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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the AICPA Town Hall Series,
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B
your resource for the latest news and updates on pressing issues facing the accounting profession.
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C
All right, so let's start simply. I've got some questions for you, Mark.
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D
Great.
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C
One year, five months, eight days into the job. I love that we know it to this level. I'm amazed we haven't got hours and minutes. But that's okay. If you had to choose a single word to describe the core value of this profession, what might that be?
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D
You know, for me, and it's interesting, as I've been now in this profession for 30 plus years. Started as a practitioner in Buffalo, small firm, and then just all these wonderful years meeting so many of our great members working for AICPA the last 20ish. You know, it's that ultimate word of trust. And we were. I had a couple meetings here today. I met with One of our CFOs, I met with actually the head of security here at mgm. And they too were talking about trust and the level of trust to the marketplace. We, as a profession, we own that word. We are the trusted profession. We keep talking about the trusted advisor, but it's just there, naturally. And how do we move forward with that in an age of uncertainty, age of AI, all of these things that are coming at us, and you have a marketplace who are worried and wondering what's happening. And so this word trust for us became kind of this moniker, and we tested it. Sue Coffey's gonna talk about it later in the town hall about this trust campaign that we're doing and how we came about the word trust being that ultimate moniker. Because we did talk about how are we gonna promote the CPA profession. It's one of the things that I heard from my listening tour over those, you know, one year, five months and eight days. But who's counting that? We need to keep promoting the CPA profession. And that is top of mind for us. And it is something that we're working on. And we're actually launching this week as part of Engage. And I'm really proud of what the team has done around this. We have continued to show up in the public marketplace around trust, and we need to continue to do that. And from that, one of the things that I've heard this for 30 years, we need a commercial, right? We also need a TV show. I'll talk to Ryan later and see if he wants to star as our star CPA later. You know, a commercial. We need to promote what we do. But the hard part is how do we narrow that down. We have sole practitioners in the Midwest doing tax only returns. We have auditors, we have CFOs in business, we have controllers, we have all of these different titles of who we are. But all of it comes back to this word trust. That's that one commonality. So we did, we produced a commercial. It is going to market this week. It is going to be primarily on cable news because that's the one place we can get to the business community and also the regulatory and legislative community in Washington D.C. consistently you can't walk into a Senate or a congressional office in D.C. without CNN or Fox News being on the TV for everybody to watch all day long. And it's the same for the business community in the early morning programming, your squawk box, your CNBCs to do the same thing. We don't need to be on CSI or NCIS or any of those other Programs for the 70 year old grandmas who are watching it, we to be where the business leaders are. And so we are really proud of what's happening here. And you are now going to get the first look at the commercial that is going to run this week. So play the commercial for me. Trust. Every major life decision depends on it. Trust in the numbers, the standards and in the people who get the numbers right. Trust that what matters most is handled with care. CPAs help keep the economy moving. Experts in audit, advisory and planning, planning held to the highest principles. CPAs guide decisions that shape our economy, careers and communities. CPAs expertise you can trust.
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C
That's cool.
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D
What?
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C
Very nice
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D
that. That sings Americana. Yes, right. And that was really what we were going for. And you know, I spent three years in political media and I learned to appreciate being able to connect in the audience. And I think it was really hard. It's hard to do anything in 30 seconds but I think we captured the profession pretty well in a 30 second ad and you all can contribute to this. So the CPA trust Sue will talk about it later but we have a website dedicated to it and we'll be able to get stories because people need to hear your story. If we want more CPAs doing it or we want businesses to better connect, we need to hear your stories about how you're helping your clients today, how you're helping your CEOs today, doing what they need to do.
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C
Absolutely right. You mentioned D.C. obviously a lot of your job, you have to be there. So as we turn towards Washington, how are advocacy and regulation shaping the operating environment right now?
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D
What are you seeing you know again a year Five months, eight days. Needless to say, we've had a few things that have happened inside the profession in that time. You know, we talked about this last year for those who were at engage last year, the change back to or the new change around getting the CPA that bachelor's plus two years of experience plus the exam, moving also adding that to the 150 hours plus one year plus the exam. And a lot of. There's just been a lot of discussion around this for so long and Ohio was the first one to pass it in December of 24. So before I even started. So when I started January 1 of 25, there were already a number of states who were ready to introduce. And so people were asking me what's my opinion on bachelors versus 150 and I said it doesn't matter. The trains left the station, let's move on. And we need to make sure that mobility gets fixed because mobility is really ugly right now. And we need to make sure that we get consistency around that from January of 25. Right. So it was January 9th of 25 that the governor of Ohio signed that bill into law. And at that point to today we now have 40 states plus one territory that have passed, plus six states and an additional territory that is likely to pass by the end of 2026. So already 46 states, 2027. The reason we don't have those other handful of states is just a timing difference or when they could get the legislation introduced. But that said, we still have some other fixes too, because I started to hear last year this buzz about use of title and some firms telling their people not to put c business card. And we talked about that quite a bit last year too. And I will say, you know, I've had the team working on this. We've collectively looked at it because I said it last year when I was here, you could take those three letters out of my cold, dead hands. I'm never giving it up. Right. It was hard enough to pass. I am absolutely proud of it and I want everybody to be able to use it. Now we have it narrowed down to what we think are 13 states that we may have an issue with. Whether it's that it's actually in the regulation that needs to maybe be changed or it's in interpretation with the state board that needs to just be kind of educated or at least have the conversation around. So we are working on that, getting to a solution around that. So that's kind of the CPA world as far as Washington D.C. itself, you know, I've met with the SEC and the PCAOB a number of times. We have the center for Audit Quality of which I'm a board member currently. I'm also the temporary interim CEO of that right now as we're looking for a new leader of the caq. A lot of regulatory changes there. But the ultimate message has been to the sec, to the pcaob while they have an aggressive agenda. And the agenda we think is gonna be to promote additional companies going public, which is what their intent. The clock is ticking and our member firms, they are not interested in this zigzag back and forth depending on who's in charge of, to over regulate or underregulate based on what's happening. And so we really, we're trying to see a sense of consistency. So that's a lot of what's happening in Washington. A lot of conversations around that. We've talked quite a bit about tax. You know, I met with the current IRS CEO. Jan's going to talk about that a bit when we get to the town hall because that's been top of mind at the service level. You know, we hear you. We've been talking about it a lot and just trying to get that straight and then a lot of other things. Like we're going to talk about federal AI and it was the what the Great American AI act that was introduced just the other day to try and regulate AI and AI regulation in the US and try and be a leader on that. But to also try and put to bed the 1700 plus state based introducing laws around AI. We don't need 1000 different AI laws to follow. We need one hopefully that we could get to. And I know that's been in process. We'll talk more about that also in that. And then finally Department of Education. I don't think that was quite out yet. Last year when we were at Engage, there was a proposed rule on what is a profession. As far as getting a federal loan and getting additional money under a master's. We were not included in that along with a number of other professions that are out there now. While we didn't quite like what the number was as far as getting us incorporated into $100,000, we were still. The biggest thing is we wanted to make sure everybody knew the Department of is not in the job of telling you whether or not you're a profession. And they wrote that in the preamble to the final register rule. So that is language that we had asked for that we had received over that time.
