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- GenAI in practice - How firms use AI, featuring Rob Collings
GenAI in practice - How firms use AI, featuring Rob Collings
AI can't do rules-based accounting work - but it can build automated workflows to boost efficiency and accuracy. Here’s how Rob Collings is creating and running an ‘AI-native finance team’ using GenAI.
Alastair Barlow
July 04, 2026
“When you think about a lot of accounting processes, they’re just a person moving data around.” Rob Collings sees that as an opportunity. He’s building a browser-based solution that brings all that data into a central platform, allowing his firm to run more like an OS (operating system) - the AI-native finance team, as Rob’s calling it.
Rob’s proposition, Flexal, is a great example of how firms can use AI right now, today, to take repetitive preparation work away from accountants. And he’s doing it with the tools we know and recognise - Claude from Anthropic and Codex from OpenAI.
It’s also a pretty neat way of circumnavigating the risk of GenAI’s probabilistic nature. Rob’s using probabilistic tech to build largely deterministic workflows (a similar philosophy to Dave Sellick): “So much of accounting is rules-based work. AI isn’t good at rules-based work, but it can build the framework around it.”