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Mitchell Troyanovsky

Co-Founder, Basis

Search every verified Mitchell Troyanovsky interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Mitchell Troyanovsky, co-founder of the AI company Basis, has recently discussed the development and deployment of autonomous AI agents for accounting firms. In interviews and podcast appearances, he described how these agents can handle end-to-end workflows over hours or days, and argued that reliable automation depends less on grading final outcomes than on supervising the agent's process and providing high-quality, up-to-date company context. He compared this context to code, saying that errors in it can lead agents to perform incorrect actions, and emphasized that the value of many SaaS systems lies not in their user interfaces but in their underlying guardrails, permissions, processes, and data architecture. He also suggested that SaaS providers that do not offer programmatic access to their systems may be at risk as agents increasingly interact with software directly. Troyanovsky also expressed views on the broader implications of AI agents for the accounting profession. He questioned whether accountants will broadly transition into business coaching roles, noting that some clients may prefer an agent that simply completes the work over spending time on the phone with a human advisor. He speculated that demand for accounting services could increase significantly as intelligent agents operate at scale, though he said the balance with labor supply remains an open question. In discussing the fast pace of AI development, he advised against reacting to daily releases and instead recommended treating the shift as an underlying paradigm change to guide strategic decisions.

Recent appearances

  • AI Agents in Accounting: From Manual Work to Autonomous Firms

    August 20, 2026 · 📺 AI:AM

    AI agents in accounting are moving firms beyond chatbots and copilots—but reliable automation depends on context, process supervision, and human judgment. Mitchell Troyanovsky, co-founder of Basis, explains how accounting firms use agents for end-to-end workflows, why SaaS UIs may disappear, and what changes for CPAs. 0:00 One bad update can break a company. 1:30 AI agents will outgrow your UI. 2:36 AI should work while you're away. 3:10 Basis and autonomous accounting agents 5:57 Selling AI to accountants 6:35 Hours to minutes value 8:46 AI in accounting versus coding 9:54 Accounting firms n…

    Watch on YouTube ↗

  • Mitchell Troyanovsky and Jay Dawani

    August 20, 2026 · 📺 AI:AM

    Join AI:AM live as Prakash Narayanan and Nathan Labenz cover the latest in AI, including interviews with JMitchell Troyanovsky and Jay Dawani

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  • How to Build Autonomous, Long-Horizon AI Agents | Basis

    August 06, 2026 · 📺 The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck

    AI agents can write code for hours, but ask them to do real work in the real economy, and they break. Mitch Troyanovsky is co-founder of Basis, a unicorn AI company whose agents run autonomously for hours — sometimes days — completing complex tax returns end to end. His answer to the reliability problem: stop grading outcomes, and start supervising the process. This is a definitive, reference-style conversation on building long-horizon AI agents. Mitch walks through the full history — from ReAct and the AutoGPT crash to reasoning models and RLVR — and explains why the industry abandoned proce…

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  • Building Basis | Fireside Chat with Mitch Troyanovsky (Co-Founder, Basis)

    July 08, 2026 · 📺 Avid Ventures

    Mitch Troyanovsky, Co-Founder of Basis (an AI startup shaping the future of accounting - and an Avid portfolio company), joins Irene Gendelman (Investor, Avid Ventures) to discuss how intentional organizational design and a deep focus on context can unlock more capable AI. This fireside chat was filmed during Avid's Rising Stars Engineering Event in September 2025.

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  • Beyond the Chatbot: Building Agent-Native Enterprises with Mitchell Troyanovsky | S3E4

    May 19, 2026 · 📺 The Hedgineer Podcast

    The transition from AI as a chatbot to AI as an autonomous agent requires more than just better models; it requires agents capable of regulating their own state and context at scale. In this episode of The Hedgineer Podcast, co-hosts Michael Watson and Jhanvi Virani sit down with Mitch Troyanovsky, co-founder of Basis, an agent platform specifically designed for the accounting industry. The conversation moves beyond the hype of generative AI to address the engineering realities of building "agent-native" enterprises. Mitch explains why the next frontier of applied machine learning involves cl…

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  • Ontologies, Evals & Deployed Intelligence: Building Real AI Agents (Basis)

    September 25, 2025 · 📺 The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck

    How do you actually build AI agents that work in the real world? Mitchell Troyanovsky, Co-Founder of Basis, goes deep on what it takes to deploy agents in accounting — one of the hardest and most high-stakes domains. In this talk, Mitch breaks down: Why ontology (a coherent world for agents) is the missing piece of agent design How evals at scale separate production agents from prototypes What it means to build a deployed intelligence team inside a company The tradeoffs between human memory vs. agent context management How to think about applied research in agents (context compression,…

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  • A/F Tech Talk with Mitchell Troyanovsky of Basis

    January 19, 2025 · 📺 AF Tech Talk

    A/F Tech Talk with Mitchell Troyanovsky of Basis.

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  • How AI and Automation Is Bridging The Accountant Shortage With Mitchell Troyanovsky

    May 29, 2024 · 📺 The FP&A Guy

    TLDR: These show notes were optimized using Claude ChatGPT 4.0 and are designed to make you listen to the full episode. We also asked H4.0 to write a brief limerick summarizing the show notes. There once was a podcast on AI, Transforming accounting, oh my! With Mitchell's insight, Efficiency in sight, A must-listen for those on the fly. Show Notes: Welcome to Future Finance, with your hosts Paul Barnhurst and Glenn Hopper, where we focus on the technological advancements and emerging trends fueling the FP&A professionals. We bring you vital updates and insights into the technologies that are…

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The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →