The accounting profession’s own leadership just put a timeline on when most of what accountants do today will be done by machines, and it’s sooner than you might think.
In this week’s episode of The Accounting Podcast, hosts Blake Oliver and David Leary returned from AICPA Engage in Las Vegas with some eye-opening news. The AICPA released a major report declaring that by 2040, routine compliance work like tax returns, audits, and bookkeeping (which make up about 80% of what accounting firms do) will be largely automated. Some industry leaders think it’ll happen even faster, maybe by 2030.
But that’s just one of the big changes coming. Private equity firms are pouring billions into accounting firms, and David has a theory about why that should worry everyone. Plus, Blake scored an exclusive interview with Shelly Weir from the Florida Institute of CPAs, who spent two years fighting legislation that would have eliminated their Board of Accountancy. She hadn’t talked to any media about it until now.
The Clock Is Ticking on Compliance Work
The AICPA report, Rise 2040: Shaping the Future of Finance and Accounting, surveyed thousands of accountants worldwide and concluded the bread-and-butter work of the profession has maybe 15 years left in its current form.
“Some timelines are even more aggressive,” Blake noted during the episode. “Allan Koltin recently said it’s by 2030.”
So what happens when machines take over compliance? According to Tom Hood from AICPA and CIMA, accountants will shift to four main roles: strategic guidance, AI oversight, data translation, and human-centered advisory. Basically, we’ll supervise the robots instead of doing the work ourselves.
David pushed back on the human advisory part. “I completely disagree,” he said. “I think the clients themselves would rather just chat it out with a bot. They don’t want to talk to the human.”
But Blake raised an important point. “If you don’t have the knowledge about what that AI is talking to you about, how do you know when it’s right and when it’s wrong?”
He’s got a point. Tax professionals are already finding major errors in AI-prepared returns. The analysis looks perfect, but the AI uses the wrong tax brackets or dates. It’s convincingly wrong, which might be worse than obviously wrong.
AI in Accounting Just Crossed a Major Threshold
David met up with three AI accounting founders at Engage: Jeff Seibert from Digits, Sasha Orloff from Puzzle, and Agree Ahmed from Flowglad. They’re all doing something David calls “hidden vibe coding.”
“You chat with these tools, and on the back end, they’re basically building code that’s custom to you and your workflows,” David explained. “Even though you’re not ‘vibe coding,’ you’re vibe coding an app under the covers and don’t even know it.”
The key difference is these tools run the same way every time, unlike chatbots that give different answers to the same question. Blake called this shift from probabilistic to deterministic outputs a game-changer for a profession built on accuracy.
The proof is already out there. OpenAI’s finance team runs with just 200 people. For a company that size, that’s tiny. Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s CFO, called it “really lean.” Industry benchmarks suggest they’d normally need 500 to 1,000 people. Zapier is even more extreme, with seven humans managing nearly 200 AI agents for internal accounting.
So why isn’t everyone jumping on board? The Rise 2040 report is brutally honest: 93% of participants said the biggest barrier to progress is the profession itself. We’re resistant to change. Yet 80% are optimistic about the future, which suggests accountants know change needs to happen even if they’re dragging their feet.
David offered a helpful reframe. “Everybody just got a silent promotion. You’re now being promoted to be a mid-level accounting manager, and you’re going to manage some AI employees.”
Private Equity’s Real Game
While AI is changing what accountants do, private equity is changing who owns the firms, and David has an interesting theory about it.
Take Crowe’s new $3 billion investment from KKR. That’s huge money, but what caught David’s attention is KKR owns companies in ERP systems, IT automation, cybersecurity, healthcare payments (WebMD), and healthcare staffing. And Crowe’s strongest vertical is healthcare.
“They’re not buying accounting firms because they think the accounting firms will make them money,” David argued. “They’re making money because the accounting firms are going to move their other product offerings.”
He compared it to Red Lobster’s bankruptcy. The PE firm that owned Red Lobster also owned shrimp boats and forced the restaurant to buy overpriced shrimp from those boats. The PE firm made money on shrimp; Red Lobster went under. Now, Red Lobster’s new owners, through a complex chain that traces back to Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, which has made massive AI investments, want to make it “the most AI-forward restaurant that exists.”