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C
All right. A lot of work going on. I've got two remaining questions for you, and time is tight. But there's so much change going on, wave after wave of change. Geopolitical uncertainty, economic compliance pressures, workforce readiness. You just mentioned AI. What does all of that mean to this group?
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D
Opportunity. I just continue to hear of opportunity around all the different things that we can do. So, you know, I talk a lot when I'm talking to our members around what's happening geopolitically. It's good to look at the world around us. Right. And then figure out how does that affect the profession. Geopolitical economics, you know, workforce readiness. We're going to hear a ton of that, I'm sure, over the next week. We're talking about upskilling our new associate or upskilling into an AI skill that we all need. But all of that comes back to value and ascertaining value to our clients and ascertaining value to our C suite and our investors if we're in business and industry. And so getting that value based on all these things that are coming around when we talk about geopolitical. One of the interesting things that I found on this, and you have all these different congressional hearings that are happening, and it all depends on which side of the aisle you're on, how nice they're going to be about the questions. But when you think about geopolitical, and, you know, I am not giving opinions on the war or anything else, but we had the tariffs that were implemented. Now we have the war, we have gas prices that are skyrocketing. And through all of that in the U.S. u.S. Citizens are still spending money.
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C
Yeah.
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D
Like it's not happening.
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C
Amazing.
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D
I mean, it's just not like this recession like we always talk about.
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C
Every plane seat is sold out, every restaurant seems to be full.
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D
You know, people are still fl. Prices are 20% higher. So, you know, it's an interesting time. And I think the biggest challenge for our profession, I see this. There's a number of small firm practitioner communities I'm in, and this, this stakeholder expectations, what the clients are expecting of us. So we, we do a tax return. We've gone to school for years, we've practiced for years, and we hand our tax return over to our client, and they send us an email back and said, well, I just ran it through Claude, and let me tell you where you went wrong. Right. And now all of a sudden, the practitioner has to explain it to their client how wrong Claude is. Because Claude's access to data they could be looking at IRS rules and regulations that are actually 20 years old.
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C
Right.
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D
Because it has access to all the data that's out on the Internet doesn't make it right. And now you have to justify yourself. So those are challenges and some of the aspects of the work that we're looking at to try and help our member firms.
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C
Exactly. Because the IRS will not appreciate hallucination. Right?
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D
That's right.
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C
Lastly, Rise 2040, this very forward thinking initiative, what is it? Explain to the rumor. What does it mean to us.
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D
Yep. And do it in a minute, 30 or less. All right, so Rise 2040, we did talk about it because it was just at the early stages of being launched. You know, when you go back a number of years, this is where the profession, I think has been very, you know, forward thinking. Back in the late 90s, it was a vision project. What does the profession need to look like 15 years out? They looked 15 years out. That expired around 2011. Paul Stalin was chair at the time. I was at AICPA at the time. They said, now we need to reset. So that became CPA Horizons 2025. CPA Horizons 2025. Lucky enough for me, I became the new CEO in 2025. And they said, guess what? That expired. Time to do it over again. And that was Rise 2040. But we did look back, we said, how right did CPA Horizon get it? And then what do we carry forward? And then what do we forget? But then it was the ability to go out to our members and ask for input about the hard trends and soft trends that they're going through. You're going to see a lot of this because you are all going to go through this process in the next week because we have Rise 2040 integrated into this program for this week. So I'm really excited about doing that. On top of it, we also have an AI tool that has been built that you'll be able to go into that tool at any given time going forward to be able to say, here are the trends that I'm seeing. I am a CPA in the Midwest who does only tax returns. What do I need to know? I am a CFO in business, in construction. What do I need to know? Or our CGMAs from around the world. We had over 6,000 inputs already and every new person that goes in there just adds to the data and the data continues to get smarter. So we're going to have this ability going forward for this to be an evergreen project to be able to help our members truly stay on top of strategic thinking for themselves, for their businesses that they work for, and for their clients. So I'm really excited about that.
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C
Well, we live in interesting times. And you've got a plan. Sounds great. But now I believe we have a town hall coming up, so I will leave the stage to you. Thank you very much.
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D
Thank you, Mark. Let's hear from Mark Jeffries.
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A
Live from las vegas. Please welcome to the stage our aicpa chair, jan lewis, sue coffey, lisa simpson and eric asgerson. The town hall begins now. Good afternoon. Engage in the Town Hall Community. It's great to be with you here in Vegas, and it's great to have the town hall community online with us. That was a fantastic opening, Mark. Ten years of engage, six years of the town hall. Today is actually our 171st show. I asked for the numbers 1.979 million, but almost 2 million. And right now we've got over 12,000 online with us. Town Hall 1000 virtual. And let's do a quick shot look at the audience here so the town hall community can see everybody here in Vegas. All right, So we've got a power hour in store for you. We're going to kick things off with a top firm issues update. Then we're going to talk about AI and practice transformation, have a discussion on trust development of future leaders. We got some announcements, and then we're going to have a great open forum. But to kick it off, Mark, I think you've got two big announcements.
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D
I have two big announcements. Huh?
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A
Look at that.
