particular moment:
"Don't ever take anything for granted when times are good. Be prepared for the downturns because it usually never stays good. Even when things are going well, ask how you can be better and how you can diversify and protect yourself. Because this source of revenue that's been consistent for so long? It could one day go away."
Keep the chip on your shoulder. Add services. Invest in the capabilities that will make your firm resilient when the environment shifts.
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