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Episode 8 - The Small Firm Advantage: Agility with AI Ethics
In this episode of Decoding Ethics, host Jeanne Viljoen sits down with Lucy Cohen, 2025 President of the Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT) and founder and CEO of Mazuma, the UK's first subscription-based accountancy firm. Lucy's contribution
to the profession has been recognized with the International Accounting Personality of the Year 2026, the Outstanding Contribution to Accountancy Award, and Barclays' Outstanding Contribution to Entrepreneurship, alongside her bestselling book, Forget
the First Million.
Lucy didn't set out to disrupt accountancy. Without a background in traditional practice, she kept seeing the same problems everywhere, data that didn't join up, work moved manually between systems, and built something to fix it. She only realized how
disruptive it was when the first business advisor she saw told her to drop the idea. She was, in her words, "young enough to think, nah."
Together, Lucy and Jeanne explore why that same outsider's instinct is exactly what small firms need to get right with AI — including Lucy's hardest ethical call: resisting board pressure on generative AI, and the one question she believes every
accountant should ask before using it: would I be happy to stand up and back this myself?
Watch the podcast here.