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D
Number one, first and foremost, this is a dual announcement. We had to wait five years to get the ideal chair in place to put on the COVID of the Journal of Accountancy, to put it back into print. So you all should have received this, let's hope by now. All right, that was about two thirds of the room tells me that there are over 50, and the other third are like, why don't we need it in print for. But that's okay. You'll, you'll learn over time. You'll learn to love it. We're going to do it quarterly now as we go forward. So we're, we are excited about this. And again for the last year and a half on my listening tour, that was one of the big things that came up. We, we want the Journal of Accountancy back in print. That said, and you know, I love the title here, play ball. And you know, I couldn't, I've said this to Jan. We had her inauguration a month ago at our AICPA Council meeting. And at that council meeting, I said, you know, especially in the tax complexity of today and all the things that are happening with tax, you know, Jan is the perfect chair. We've picked the perfect chair, it seems every year. And Jan, for this year with all the things that are going on with the irs, Jan, his practice is a small practitioner, she has practiced as a mid sized practitioner, and she has practiced as a large practitioner. And she has been such a great volunteer on all our tax committees that she really is such a great representative. So please welcome our chair. And I almost tried to take her middle seat where she belongs. Our chair, Jan Lewis. Jan,
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E
wow, thank you, Mark. And I'm just sitting here because they told me this was my chair. I wasn't trying to take your chair. Thanks, guys. And for those of you who don't know me, you do now, I guess. I'm a tax partner at BMSS Advisors and CPAs in Ridgeland, Mississippi. I'm no stranger to the town hall as a tax partner. The town hall helped me survive the pandemic in 2020. And really ever since then I've been a loyal follower and sometimes guests. And it really means the world to me to be here today, about a month in. So far so good in my term as chair. What I really hope in this next year that what I'm able to do is to connect with members, to share with them some of the great initiatives we have rolling out to really benefit them, tremendous advocacy efforts that I think are critical so that we show our members that we're promoting them, so that we're protecting and promoting the profession. And then finally just really showing all the technical resources we have like the town hall and like so many other resources we have. You know, in my day job, again, I'm a tax partner and I've, as Mark said, I've been at a lot of different firms. I've started off at an international firm, then I was at a very small firm. We grew to about a 60 person firm before we merged with BMSS in 2023. And so we have offices all across Alabama and Mississippi. But I also know, I've seen firsthand how the AICPA can benefit firms of all sizes. And I want members to know whether they are in public accounting like me, or whether they're in business and industry or education or government. I want them to also feel heard and really see the value of their AICPA membership. That's really my goal. Again, I've done a lot of things volunteer wise with the aicpa. Throughout the course of my career, I've seen a lot. I've seen a lot of growth in my firm and practice. I've seen a lot of changes and I've seen an awful lot of tax legislation. So I feel your pain and that's what I live every day. But I will tell you, no matter, over the course of these years, regardless of the change, the growth, the mergers, everything, the one thing that does remain constant is that we are those trusted advisors for our clients. That will never change. It is our core value. Doesn't matter the amount of disruption or transformation or anything else that happens in our profession. Trust is really our key. So I am really looking forward to this next year. I hope to listen and connect with members. And I can't think of a better place than to start here at Engage.
- [21:33]
A
Well, thanks, Jan, and welcome and thank you for your leadership. We're looking forward to it over the coming year. So pivoting here, Lisa Simpson. This is a slide that we all know well. But the big news is this is being released today, the 2026 PCPS top issue Survey.
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F
Thanks, Eric. And so good to see all of you really quickly. As a reminder, PCPS is the Firm Practice Management Resource center at the aicpa. And we asked you as practitioners, what's top of mind for you? We had about 600 firms respond. Almost 80% of those had 30 or fewer professionals. So got great insights from across the firm size spectrum. And if you're looking at this chart going, I don't understand what this means, I'll break it down for you really quickly. If you look at each of those columns that are by firm size, it tells you what was ranked as one of their top fives. Now, y' all can count. So I'm going to go ahead and confess. You might see some that have six. We did have some ties, so don't question our math. We had some ties there. And this is what's top of mind right now. And I break it down into three main buckets. You've got technology, you've got talent, and tax. So when we look at, across the spectrum, keeping up with technology, the changes in technology, the changes in artificial intelligence are, regardless of your firm size, a top of mind issue. We're going to talk about that later on. And throughout the course of Engage, throughout the course of every AICPA town hall, we're talking about technology and especially the impact of AI on the profession and how we do our work leveraging that technology. So how do you actually get it implemented into your firm, how do you get buy in and get it adopted into the firm and integrated? So a consistent theme there across the firm size. So don't feel alone if you're a little overwhelmed by the amount of AI developments. Eric and his team have a great handle on it. Our team also has a great handle on it and we'll be talking about that. If we look at people, Mark likes to say that the future of the profession has been they've said we were dead more than once because we got Excel, because we got QuickBooks, et cetera. We are not in any way seeing that there's less emphasis on people. You can see that the firm size categories are working on managing staff, finding staff, developing those staff into leadership, working on capacity, working on evening out workflows and retaining staff. So we're still, as a profession, focused on the people aspect of it. And then you've got tax. So, Jan, I'm going to turn to you for tax. We know that we can see that the smallest firms are showing that keeping up with the changes in tax law, the complexity, and also working with the IRS is a challenge. Tell me what you're hearing about that and what we're doing about that.
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E
Yeah, well, I will tell throughout my term as chair, I'm going to hear about this. I'm going to speak about it. Throughout my years as volunteers, we have always talked about IRS service levels. We do a survey every year on IRS service levels and what our members think about that. We're just wrapping that up now, kind of trying to digest that. And we'll report that back on a later town hall. But I guess what we need to say is that we do hear you. We know the challenge is there and we are hopeful. We think the IRS definitely wants to work with us and hear what we have to say. And the best part of that we heard last week the IRS is now actually hiring, going on a hiring activity to try to get new customer service representatives that will help us in some of our pain with reaching to the irs. So I'm hoping that's really key in helping us deal with the irs.
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F
That's great. I'm going to come back to you in a minute for some technical updates because we got to talk tax technical. We also asked our firm leaders, what do you see as impacting your operations over the next five years? What's going to have the biggest impact on you? Again, technology and talent. So continuing with those consistent themes, and you'll see that again, it doesn't matter what firm size you are. You're thinking about technology, but you're also thinking about recruiting staff, mainly experienced staff is what we're hearing, but also retaining those staff. And I think the one about the shift in skills is really important because we're spending a lot of time within the AICPA thinking about how we can help folks who are coming out of college or who are early career professionals. How can we help them and everyone in the profession adapt to the changes that are expected in the work that we do. And Sue Coffey and I will talk about that a little bit later. Another one that I get really excited about is adapting service offerings to changing client needs. So if you've been on, if you've participated in town halls before, you know that Eric and I love to talk about client advisory services. We love to talk about the transition from tax to advisory. And again, another preview of what we're going to be talking about a little bit later in the conversation. So, again, one of the reasons that we do this survey and that we ask for your input is so that we can look and see how we're supporting you in addressing these top challenges. So we're going to take these results, we're going to dig in a little deeper behind the scenes, and then we're going to map these out to you, to existing resources. And if we identify a gap, then we know we need to spend some time working on solutions to help you. And with the CPA.com team and the AICPA team, I'm confident that we can deliver resources that will help you address all of these.
- [27:53]
D
And Lisa, so with this, I started with the AICPA in 2006. Of course, I left for five brief years in between there somewhere. But in 06 when we started and we had a new team that was established back then, at that time, the Top issue survey only published one list. And I remember sitting in practice and thinking to myself how this one list finding and retaining talent, Top issue. Well, you know what? That's not my issue. Or tax services, larger firms will say, well, that's not my issue. And so it was kind of disconnected. So ever since 06 is when we started to publish having the multiple firm sizes. And that does help us narrow things down and understand where the issues are.
