The Future of CPAs: How AI is Transforming the Accounting Profession

It's no surprise that artificial intelligence continues to dominate Wall Street as well as Silicon Valley, both as a technology and also as an investment theme.

Now from the Mag 7 mega caps to traditional software makers, the entire industry is going all in on the tech.

Now tech leaders are making this major pivot because the new Agenteer is finally solving AI's return on investment problem, but companies now deploying the tech to manage client relationships as well as scale up operations without adding headcount and also tackle high cost human problems.

It's also becoming crucial for driving seamless interoperability across different platforms.

Well joining me live here at the New York Stock Exchange is Jin Chang, CEO & co-founder of Fieldguide.

Jin, great to have you here.

Thank you so much for joining me, thanks so much for having Field Guide on the show.

Talking about artificial intelligence, the technology, as well as the investment theme, we know that there's a lot of noise.

So what does that actually take to deploy AI when we're talking about regulated industries?

Yes, so Field Guide is an enterprise AI company that's fully dedicated to a highly regulated compliant industry called the CPA profession.

Uh, we specifically serve audit and advisory practitioners.

These are the people who facilitate trust between, you know, many listed companies and their stakeholders, of course.

So we take it very seriously, uh, when it comes to building domain-specific AI.

For the CPA profession, and what that means is beyond just speed, beyond just accuracy, improving the quality of the work itself, the quality of the assurance, being very respectful of the compliance heavy nature of this work, the auditability, the traceability.

That's required for trusted AI.

You know, this is not something that, you know, two kids in a garage can create in a weekend.

It's very domain specific AI that's professional grade.

Yeah, so you mentioned domain specific artificial intelligence, especially agentic AI.

What are some of the challenges in your space and what can humans actually solve?

Versus say AI put simply, Field Guide is aiming to automate the work that is manually intensive and frankly it's the work that folks don't want to do, right?

Human experts are uniquely positioned to provide really great advice to their clients, often the most sophisticated companies in the world, and What that means is respecting what human practitioners and the standard setting bodies, the professional standards require of human practitioners.

So the way we think about field guide and our AI philosophy is we are enabling practitioners to do the best work of their careers.

We are helping CPA firms.

Meet the rising complexities and needs of these organizations despite having a talent shortage, so the CPA firms needed to do more with less is now a must-have, not a nice to have, and the field guide is entirely designed around serving that and here on Wall Street we pay attention to labor market data and what. is doing two traditional roles.

So when we're talking about CPAs, what's the reality on the ground?

The reality is there are not enough people in the CPA profession.

I come from practice myself.

I started my career at one of the big four, and I entered that career with grand aspirations to one day become a practice leading partner or a CFO one day.

The tragedy there is I didn't enjoy the manual work involved, so I left the profession seeking to build something new for the world.

Of course at that time I didn't know that I would be back in the space, the CPA industry to help this industry now.

Turns out I wasn't the only one who felt that way.

Many folks are leaving the profession and not enough people are entering the profession, meaning CPA firms to meet the rising needs and complexity they need to.

The people do the best work of their careers and you bring up an important point because whether we're talking about entry level lawyers or CPAs or even a financial analysts, it's that work the mistakes that you make right at the entry level that really helps you learn what to do, what not to do so when it comes to AI how much is required from an actual human being in terms of oversight.

So the reality is the way we train and upskill, reskill our workforce, and this applies to every industry out there, of course we're talking specifically about the CPA profession, but the way we train our workforce and reskill them for the next era is in fact going to be different.

And at Field Guide, we don't just build great AI software for this profession, we also think about how to best help the industry reskill as well.

So that means.

In fact, training, uh, junior auditors on the basics, having them go through some mistakes, but not having to do those same mistakes for multiple years, perhaps accelerating that time frame and and presenting a more attractive career for junior auditors who are considering entering this profession.

And finally, before I let you go, we have about 60 seconds here.

So when it comes to the regulatory landscape, I'm sure you have many conversations with stakeholders.

What do you need?

What do you think needs to happen when it comes to guardrails?

Well, the reality is regulators and accounting standard setting bodies are already lagging where the pace of AI is.

And to be fair, the pace of AI is something that humans have never seen before.

I'm sure you are seeing this in your in your show as well, but Um, uh, regulators and standard setting bodies are doing their absolute best to, uh, uh, stay on pace with the pace of AI development, uh, and we at Field Guide, uh, we are having active conversations with these standard setting bodies on how audit methodologies should change for the new era.

Well, Jon, it, it's great having you here.

Thank you so much for joining us and thank you so much for sharing your perspective.

Thanks so much.

Thank you.