Lucy Cohen
The Mother of Modern Accounting
Finance and the accountancy profession have a problem with artificial intelligence
They are adopting tools they do not understand, trusting systems they cannot interrogate, and sleepwalking towards consequences they have not thought through. The people sounding the alarm are mostly consultants and commentators who have never processed a real transaction in their lives.
Lucy Cohen is not one of those people
She has spent over two decades running a live accountancy firm serving thousands of small businesses. She has built and operated AI systems, not in a laboratory but in a functioning business, at scale, with real clients and real consequences. She has watched the finance profession make the same mistakes, repeat the same assumptions and reward the same mediocrity, and she has decided that someone needs to say, clearly and with evidence, that the emperor has no clothes.
That someone is her. It usually is.
She founded the UK's first subscription accountancy firm at twenty-three
She invented a model that the entire profession initially mocked, and now widely uses. She is the 2025-26 elected President of the AAT, representing 130,000 professionals across 105 countries. She advises Downing Street. She is a doctoral researcher with papers that are already forcing uncomfortable conversations at the highest levels of fintech and professional services.
She is also the person who ran a campaign from her kitchen table that changed NHS clinical guidelines, drove a rickshaw across India for women's charities, and won the British Powerlifting Championships.
She is not who you expected.
Work with Lucy
If you book her to speak…
your audience will leave with ideas they could not have got anywhere else, and questions they will not be able to stop thinking about.
If you read her research…
you will not be able to look at your AI strategy the same way again.
If you want to understand where accountancy is actually going…
and who is leading it there, you are in the right place.