- [28:40]
F
Yeah, agreed. And I'm excited that we're actually able to give you a look at some of the larger firm challenges because again, I think sometimes as a small firm practitioner, you might think that the big firms have it all figured out. And I think it's important to Know that as a community, we're in this together. All right. I promised a tax technical update, so I'm going to turn that back over
- [29:04]
E
to Jan. No town hall would be complete without some kind of tax technical update. And since Melanie Lawrence's not up here, I'll have to do it myself.
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F
Thank you.
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E
We have two slides today. Want to touch on. We've mentioned this before in the town hall, the Kwong case. We don't have enough time. We could talk for eight hours about the Kwong case. The most important thing that I want to touch on here is the time sensitivity to this. In all likelihood, July 10th of 2026 could be your last deadline to file a and of course, you have different opportunities to do this, whether you're going to file a protective claim or a claim for refund. That in and of itself is a big decision because a protective claim means one thing and a refund claim means another. The whole idea of the Kwong case is because the Kwong case was ruled by the Court of Federal Tax Claims that the COVID era penalty relief lasted all the way till June of 2023. If you've got clients that have had penalties from 2020 to 2023, either paid them or have had them assessed and they haven't paid, according to that court case, the IRS should not have charged penalties during that period of time. That's where the Form 843s, the protective claims, all of the technical stuff comes in. Again, that's the extent of the detail I'm going to go in today. The QR code on the the screen and of course the dedicated website that the AICPA has will take you through all of this. Even a sample client email that you can send out, how you go through transcripts and find penalties, how you will fill out an 843 to file the protective claim, and then the difference in filing a protective claim and a claim for refund. So again, that's critically important. The only other technical update we're hearing a lot about CP53E notices. If you're not in the tax world, you've probably taken one down the hall to your tax partner, like at my office, because a client has received one of these, we know there's an issue. The notice itself makes sense. It goes out to someone and says, hey, we don't have your bank account information, so we don't know whether to deposit your refund. The concern is we've had taxpayers get these notices when they didn't even have a tax refund. Coming. And then of course a scarier issue is do we have a problem there with fake notices? And that's become more and more of an issue. Are you going to give your bank account out to anybody? So the IRS has come out. We've reached out to the irs. They acknowledge that it has been a very confusing issue. The whole issue of the executive order and requiring direct deposit, but as of now, still not requiring direct payment has been a real confusion for preparers and for taxpayers alike. We're on it, we're working with the IRS. If you've gotten one of those CP53 notices, one of your clients has got them. The IRS has acknowledged some of those are in error and there's nothing that
- [32:18]
F
you need to do. Thank you, Eric. I think we're going to talk technology.
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A
Yeah, we're 15 minutes in and we haven't unpacked. Probably the topic of the event, which is going to be everybody, you know, talking about what Gen AI is doing to the practice. We've got a tremendous group of solution providers on the exhibit hall floor close to 200 that will be opened at 5pm today. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna, you know, provide some high level information and then we're gonna, we're gonna talk a little bit about what we see that's happening inside the practice. First off, this is a recently released study. Stanford's been doing this study for the past decade plus. It's an AI index that they put out. It's worth the read. They test all the different models, they talk about adoption, they talk about spend. So on this slide, you're seeing through 2025, the level of AI private investment. And it's staggering, it's staggering. Where you see the United States is we're all reading the headlines. 286 billion. When you look at this year, this is where the forecasts currently are. The US investment is going to double to well over 700 billion. 2027, they say that's going to a trillion. That's staggering. That's over 2% of the GDP. We're going to see these historic IPOs coming up with OpenAI and anthropic. Anthropic. You've probably all been seeing the news. I mean they're now at a run rate of over 40 billion. 18 months ago they had a run rate of 1 billion. So just tremendous, tremendous growth. Growth that has not been seen before. Over the past year there's been 2,000 US AI startups. So just incredible what's going on but let's talk about, so that's a little bit of the investment in revenue. Let's look at adoption levels once again. It's kind of unprecedented. The adoption level of Gen AI is well ahead of where the Internet was and the PC revolution was at that same three year inflection point. When you look at, and this is just looking at the general macro population, you look at high school and university students, it's well over 80%. But Mark, let's now get time to talk about what's happening here with us from an adoption standpoint. And we did another quantitative study related to what's happening in one particular area, an area that's really made an impact over the past six months in particular, and that's AI powered tax research. So we went out and did a quantitative survey to over a thousand to one thousand US tax professionals. And this survey was done in 2025 as well. Look at the changes at the firm level. It went from 33% to 60%. Plans on putting something in place also increased and those with no plan decreased down to 7%. There's another interesting data point that's not shown in this slide. This is at the firm level. If you talked at the individual level, Mark, I asked a question about this. It's at 80%. So guess what, there's a few row employees at these firms that are doing it themselves. So Mark, you know, tremendous opportunity for increased value here. Your thoughts on adoption. One thing, I mean we've been at this journey helping firms evolve their technology strategy for a decade plus. One thing I'm so excited about is how open minded they are right now and the amount of trialing that's going on. Every firm I talk to, like I'm trialing this, I'm trialing that.
- [36:12]
D
You know, it's interesting because I've talked to, you know, I've given four presentations in the last week and I keep talking about the adoption curve. Tom Hood and I have talked about this. As we look at Rise 2040, we said we'll never break the adoption curve. You're going to have innovators, early adopters, you know, early majority, late majority, out to laggards. But I got to say, in something like this, especially as the technologies are advancing so fast, tax research being the example, watching our firms have greater adoption, and this is what I've said is that as a profession, it's not that we're going to necessarily change the adoption curve, but we have to shrink the amount of time from beginning to end. And we're Seeing that already. So even those who said, well, I'm not going to use that for tax research, they're using it today. You know, the adoption curve timeline is lightning fast today. And so seeing that, one of the things I always find, you know, again with risk, this is why we, you know, we've propped up our Josie for ANA research right around our standards and getting other standards in there for tax research, you know, having Bluejay as a partner, what we can't have. And you know, I gave the example in my introduction about, you know, clients going out using cloud AI thinking they got all the answers. Well, we also can't use cloud AI in an open environment and expect to get the right tax answer from a research standpoint either. So having it in a closed environment, knowing that we have the real information at our fingertips and understanding the validity of that is going to be incredibly important. And again, we have so many opportunities, I think as a profession to be the leaders in this. I know we're going to talk about the federal act proposal that's out there right now. Again with the trust moniker that we are. We are going to be the trusted testers around AI. We're going to have clients asking us to verify. They all still want a human in the lead to be able to say that AI is there. But I want you to make sure, I want you to tell me that I could trust this. Right.
