Insights, guides, and updates
AICPA leadership opened Engage 2026 by naming AI the top issue for CPA firms of every size. After four days on the floor — AI-native ledgers, closed walls, and a profession aiming at 2030 — here's why the real deadline is 2028.
In the last few months, agents running on Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 changed what AI can do — but the training most firms will buy to keep up is still a 2024 prompt-engineering course. The skills that actually build an AI-native team are learned through reps in your own work, and the most valuable may not even count as CPD. Here are the six questions to grade any AI training before you book it.
Ramp shipped an "AI operating system" built for accounting firms, Karbon and Firm360 opened MCP sockets to whatever AI you bring, Thrive put $1 billion on the table to buy firms like yours — and 69% of tax pros told a surveyor the hourly billing model is ending. Not one major model release all week. The fight has moved up the stack, to who holds your firm's encoded knowledge and who controls the door.
YC's AI stack works because they gave the agent direct access to their data. Most CAS firms have done the opposite — locked AI out of everything and then wondered why it isn't very smart. The real question for your firm isn't whether to give AI access. It's how much, of what, with what controls.
OpenAI and Thrive just shipped a self-improving tax agent at 97% draft accuracy — built by six months of OpenAI's forward-deployed engineers and researchers embedded across a 30-firm network. It isn't a service OpenAI sells; it's what happens inside a company OpenAI owns equity in. But the loop the agent runs on sits one layer down the stack, fits in your sprint, and is the only version that doesn't turn your firm into someone else's training data.
You've inherited that workbook — beautiful structure, validated, and wrong every month nobody caught it. AI now ships polish in seconds, and in CAS, polish is what your clients pay for as a proxy for trust. Here's the one prompting habit, and the design principle underneath it, that separates Champions from Copilot users.
