A newly released report from two major accounting industry organizations is full of relatively clear-eyed advice when it comes to navigating the stark AI and technological changes that are expected to continue broadly reshaping the accounting profession in the coming decade.
The crowd-sourced 44-page paper: Rise 2040: Shaping the Future of Finance and Accounting Vision Report from the American Institute of CPAs and the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants presents the shifts as a call to action for accountants. At the same time, the report also acknowledges anxiety and concerns about jobs being displaced and what that future will look like.
Tom Hood, executive vice president of business engagement and growth at AICPA and CIMA, said in an interview Friday that the report’s findings grew out of discussions led by the organizations from June 2025 to January, with more than 6,000 accountants, CFOs, controllers and educators in 25 countries. The results as a whole represent one of the industry’s first global responses to the AI-related changes affecting the profession and a blueprint for how to navigate the new era, Hood said.
“Yes, fear was in the discussions but then…when you shift your brain into, ‘how do I find an opportunity in this?’ it flips to optimism,” Hood told CFO Dive. Among the challenges ahead, for example, will be training a new generation of accountants that will oversee technology and check its results without ever having done the routine work themselves. The profession and education will ultimately be “teaching people accounting when they’re not going to do accounting,” Hood said.
Below are four predictions for the future change coming to the accounting industry, and some solutions for addressing them:
- AI-enabled accounting expansion will lead compliance to become “invisible,” audit to become a continuous activity and require entry-level roles to be redesigned. Some ways to “pre-solve” the predictable problems to which this could lead include creating AI-driven “institutional memory” and providing risk and fraud monitoring through ongoing analytics, according to the report.
- Automation and AI will reduce costs, compress labor time and affect demand for talent. To address this, accounting firms can consider implementing subscription or value-based pricing or consider offering “CFO-as-a-Service,” according to the report.
- Workforce reinvention and the increasingly AI-enabled profession could lead to a breakdown of traditional training pathways and loss of institutional knowledge. The report advised companies can consider implementing intergenerational training and “human-AI” training models, among other solutions.
- As “manual processes fail,” a premium will be placed on trust and assurance. “As complexity increases, the need for trusted professionals, ethical oversight and high-quality standards increases alongside it,” the report states. Professionals can consider developing “trust score platforms” and implementing automated anomoly detection.