- [38:19]
A
And Mark, in this report, it's 20 pages or so and you'll hear what the firms are doing with the time that they're saving and they're doing. And we'll be talking about this in a moment. You know, moving to focus more on advisory, focus on better outcomes. So the opportunity is incredible. But this is significant. 60% of firms putting these AI based tools in place, there's more opportunity, but this is absolutely shrinking the adoption curve. Mark, one thing, I mean, I opened up with this slide Talking about this growth, 700 billion plus being invested. With that said, there's lots of concerns. There's concerns on energy use, there's concerns on cybersecurity. Two big announcements this past week though, one from the administration, one from Congress, related to putting some guardrails in place or regulatory guardrails in place.
- [39:13]
D
Yeah, you know, it's been, we saw this in the sustainability ESG age. Right when that first started, it became the wild west of standards. There were all kinds of different standard setters around it. And this is more on the, you know, kind of the audit related space of what we do. And some of the Assurance around that. And I think, you know, right now, and I like the idea the executive order was one thing about how they're going to review the models and they're going to be engaged in that. And that's from a national security standpoint. Again, sue and I this morning were, and Eric was, and Lisa were there too. The, you know, listening to this head of security for MGM and the risks around AI that they're looking at every day and what AI does from a security standpoint, there's a national security aspect to that too. And so thinking about that with the executive order that came out, but then also this great American AI act that was just dropped, it's like 300 pages, I think. And we've been through it and looking at what's in it. But the biggest part is there's what, 1700 different AI related laws and potential regulations coming out of the states in a variety of ways. We can't all comply with that. I mean, we can't have the Wild west around this. So I do think it's the federal government's thought that if we had one big standard for the country and get that out in front of Europe doing something or Asia doing something, so that we see set the standard, we're investing the most out of any other country. So let's set the standard around this and let's get it right. Set the guardrails so we have that as we go forward. So this is a big piece of it. We're going to be actively participating in, you know, comment letters around this and working with Congress around certain things. I think, again, opportunity for us. There's some verification in there that I think CPA should be a very big part of as this comes down the pike. So, so look forward to what that's going to look like when we're all said and done.
- [41:16]
B
Mark, if I could just add at the federal and the state level, we need to be at the table. We need to make sure that whatever is written allows us to perform the engagement in accordance with our standards. And so that takes obviously our federal legislative team led by Mark Peterson, all The State Society CEOs, I know many of you are out there and those 17 are primarily occurring in blue states right now. And so making sure that our legislative people are positioned at the table and have the resources they need to guide those legislators is super important.
- [41:52]
A
That's right. Yeah. It's good to see this is a bipartisan Great American Artificial Intelligence act led by a Republican out of California and Democrat out of Massachusetts. Well, Mark, you kind of alluded to this. I mean this is going to be a big discussion on the trade show floor. What are the potential benefits of these vertically AI enhanced platforms versus the Frontier models? Gen AI ChatGPT, Claude being Gemini being the frontier models and then countless examples here of these AI enhanced platforms that are using the models but they also are putting in place controls, doing things about focusing on where the data goes, making sure it at times stays, not just at times, whenever it needs to, inside firm managed boundaries, understanding when you want to toggle AI capabilities on and off in an engagement. There might be situations where you want to use it, there might be other situations where you want it to be more deterministic. When you look at these technologies and this is what we've seen over the past decade, it's about the people, process and technology. So this change management is critical. We're working on a lot of change management and practice development strategies. But the solution providers, these vertical solution providers are doing the same thing. They're thinking through the use cases. So I think this is a, it's a very important discussion at times. I think the frontier models will be playing, they are playing valuable role for the firms, playing valuable roles for their clients and then these vertically AI enhanced platforms will also be supporting.
- [43:44]
D
Great. Yeah, it's just such an interesting time around. We've talked a lot about AI and you know, again we have just so many different types of CPAs sitting in the audience today. Business and industry, small firm, medium firm, large firm, tax only wealth advisors. So you know, all of it is going to get affected by this and we need to be part of that ecosystem in business and industry. You talked about some of that like you know, auditing, the verification of the use cases that happen that could start inside the finance team in business and industry and then the firm could come in and provide assurance over it. We talked about some, you know, cybersecurity and AI related tools that need to be done and how different companies need to start looking at things differently. Having these tabletops to be able to assess that in a different way. All of that are opportunities again for the profession to be actively involved in this. So you know, I, I'm done with the headlines and say, you know, the accountants are going away because of AI. We are absolutely here to stay and a ton of opportunity and we just need to embrace every, everything that comes at us.
- [44:54]
A
Yeah, well said Mark. And again this technology is going to be the great equalizer. It's going to help firms of all sizes when you're Looking across the different practice areas, there's lots of things that you want to be thinking about. It's not just Gen AI. You might be using machine learning, using some other techniques, but what we are seeing is adoption in the audit area, in the tax area, in the advisory area. Tax in particular. Tax right now is going to go through some very, very, very, very dynamic phase with these new capabilities. You'll be hearing about it in sessions throughout, engage about the automation of the tax return and that's going to happen and there's going to be more opportunities for the trust advisor to really play their role. So, sue, We've got the CPA.com AI working group that's really kind of out there working with the tech companies, working with the firms, kind of seeing where things stand. But we work hand in hand with your team that does a lot of the technical standards work.
- [46:08]
B
We do. We do. And the Auditing Standards Board and the Assurance Services Executive Committee have been working in this area for quite some time to enable the how you audit an entity that uses Genai in their financial reporting system. How do you audit using genai as part of your audit? And then how do you audit the AI itself? So there's primarily three buckets that they've been developing resources, guidance and standards around to enable the profession to be able to perform the services in a quality manner.
- [46:43]
A
Yeah, thanks. So it's a great partnership. So here's another report that just got released today and we've got a new leader@cpa.com, who's senior director of Tax transformation and he's really working hand in hand again with members of Sue's team to think about this evolution and this change management that's occurring. And this slide was taken from this report, this framework, and it talks about the steps. This has been going on for a decade plus, but it's going to really start accelerating this move from compliance centered practice to an advisory centered practice. So, Jan, you've been in the TAC practice for quite some time. So as more of this tax return gets automated, how do you see the practitioner's role evolving? And we're all talking about driving better outcomes.
- [47:43]
E
You know, Eric, we all know that our clients see value in us when we give them those additional services. A client generally is not really excited about getting a tax return. They're excited about the planning and the advisory services that we provide with that tax return. So I think that's not really any different than it has been. What, what's different now is that with the AI, tools, we'll be able to see that preparation time and focus become less of the time, and the advisory and the planning be more of the time. That doesn't mean the return doesn't have to be done. It also doesn't mean you've got to review that return because that's when the opportunities show up, when you review the return that maybe AI has prepared and it may have treated something a certain way or basically taken the information the client gave them and just put it in the tax return. Well, that's when we stop in the review standpoint and say, well, what if we did this differently? What if I talk to the client about doing this? This can still be done. We could treat something this way. You know, that's when the real value comes. And I think it's also going to really start the communication process better because we all know that a client's much more sticky if you communicate with them more often. So I think that's also part of this, that you're not just a product, a tax return, that you're delivering it. You're delivering information, help, assistance, you're solving problems while you're doing the tax work.