The pattern shows up elsewhere. Sikich got PE funding from Madison Dearborn Partners, which has big investments in construction and real estate. Those are exactly the niches where Sikich is strong. David envisions accounting firms doing CFO work encountering a client problem and “just happening” to have a sister portfolio company that provides the exact solution needed.
CPAs aren’t blind to this. A recent survey found 57% think PE threatens the CPA brand. And yet many would still take the money if offered.
Florida’s Two-Year Battle to Save the CPA License
Perhaps the biggest threat is deregulation. For two years, Florida fought legislation that would have eliminated its Board of Accountancy, wiped out CPE requirements, and paved the way for the dismantling of CPA licensure.
Shelly Weir, who led the fight, gave Blake her first media interview about it. The bill was massive, with 550 pages targeting CPAs, architects, engineers, veterinarians, realtors, and several other professions. It flew through the House in just 18 days.
“We were literally physically pulling senators off the floor,” Shelly recalled about the final day of the 2025 session, which went until midnight. “I’m like, if there’s one lifeboat, I’m getting on it. Good luck to you people.”
Florida deployed serious resources, including nine lobbyists, public affairs firms, and polling projects. But their smartest move was personal. They found CPAs who knew legislators personally, like college roommates, church friends, and siblings, and had them make the case directly.
Their winning arguments were clever. First, they showed how eliminating the Board would actually create more red tape by breaking the interstate mobility system CPAs have built. Second, instead of just saying no, they developed their own modernization proposals.
“We were the only profession in this particular bill that had taken a moment to self-reflect,” Shelly said.
They beat the bill twice, but Shelly doesn’t think it’s over. “I do not think the issue of deregulation is going away,” she warned.
What Keeps Firms Up at Night
The AICPA also surveyed firms about their top concerns for 2026, and the results show a clear divide by firm size.
Small firms (solos and 2-10-person shops) worry most about keeping up with tax law changes but aren’t concerned about technology adoption or staff workload. Bigger firms have the opposite problem. They can handle tax changes but struggle to retain staff and implement technology.
“I’m wondering if the smaller firms, because they’re capable of adopting technology better, have less workload on their staff,” David observed.
Mid-size firms (11-100 people) are most worried about finding staff. They’re stuck in the middle: too big to be nimble, too small to have big-firm resources.
Only the largest firms (500+) worry about retaining staff, likely because they have many people nearing retirement.
Signs of Hope Amid the Chaos
Despite all these challenges, there are positive signals. Accounting enrollment jumped 8.9% this spring, way above the 1.3% growth for all majors. That’s impressive given the “accounting is dying because of AI” headlines.
The AICPA launched its “Trusted CPA” campaign at Engage, complete with a national TV commercial. David wondered whether this was a legal hack, since some states restrict how CPAs may use the designation. “You can’t put CPA on your LinkedIn page, but you can use the hashtag #TrustedCPA?”
More importantly, 43 states have now passed alternative pathway legislation, and Vermont, Missouri, and Louisiana just joined them. After years of tension between state societies and the AICPA over the 150-hour rule, there’s finally alignment.
“It feels like maybe they’re marching in an aligned point of view,” David observed. “Elevate the CPA brand, don’t let it get deregulated by states.”
Oh, and Someone Stole $7,000 Cash from a Brooklyn Accounting Firm
In lighter news, David shared a bizarre story that had him scratching his head. Police are looking for someone who walked into an accounting firm in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and stole $7,000 in cash right off an employee’s desk.
“First off, what accounting firm has $7,000 just sitting on a desk?” David asked. “What does this accounting firm do that they have this cash lying around? Something doesn’t add up.”
Blake’s take is, “It’s an indication of how much of the profession is still operating 20 years in the past.”
The accounting profession faces three simultaneous pressures from the automation of core work, private equity ownership with potential conflicts, and deregulation threats to the license itself. But the profession is responding. Enrollment is up. States are modernizing pathways. AI tools are getting good enough to actually trust.
Treat this moment as a chance to redefine your value. Don’t wait for someone else to dictate the changes, or you might find there’s nothing left to save.
Want to hear the full discussion, including more details about AI developments and Shelly’s complete interview? Listen to Episode 492 of The Accounting Podcast.