Your software vendors are now your speed limit

Ask any of your software vendors for a feature and you will probably hear a version of the same answer. It's on the roadmap. Maybe next quarter, maybe next year.

For most of the last decade, that was simply how software worked, and firms planned around it. At our AI agents panel on 1 October, hosted by Kevin Lord (Firmcheck CRO), Celso Pinto put it bluntly: that answer is now a warning sign, and one version of it should make you leave.

Celso has spent almost thirty years building software, founded SimpleTax and Pixie, and now runs Connector Central. His favourite red flag, in his words: "We don't have an MCP, but it's on our roadmap for '27." His advice: "Please don't walk, just run away from those vendors." (watch)

That sounds extreme. The reasoning behind it isn't.

Why one missing feature now matters so much

An MCP is how an AI assistant gets into your software. MCP, or Model Context Protocol, is an open standard Anthropic introduced in November 2024 that lets an assistant such as Claude read from and act in another system. Kevin showed what that looks like live in the session. One prompt asked Claude to bring Firmcheck up to date with the client list in Sodium, and it created the missing clients, added a director, and ran the outstanding ID check. The two products have a direct integration, but it wasn't switched on; everything went through MCP. (watch)

A tool without one is a locked room. The assistant can work across everything else and then stops at that door. Someone in your firm goes back to copying data across by hand, and the whole process slows to the pace of the least connected system you own.

That is Celso's point. "Right now it's very much the speed limit," he said. A slow vendor used to cost you a missing feature. Now it caps what you can automate around them.

Speed is the new test of a vendor

Kevin opened the topic with something every product team recognises. A few years ago, a request went on a roadmap and might appear nine to twelve months later. Now features ship weekly, sometimes daily, faster than most customers can keep up with. (watch)

Celso went further. Any reasonably good product team is now moving at a pace that would have been unthinkable a few years ago, and the newer accounting platforms snapping at the heels of the established ones are doing it because they have rebuilt how they develop around AI. A vendor quoting you next year's roadmap, in his view, is telling you they haven't worked out how to do that.

You don't have to accept the strongest version of the argument to take something from it. Roadmap answers used to be about priorities. Increasingly they are about capability, and capability is harder to fix.

Don't build your way out

The obvious response to a slow vendor is to build the thing yourself. Billie Mcloughlin, who runs Aiccountancy and spent over a decade in practice, warned against it. (watch)

She built her own website with an AI coding tool and found herself learning things she would never use again, such as "how to link a Stripe account to a database I'm never going to need again." So she handed it to an expert and went back to spending her time on accountancy and AI. She compared it to the rage-bait claim that AI means you no longer need an accountant: the same logic, pointed the other way.

So the choice isn't between a slow vendor and a home-made tool. It's between a slow vendor and a faster one.

Faster isn't automatically better

Marcus Batson, who heads customer success at Sodium, added the caution the discussion needed. AI, he said, "makes good things better and bad things worse." (watch) A product team that already understood why each customer request mattered gets much faster. One that didn't just produces more of the wrong thing, sooner, and AI is convincing enough to make that look impressive.

The same applies inside your firm. Celso suggested you can now ask an assistant to move data from one vendor to another and take most of the pain out of switching. Perhaps. But an agent moving messy data moves the mess, so treat that as a reason to tidy your records first, not to stop checking them.

What to do this week

List every system that holds client data in your firm: practice management, accounting, AML, document storage, email. Next to each, write one word. Yes if it has an MCP server or an official connector to the AI assistant you use. No if it doesn't. And if they said "roadmap", the date they gave you.

Any "no" against a tool your team opens every day is the first conversation to have at renewal.

The full panel, with Celso, Billie and Marcus, is here. We'll be running more of these sessions so keep an eye out for future invites.