- [49:17]
A
Yeah. And I know you trialed some AI automation tools and you had some great examples of like, okay, that's great. Did the preparation, but there was some adjustments you wanted to do.
- [49:27]
E
Yeah, I gave Eric. I was talking to him about tax returns the other day, and we used AI in our firm, and the AI prepared the tax return. And when I got it to do my final review, I realized that maybe an expense that was put on one schedule really should have gone on another schedule. And it had a tax impact. I realized that one client had a profitable business. Maybe we could still set up a set plan or some kind of retirement plan. AI's not going to know that. We know that. And that's our job to be the advisor.
- [49:59]
A
Well, excellent. So this is something. Thinking about the strategy, thinking about those steps that Jan just highlighted, obviously talking to the different technology providers. It's a little bit of a frenzy out there, I'll tell you that. Right now I'm talking to firms, all firms are building agentic tools. And then there's a lot of trials going on. There's proper steps to take in due diligence. So make sure you're following those, going to continue to improve. So I think Mark said you want, you want speed, but you do want to kind of think about your process and your business strategy as well. And there's some documents here to help you with that. Well, trust is a topic of AI, but trust is. Got some broader things going on at the aicpa.
- [50:49]
F
I love the commercial that Mark showed at the beginning of our town hall, and I hope you all are excited about it. Sue has been working closely on, you know, what, what messages resonate and why are we doing this. So, sue, from a trust standpoint, how did we get.
- [51:08]
B
So we're. So we're talking about AI and we're talking about trust, right? And the opportunity and trust. And I think somebody's got to go on Claude and create a trust bingo card, because I think we're probably going to hear trust 5,000 times during this conference. And whoever screams bingo first wins a prize. So obviously a huge opportunity. Mark talked about the opportunity. Everybody here has been talking about the opportunity of the use of Gen AI. But AI obviously brings a lot of risk to the system. It brings a lot of risk and challenges for businesses and individuals. So we just heard a presentation that this morning about deepfakes and, you know, manipulated photos and voiceovers and, you know, at the state level, there's bias in hiring and alleged election fraud and things like that. So the opportunity for trust is there because you don't know what you don't know anymore. Right? You don't know what's real. And we are obviously a profession that provides that trust, and we need to be prepared to deliver. So last year we hired the Harris Poll to understand what our opportunity was and what our gaps were in this space. And the good news, the really good news, music to my ears, is that we are recognized as trusted experts. So we start from a very strong position in thinking about trust. But we have a bit of an awareness gap. When we ask business decision makers and Americans who really could benefit from our service, fewer than, or just about 48, 49% are either unsure or confused about who we are and the extent of the services we offer. So we have work to do to close that gap. But it is a gap that we can absolutely close. And that's where the commercial comes in or starts to come in that Mark showed in his presentation. Tomorrow we'll actually be launching the national CPA Trust brand campaign. And it will involve a whole host of things from paid media to, you know, a tagline that we can all use with our clients and on social media. And so we're really excited about this. It's a long time coming for a profession, and as Mark said, said our members have been asking it for it for a long time. And I can, I actually think we can make a lot of headway to close the gap that we have.
- [53:39]
D
Absolutely. And everybody look out for that. I think tomorrow, well, you're going to be busy in all these sessions, so you won't be watching Fox and Friends or Morning Joe or Squawkbox. But that said, it is going to be out there. I think the more we can take social media and everybody just kind of of promote that themselves. This is your own personal commercial. Right. So every one of us now can say, okay, we could use this ad in our own special way to be able to share with others inside of our network.
- [54:07]
B
Right. So we wanted a number of media outlets. So for the next three months, you're going to see the commercial air on Squawk Box, Fox and Friends and Morning Joe. In September, we're going to introduce some media placements on cnbc. And that's going to revolve around a slogan that tested really well with the target audience. Remember, it's business decision makers and Americans who could use our service. And that tagline is cpa, where trust meets expertise. And the beauty of that tagline is that we can use it in several different contexts. So if we want to address an audience for financial planning, we use CPA trust in financial planning, we can use CPA trust in innovation, we can use CPA trust in AI. So there's so many ways that we can use that that can really expand the advertisement campaign. And as Mark said, a big part of this is going to revolve around social media as well.
- [55:11]
F
Well, speaking of social media, if you haven't already celebrated your CPA or the CPA in your life, if you're not one, just a quick reminder that closing this Friday is a digital mosaic that allows us to really amplify the excitement that we have around our three letters that we'll take from our cold in hands. I want to shift from trust, which you can play on your bingo card, to another one, which is going to be human led. You're going to be hearing human led throughout the course of the conversation because we are what's core to the profession. It's the people. It's that trusted advisor relationship. And sue, we've heard a lot about how firms are looking to adapt early career professionals based on changes in technology, changes in client needs. So tell us about a big project that your team's been working on.
- [56:12]
B
Yeah. So if you could actually flip the slide one more slide. So we have, over the last, I don't know, six, seven months, we've been doing a lot of Research to understand what the challenges with our skill, the individual, the skills, the skills that we're going to need as the marketplace changes. And we heard from firm after firm after firm and finance leader after finance leader after finance leader that the skills that early career professionals have are not necessarily where they need them right now and where they think they're going to need them over the next two, three, four years. So we have been identifying exactly what those gaps are. And we have been in the process of developing a skills framework that will provide the basis for essentially a technology enabled virtual reality interactive tool with real life simulations that actually take individuals through real engagements. So, Jan, in the tax area, think about hiring somebody right out of college. But before they start, they do this immersive training and on day one, they've already done 10 tax returns and they've identified all of the problems in those tax returns and they've received real life feedback and they've learned how to communicate with a client and they've learned how to bring leadership into the practice. And that person is ready on day one. I mean, when you think about it, when I started, it took me probably three years to get to where today that individual needs those skills like on day one. And so that's what this is about. It's called a profession ready initiative. And we're going to start launching resources at the end of this year.
