CFO Dive recently reported that finance and accounting are now the fastest-growing business majors in the country. 

Enrollment is up 9.4% in finance and 8.9% in accounting this spring, far outpacing the 2.2% growth across business majors overall. After years of shortages in accounting talent, that's a remarkable reversal.

It's not an accident. More than 40 states have rewritten CPA licensing rules so candidates can obtain the certification with a bachelor's degree instead of an extra year of school. Big 4 firms have doubled their CPA exam bonus to $10,000, and starting pay is up. 

The industry put real effort into making the profession attractive again, and students are responding. That solves the recruiting problem but sets up the next challenge: ensuring that professionals entering the industry use AI as a launchpad for judgment, not as a substitute. 

I started my career at EY. I know what the old path looked like —  years of ticking and typing. 

Typing client data into spreadsheets, reconciling line items by hand, and learning the craft, one tedious work paper at a time. It was grueling, but it built something. It taught a generation of accountants how a number moves from a source document to financial statements, and what signals to look for when something doesn't add up.

AI is now capable of performing many of the tasks that used to occupy a staff auditor's first two years. It reads PDFs and extracts data in seconds, not days. It tests entire populations rather than small samples. It matches records in real time instead of during the late nights of a tight audit deadline. 

For firms, that's an obvious win on cost and quality. But it raises questions about the new wave of professionals. If a new accountant never spends the early years of their career understanding how transactions flow through accounting records and how different systems should and should not correlate to one another, do they still build the instinct and experience that comes from doing it the hard way?

Professional judgment is built through repetition, recognizing where something looks slightly off in the smallest details, and learning to see the red flags. Automate that practice away too fast, and firms risk recruiting the largest cohort of new accountants in years while failing to develop the next generation of partners from it. 

Worse yet, you begin to undermine the very foundation of audit quality, which the firms have spent years developing systems and processes to improve. 

With the industry’s adoption of AI, the judgment-building work doesn't disappear. Instead of two years on data entry, a new hire can spend two years asking why the AI flagged this transaction and not that one, learning to interrogate evidence rather than just sign off. 

Instead of learning materiality through rote calculation, for example, they learn it by reviewing AI-assisted analysis and deciding whether the output actually holds up for this client. 

Professional judgment is the piece that can't be outsourced. AI can extract the data, run the population test, and flag the anomaly. It cannot decide whether a number is defensible or whether to push back on a client's explanation. Accounting decisions still ultimately involve human judgment based upon years of training and experience. 

I don't think the answer is slowing AI down to preserve the old training ground. That would waste the very efficiency and opportunities AI brings to advance audit quality. The answer is that firms need a structured, deliberate approach to deploying AI systems, and there needs to be firm-level monitoring of how AI is being deployed in their engagements. 

As with any significant shift, organizations need a change management framework and governance structure that prioritizes AI execution and staff development equally. 

Given that nearly 75% of the CPA workforce reached the retirementage in 2020, we should celebrate the fact that the accounting profession is beginning to win back a new generation of talent. However, developing and retaining that talent will be critical in the AI era. 

Our profession will change more in the next five years than at any point in history, and it is up to all of us to ensure that the next generation of CPAs understands the judgment behind the work, not just the work itself.