Reading Room

Announced June 2, 2026, from Tampa. Crete Professionals Alliance rebranded as Current. The company is a national platform for independent accounting firms, with close to 30 partner firms across the US, more than 2,000 employees, and over $500 million in annual revenue. The stated rationale for the name change is that AI now lets local firms compete with large incumbents and bring enterprise-grade advisory work to smaller businesses. Partner firms retain their own brands, ownership, leadership, and client relationships while drawing on a shared platform of technology, global delivery, and strategic capability. Chief executive Steve Stagner contrasted the model with conventional roll-ups, describing Current's holding period as effectively permanent and its focus as topline growth rather than cost extraction on a deadline. Current was formed by combining Thrive Holdings' technology capability with founders Jake Sloane and Frank Zhang's work backing founder-led businesses. The release cited a commissioned April survey in which 65 percent of accounting firm clients said AI would improve their perception of a firm while 75 percent still preferred personal interaction to automated experiences, and noted that a Tax AI pilot was being rolled out across the portfolio. Current is an Accounting Today Top 10 Firm for Technology and a 2026 Fastest-Growing Firm.

Describes a practitioner-feedback and evaluation loop for Tax AI. Reports a 7,000-return pilot, roughly one-third less preparation time, and about 50% greater throughput.

Describes founder dependence, unreliable target accounts, and the need for M&A, industry, and AI expertise.

Announced May 20, 2026, from Jacksonville. FIS announced that BankSouth, a $1.6 billion-asset community bank based at Lake Oconee, Georgia, selected the FIS core banking platform to power its retail and business banking lines. The bank framed the conversion as part of a broader data and technology strategy. The selection followed BankSouth's March 2026 announcement of a strategic partnership with Sequence Holdings, the permanent holding company deploying engineers and AI tooling into the bank's operations, and coverage connected the two moves as parts of the same modernization effort.

Announced May 2026. OpenAI and Eudia formed a strategic partnership to co-build for the legal and acquisition teams of the Department of War and other US government agencies, integrating OpenAI's frontier models into Eudia's platform. The stated aim is to improve efficiency for contracting officers, legal counsel, and program managers. The partnership expands and formalizes work already underway: in August 2025 Eudia had won a $1.25 million contract-handling engagement with the US Department of the Air Force. Eudia characterized the collaboration as government-focused and purpose-built for the mission space, distinct from its broader commercial footprint, and declined to comment on OpenAI's product roadmap when asked about Codex for Legal. Eudia also operates an alternative legal services provider in Ireland and an alternative business structure law firm in Arizona, and had recently signed a partnership with ServiceNow, which it describes as the workflow layer government already runs on. Coverage noted the timing against a contemporaneous dispute involving Anthropic and the former Department of Defense over use of its models.

Announced May 4, 2026. Long Lake Management agreed to acquire American Express Global Business Travel in an all-cash take-private valued at approximately $6.3 billion, with support from General Catalyst and Alpha Wave; Koch Equity Development was also reported in the syndicate. Shareholders receive $9.50 per share, a 60.2 percent premium to the May 1 closing price. The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2026, subject to customary conditions and regulatory clearances. American Express is selling its roughly 30 percent stake for $1.5 billion and expects to record a pre-tax gain of about $975 million; its brand license and other commercial agreements with Amex GBT remain in place. Paul Abbott is chief executive of Amex GBT, which operates in more than 140 countries. Ken Chenault, General Catalyst chairman and former American Express chief executive, commented on the deal. Long Lake was founded in 2023.

Announced May 4, 2026, from Tampa. The Baldwin Group (NASDAQ: BWIN), an independent insurance brokerage and advisory firm, announced an expanded enterprise relationship with Anthropic to deploy Claude firm-wide. Baldwin will integrate Claude across its business segments and functional groups, giving advisors, client experience staff, and operational leaders an enterprise-grade platform intended to improve productivity, speed decision-making, and support end-to-end workflows. The agreement followed several months of active deployment in targeted parts of the business, which Baldwin said produced measurable gains in the quality of client-facing insights, productivity, and workflow efficiency. Chief executive Trevor Baldwin framed the tool as augmenting rather than replacing professional judgment, describing the core skill in the industry as synthesizing complex risk and anticipating unasked client questions. The release also emphasized governance, training, and cross-functional collaboration as part of Baldwin's approach to AI adoption. Baldwin was subsequently the target of a take-private agreement by a consortium led by Michael Dell's DFO Management and Sequence Holdings.

Reports an agreed $6.3 billion cash acquisition at $9.50 per share, with closing expected in H2 2026.

Announced April 22, 2026, from London. Crescendo launched its expansion into the UK and Europe, positioning the move as the introduction of an AI-native customer experience category into a large and, in its framing, underserved market. The company cited more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue reached in under two years, a global footprint built partly through acquisition, and delivery across six continents under a 24/7 model. UK and European customers named include Dr. Martens, Funky Pigeon, Mention Me, RealVNC, and Sweet Bee Organics. London was chosen as the European anchor on the basis of its talent and technology base; co-founder and chief executive Matt Price was raised in the UK and previously scaled Zendesk's European operations. The release framed European demand around fragmented legacy infrastructure, multi-market and multi-language operations, and regulatory pressure on trust, accountability, and demonstrable AI performance. A UK launch event in London was planned to mark the expansion. Crescendo was founded in 2023 and is headquartered in San Francisco.

Announced March 24, 2026, from Palo Alto. Eudia launched Expert Digital Twins, which it describes as governed replicas of how an organization's best subject matter experts make decisions, deployed at enterprise scale, and positioned the launch as defining a category it calls the System of Intelligence. The platform's core is the Enterprise Brain, an intelligence layer that captures and codifies expert judgment across contracts, policies, precedents, and prior decisions. Within it, specialized decision engines called MINDs generate the Digital Twins, made available across the enterprise as self-service. Eudia states three intended outcomes — accuracy, consistency, and scale — and describes a feedback loop in which every decision, correction, and expert input returns to the MIND. Forward-deployed engineers build the integration patterns and ontology structures, a model Eudia says it has run since its founding in 2023. The launch included a ServiceNow partnership extending the Twins into ServiceNow's Legal Service Delivery and Contract Management Pro products. Cited customer results include Graybar reporting legal due diligence moving 98 percent faster and Duracell reporting a 50 percent reduction in contracting time and cost. Omar Haroun is chief executive and co-founder.

Announced March 2026, from Greensboro, Georgia. BankSouth, a $1.6 billion-asset community bank, announced a strategic partnership with Sequence Holdings, a permanent holding company that improves the operations of established businesses through technology. Under the partnership, a team of Sequence engineers — with backgrounds at Palantir, Scale AI, and Apple — works alongside BankSouth's staff to build and deploy AI-powered tools, framed around a human-first approach to community banking and BankSouth's roughly 80-year history. Sequence chief executive Michael Lee, a financial services and technology investor, joined BankSouth's board of directors. Sequence took a minority position in the bank. The partnership followed Sequence's emergence from stealth with a $75 million seed round led by Conviction and 8VC and a Series A led by Lux Capital, joined by Definition, Avenir, Chris Ré, and other institutional investors. Sequence is based in New York and deploys engineers alongside a proprietary technology platform. Latham & Watkins represented Sequence on both the partnership and the financings.

Reported $1 billion-plus fundraising target; completion unverified.