- [58:15]
D
And to that point, you know, this also answers to your top issues, Lisa, the fact that we need experienced professionals, right? Well, the problem is the new associates need the experience. And if everyone says the same thing, well, I can't hire them, they're not ready and they're not going to get the learning that I got in the field, then how are they going to get the experience to get there? And we've said like the pyramid model that we hired a lot of people at that entry level or for smaller firms that they had their one or two new professionals, professionals that they had and they kind of learned on the job. That learning on the job is gone, right? Because it's got an automated AI. Eric is going to take it over with doing the tax return completely. But we still need to give them that skill. And the only way we're going to do that is if we create the simulator. It's going to be again, scalable based on firm sizes or corporate sizes in it. But again, in my first year and a half going around talking to firms, talking to CFOs in business and industry, they all talked about a skills gap. Today, absent any AI discussion The gap is already there. They need critical thinking out of the gate, but they haven't done the debits and credits. And how am I going to give them the debits and credits to do the critical thinking? And that's the gap that was created.
- [59:33]
B
Right. They have the technical knowledge, but they don't know how to apply it. And they don't have the professional professional, nor in some instances the technological skills. So I'll tell you what, the technology that is available today to do this, to enable this type of learning is so cool and off the charts. And Carl Mays on our team is leading this initiative. And tomorrow there is a lunch and learn. So if anybody is interested in learning more about this and actually participating, because we actually need continue to need to your help in giving us feedback on this, please go to that lunch and learn. We've got a lot of space for this one.
- [60:10]
D
And at that point, I mean, this is the thing we're learning from other industries. Right. So in the aviation industry, simulators have been around a very long time. You know, pilots, they actually learn from mistakes that take place. They put that into the classroom, into the simulator. So even though we say it's like a new professional thing, all of us will have the ability to learn through simulation in a very different way.
- [60:36]
B
Yeah, I mean, we're starting with early career. And Mark, to your point, like, if you do something wrong, it's going to tell you you did it wrong and make you do it again until you get it right. But we're starting with early career. But think about this. This could be how we train our professionals in every aspect of their career from day one until the day they retire.
- [60:56]
D
Yep.
- [60:57]
A
Okay, we're going to leave time for questions. That's what I've got town hall questions. I've got conference I O questions here. I've been looking at them. But we've got a few resources to cover, so let's just.
- [61:09]
F
Yep. Eric's multitasking with his different question sources. Really quickly, we want to remind you again about the opportunity to join one of our online communities. It's through a platform that we call Engage365. You'll see the different communities that we have listed. As participation grows, we'll be adding more and more to help you identify where your people are and how you can connect with them. Mark, there was a Q and A in the conference platform about the website. If you're having challenges navigating the website and finding a resource, come to a community and ask for what you're looking for and one of our staff will help make that connection for you.
- [61:51]
D
Yeah, Lisa, to that point on the, you know, the communities are just going to be such a great way for each and every one of you to connect where you want to be connected. Again, our profession does so many different things and I've said this for years inside the AICPA. We send you an email, maybe 10 in a day. I don't know how many in a day, but many emails based on your interest level that you've created. You say, oh, you know what, Jan, I'm a tax professional, but I need to know a and a. So yeah, I'm also kind of interested in that. So we just bombard you with all of them, everything. And then it's not. This is siloed into those specific areas and we could actually put resources up there.
- [62:33]
E
That's what I was going to say.
- [62:34]
D
So you get connected to the resource directly rather than trying to navigate our website, which rumor has it, may not be the best website in the world and we're working on it, but at the same time if we don't need it, because we can hit you inside these. So join the community. We're seeing great uptick in this and I can't say enough. This is going to be a better way for us to stay connected closer
- [62:57]
B
and talk to your peers about how they're handling issues, how are they addressing a transaction. It's really powerful.
- [63:03]
E
It's great because as you said, you engage with other professionals. But I also agree seeing those resources come down and get posted there is so wonderful. You see it when it's posted of as a tax person, something new has come out and again you see it right away. The other thing that we've got on the slide, once you're in the Engage365 community, you'll also see up at the top there's a little tab that says volunteer. That's where you can volunteer for one of our many, many committees, task forces, all sorts of task technical resource panels that you can be a part of. And it's an ideal time to talk about that because our committee year runs, you know, June to June, May to June, something like that. But June 1 is when the applications open up for this next year's volunteer cycle. So this is a perfect time. Get on Engage365, pick some communities and then also look at that volunteer tab and just fill out some basic information about you, the type of committees you're interested in. You won't hear right away because Obviously, it takes us several months to get all of that. None of that's decided until early next year. But we want to hear from you if something you're interested in that you want to be a volunteer. I cannot tell you I would not be sitting in this chair today if I had not gotten involved in my very first committee years ago. I've learned so much. I've gained so much confidence. I've taught. I've learned more things from what people have taught me. And I've just met some really great friends across the profession.
- [64:46]
F
Aw, thanks, Jan.
- [64:48]
E
There you go. I would have never known Lisa since.
- [64:50]
A
A nice endorsement. So, Mark.
- [64:52]
D
Yep. And to that, Jan, just to follow up on that. So I've, you know, I've interacted. We have a number of our chairs who are here at Engage, and I've had so many chairs just talk about their volunteer journey and be able to say, you know, no matter how hard I tried to just give back to this profession, I ended up on a committee. I was one of 15. And no matter how hard I tried to give back more than I could receive, there are 14 other people just as smart as I am getting me all of this information. So it is something that's so important, I think, to this profession. Yeah, I want to talk about the women to watch and just recognize. And I know there's a number of these incredible women who are here today and at this event. And this is a really important award to me to show the future potential CPAs who are out there that we are a diverse profession, showing that, you know, we continue to focus on all the women of the profession who have really kind of grounded this profession to start. We had some, you know, we have our women's executive committee. They've done some great work around it. They've identified some of the issues. We've seen improvement in getting women into leadership, which was, you know, you think about the fact that for years, over half of the new entrants to the CPA profession or the accounting profession are women. Yet at some point, you know, our leaders. Leadership inside of firms was only a fraction of what that was. This was a way. The Women's to Watch award and recognition was a way for us to show others that there are opportunities to be a leader in this profession. And, you know, so these women show strength in who they are and what they do, and they're great role models to those for the future. So that said, we are also taking nominations for the. The 2026 Women to Watch awards. That'll be awarded later on. And so this is a great opportunity to recognize leaders. This is going to be open through July 31, so if you know of a female CPA that you want to nominate for this, please do. Because it's always encouraging to hear the stories and be able to recognize those who make the this profession as great as it is. So please do get them recognized
- [67:19]
A
here. We've got some more AI resources here. I referenced this earlier. You know, definitely want to follow some important due diligence steps when you're looking for these new solutions and then build versus buy our partner, you know, partnering, leveraging some of these solutions versus building. So resources to help you with those decisions. I also want to do a shout out to our startup accelerator group that are here at Engage. You can go see them, they'll be in the AICPA booth. We received 160 applications this year, almost all of them focused on AI native, you know, building AI native solutions. What we're trying to do here is just spur in innovation, work with the tech community to drive solutions for the firms as well as members in business and industry. We got digital CPA coming up. This is an award that is gaining more and more focus. So we welcome you nominating your fellow practitioners for the Innovative Practitioner of the Year award that will be given at digital CPA. Nomination deadline is July 17th. So here we are. We do still have a few minutes left for open forum, so I'm going to. We've got the conference IO we've got a question that I think the top question so far is. I don't think it's really for us might be for the final keynote of the day. Will we see Deadpool in either of the next two adventures? I don't know, Mark, if you found
- [68:56]
D
that out, what was the question?
