It’s been a while since I last shared something here, but as I reflect on 2025, you’ll understand why. Most days, I finish work feeling like I didn’t accomplish enough, but that’s only because there is a never ending list. I remind myself that if you’re in business, that is a wonderful “problem”. I often step back and reflect on the days and weeks as a whole, and I’m always impressed with how much WE HAVE accomplished.
Part I: Alpine Mar
2025 is Alpine Mar’s 5th year in business, and this year was by far it’s biggest and most active year. Here are the quick highlights:
Our team grew from 9 in 2024 to just over 40 today.
Part of Alpine Mar’s growth in 2025 came by way of an acquistion in Q1 that added 7 new members to the firm and an added service line, Assurance Services. Read more about it here.
We’ve expanded our international team and added a physical office location in the Philippines to continue to attract exceptional local talent. Our Philippines team today is comprised of 16 members. Read more about it here.
We launched a new business under the Alpine Mar umbrella expanding into IT services, which was a natural segue to support many of our existing clients in new ways. Read more about it here.
Our AI adoption and workflow automation efforts were exceptional this year. As we close the year our Client Accounting Services (CAS) practice deployed AI agents into QuickBooks Online for a few small, select group of clients. The results have been impressive, and the team will be looking to expand these capababilities in 2026.
While 2025 has been an exceptional year of growth for the firm, it did not come without challenges. Integrating an acquired firm, launching a new business, and implementing new processes through rapid technological shifts is no easy feat. It was achievable as a result of one primary attribute that sets our firm apart. THE PEOPLE. This is something I take a lot of pride in, and has in large part informed our hiring processes. To date, our new hires are a product of our internal network. Whether we’re hiring here in the US, or in the Philippines, our first course of action is to look through the network of existing team members to identify other talented individuals in our industry.
The result of this has lead to quality, high pedigree, and high character individuals that make up Alpine Mar. What we’ve accomplished in such a short period of time would not have been possible without the exceptional individuals that make up our team.
Part II: AI Exploration
Alpine Mar has been defined as The Modern Day Accounting Firm, and for good reason. Like many other industries the AI buzzword is humming. We are not afraid of change, on the contrary, we welcome it. We’re leaning into the AI revolution. As a result, we embarked on an AI project toward the end of 2024. Our core focus at that time was:
How should AI be deployed in our business?
What are the biggest risks and concerns with AI in our business?
The first question prompted a wealth of responses that were obvious, but the second question was one that required us to be much more thoughtful, and careful with AI deployment. At Alpine Mar we work with a wide range of ultra high net-worth individuals and families, and small solo run businesses. We work with, and have access to very sensitive non-public information. Privacy and security is one of our single highest priority focuses at the firm. Therefore, if we are going to deploy AI in our business, data security was priority number 1.
This lead to the hiring of an emerging tech engineer that spent over a decade in the AI space with two exceptional companies, Oracle and Boeing. We were immediatley impressed with a platform he had built that allowed the local, on device deployment of AI, rather than having a need to rely on a cloud based infrastructure that we didn’t own, and could potentially expose data. We spent a few months testing the platform, and while it was impressive, we ultimately found that in order to deploy the solution at scale within the firm, we would need a lot more hardware. The short conclusion is this: computing hardware has not caught up to the needs for the local deployment of AI at scale. The exact reason massive amounts of capital are going into data centers.
Part III: AI Start up
Fortunately, later in 2025, many security challenges are being solved, and new industry specific tools are being released by other companies we’ve begun to partner with. However, this isn’t the end of that AI development. Before scraping our project altogether, we asked for a lot of feedback in the emerging tech community. This lead to a conversation with an engineer working for one of the largest embedded processing chip makers, for products like Amazon Alexa and Google Home. He’s since become a part of the team.
While the product that had been created was not suitable to deploy at scale with the massive amounts of data we retain, it is suitable for embedded edge devices, such as what is currently thought of as a smart home device. Our society in general is becoming more privacy concious, while “big tech” is becoming more invasive. The platform that has been developed focuses on this exact problem, while also delivering greater capabilities than what the world has come to know from devices like Amazon Alexa.
The team is in the process of deploying and testing the software on NVIDIA dev kits so that we can start understanding how far we can push an LLM’s size and capability on an embedded device. Turning on your TV, your lights, and other applicances is just the begninning, and the cool part, you don’t need internet to make it happen. All AI compute is happening locally, on the device. No threat of big tech listening in to steal your data, and even better, no subscription necessary. This doesn’t mean the device won’t connect to the internet. It just means you’re more in control of when you do and what you share.
There’s much more to come on this as the team continues to build. Hopefully a new household name will emerge from this project, but if it doesn’t, it won’t be a failure. I will still be walking away with a ton of new knowledge.
Part IV: 2026 Outlook & Closing
As I look forward to 2026, our main focus point at Alpine Mar is not growth. It is to coninue providing an exceptional, high level of service to our exisiting clients. Continued growth will be a by-product of our exceptional service and our ability to partner with, and attract and develop new talent. To that end, we are in the process of developing training resources within the firm. It is not enough to simply attract great talent, but it is our responsiblity to develop and promote great individuals. This is a phase within Alpine Mar that I’m very excited about.
Aside from my core responsibliity of managing Alpine Mar, I hope 2026 will bring some more time for me to do some more writing, and to have more conversations with some of the exceptional people I have in my network on Roads & Riches. Two things that I genuinely enjoy.
In closing, I also want to share that I think writing and having in person conversations is more important now than ever. The reason being is that AI is an incredible tool, and one that I beleive, if not careful, can rob us of thinking critically and being creative. Even if it can do those things better than us as humans, there is a level of fulfillment that comes with thinking critically, solving problems, and being creative. Be intentional about doing more human things in the world of AI - I beleive it is important.
I wish you all a wonderful holiday season, and a great closing to the 2025 year!
Pablo
(not written by AI)