- [68:59]
F
Is Deadpool going to make an appearance in either of the next two Avenger movies?
- [69:03]
A
It's Orion. We'll try to get to that. To Ryan Reynolds.
- [69:06]
D
We could probably hire somebody in Vegas to be dressed as Deadpool and say they're Ryan Reynolds or he would have exceptional.
- [69:13]
F
How about I just volunteer to ask Ryan?
- [69:15]
A
There you go. So that's coming up. I think we, we did. And Mark, you've hit you, you understand this feedback on the website talk. We, we talked about that but clearly this is. You've got the community centers, but you're also working on addressing the platform.
- [69:33]
D
Yeah, the platform issues. I mean it's been, you know, it has. I've leaned in on this a bit over the last 16, 18 months. And I, we, we, we are getting better. I know we, we were better on our firm billing issues that were out there are just general billing related issues. We're working on getting Stripe incorporated into some of our purchasing power, which is going to make it a little easier in doing, you know, online commerce with us, the website again. And this is what I said, you know, and with having AICPA and SEMA and then we jammed it all together, is trying to figure out what that looks like. Scott Spiegel is here, our coo. He's got a lot on his plate about digital transformation. And we continue down this path takes time. You know, we had some big systems that were trying to, to unravel, trying to get out of contracts to do that. So it is going to take a little bit of time. But I am excited. But having Engage365, which wasn't even talked about, I mean we launched it at Engage last year. Right. And it wasn't even on the platform to give that as part of the solution and getting everybody over there to see the resources. Jan, that became the focal point. We could get the website, you know, this fixed at some point in time. But get over to those communities and you're going to have a better experience with AICP out of the gate and be able to read J of A in print so you don't have to go to the digital version. That too helps.
- [71:00]
A
Okay, well, thanks for that, Mark. I'm just going down the list here. Thanks for submitting these via conference IO AI is getting booed at college graduations across the country as we plan to utilize it to move forward. How do we guard against negative public perception? I mean it is, it's the big, it's probably the biggest technology change of the 21st century, even going back to the last century. So a lot of anxiety. And I think it's something we, when we talked about, you know, the, the, some of the AI policies that are being put forth, a lot of things to think about in the college campuses. One thing they're concerned about is, you know, how it's going to affect their, their employment.
- [71:43]
D
Yep, absolutely. So we're hearing that. I'm getting that from members. I have members saying, you know, my daughter's thinking about getting into accounting. What do I tell her? I'm like, tell her absolutely. Why wouldn't you? And they're like, well, I'm worried about AI. Well, again, for those who embrace it, it's going to be there. And again, we have to keep pushing forward because the opportunities are Going to be tremendous.
- [72:03]
E
It goes back to us telling a better story. If we tell that story about a profession and that's every one of us, not just the people up here.
- [72:10]
D
That's right.
- [72:11]
E
That will impact the student.
- [72:12]
A
Yeah, it is. Well, I mean, I think for the firms, for members in business and industry, it's an incredible opportunity to just be more strategic and have the mundane work
- [72:25]
D
automated tell the story. That said, that's the big thing. And I had one of our members, you know, tell me, you know, I talked to my daughter out of getting into accounting. I told her, you don't want to do that, you should pick something else. I said, what does she do? He says, well, she's a cardiologist. I said, why? Because the hours are better. Right. And you can't even say the income at some point. They're all employees of these big hospital groups now today. So, you know, it's all relative. And yeah, we work hard. There's no doubt about it. And I'm proud of the fact of working hard and you know, I think it is still a good story.
- [73:00]
A
All right, so we're kind of in pure lightning round. We got maybe a couple. Mark, I know you like seven year old grandmas. That comment earlier, it did a few people saying 70 year old grandmas are good members.
- [73:12]
E
You know, there are plenty of 70 year old grandmothers that are very technologically adept.
- [73:17]
D
Listen, I'm not far away from being in that category. Like, you know,
- [73:23]
A
sue here. We'll end on this question here and then close out the town hall and this opening session here at Engage. Has there been an increase in undergraduate accounting students based on the bachelor's plus two year change?
- [73:38]
B
Yeah, I don't think we quite know that yet. I think we'll know more next year. But this is the third year in a row where we're seeing increases in enrollments and they are converting to graduates and they are sitting for the CPA exam. So like the elevator. It's a really good story and we should be proud of all the work that everybody in this audience has done.
- [74:03]
D
But that happened, you know, the increase in enrollment happened before bachelor's even happened.
- [74:08]
B
Yeah, it did.
- [74:09]
D
So that is a good story. That was unpacked part of what you put into place and all that. But then also, you know what I worry about, and this is where we all need to lean in a little bit, is that this actually adds candidates to the system now. And if there's a softening of employment inside of firms, just temporarily, you know, we don't need kids going back to school saying, well, you know, don't finish in accounting, there's no jobs. We're doubling in essence almost the number of candidates available to work based on the Bachelor's coming into place.
- [74:44]
B
And if you couple that with the Profession Ready Institute, you've got a really
- [74:48]
D
good story to tell. There was a headline, I think it was in today that there were 5,400 jobs lost in the last job reports in our category, which is accounting slash bookkeeping slash payroll clerk, which is a pretty darn broad category. I guarantee you we didn't lose 5,400 CPA jobs.
- [75:07]
E
Right.
- [75:08]
D
But in the category of bookkeeping, automation and payroll, there is definitely going to be an effect. So we got to manage the story relative to the headline of who we are as the profession.
- [75:18]
A
That's right, Mark. With that, we're going to have to bring this opening session to a close. This town hall to a close. If this is your first town hall here at Engage, we encourage you to register. Here's the upcoming town halls. What a great kickoff to engage 2026, the 10th anniversary of can't wait to be out there meeting people in the hallways on the trade show throughout the sessions. So Mark, thanks for your leadership. Jan Sue Lisa, it's been a great show today.
- [75:53]
D
Thank you.
- [75:54]
B
Thank you for your participation. You can also subscribe to the AICPA Town hall series on your favorite podcast platform, as well as Watch archives on YouTube and find resources@cpa.com Tune in for live broadcasts Thursdays at 3pm Eastern Time.
- [76:15]
G
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