Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant concept for the accounting profession—it’s a rapidly evolving reality. And according to accounting researcher and educator David Wood, the biggest challenge for CPAs today isn’t whether AI will impact the profession. It’s how quickly firms and professionals are willing to adapt.

Wood, an accounting professor at Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Business and a recipient of the 2025 AICPA Distinguished Achievement in Accounting Education Award, recently joined a CEO Chat discussion to explore how AI is reshaping accounting, education, and professional development. His message to the profession was clear: the future of accounting will belong to those willing to experiment, learn continuously, and rethink how work gets done.

A Tool, a Partner, or Something Else Entirely?

One of the first questions posed to Wood was one that practitioners across the country are still debating: Is AI a tool, a team partner or something else? His answer cut through the noise immediately.

“The reason there are so many different opinions about AI right now is because it’s so new,” he explained. “Nobody really knows what it is or where it’s going—and that’s the fun part. If you get involved now, you get to help establish what the future looks like.”

Wood described adoption as a spectrum: early adopters diving in headfirst, skeptics holding back and a third camp that has decided to sit it out entirely. That last group, he warned, risks becoming progressively smaller and less competitive. For CPAs and firm leaders, the message was clear: neutrality is not a safe position.

He also identified two critical mistakes leaders make. The first is falling into extremes and either dismissing AI as hype or treating it as an infallible oracle. The second, and perhaps more costly, is trying something once, finding it lacking and never returning.

“Somebody might try it once, decide it didn’t work, and then think they don’t have to worry about it anymore,” he said. “But the technology is progressing so rapidly that if it couldn’t do something a month ago, you should try it again.”

To illustrate the dangers of that mindset, Wood offered a striking data point: when ChatGPT-4 was tested against CPA, CIA, CMA and enrolled agent exam questions, it struggled to pass. Just 18 months later, though, a comparable model achieved a perfect score on the same multiple-choice questions. The pace of change, he emphasized, demands constant re-engagement.

The broader implication for CPAs is that continuous learning is no longer optional.

“This isn’t like sending someone to Excel training and expecting that knowledge to last their whole career,” he said. “Once you start down the AI path, you have to keep educating yourself and trying new things.”

Transactional vs. Transformational: The Mindset That Matters

A central theme of the conversation was what Wood calls the difference between transactional and transformational AI use. Transactional use means offloading a task—pasting a prompt, getting an answer, moving on. Transformational use means asking a deeper question: How can I use this to do my work better than it has ever been done before, possibly better than anyone in history has done it?

“The question becomes: how can you use AI to do something better than you’ve ever done it before?” Wood said. “Maybe even better than anyone in history has done it.”

For CPAs, that could mean reimagining how audits are conducted, how tax preparation workflows operate or how insights are delivered to clients.

“Accounting has traditionally been a profession where processes change slowly,” Wood noted. “AI is forcing us to rethink those processes in entirely new ways.”

CPAs and firm professionals that only use AI to shave minutes off routine tasks will likely see incremental gains, Wood said. But those that use it to rethink service delivery, client advisory and internal workflows entirely will define what modern accounting looks like.

Wood illustrated the point with a student in his data analytics course who, after just four weeks of AI training, was pitching a product he had built to a Fortune 500 company. The barriers to creating meaningful, client-facing innovations have collapsed.

“It shows how powerful these tools can be,” Wood said. “Anyone who has the curiosity and willingness to experiment can accomplish things that would have been impossible before.”

His practical advice for professionals who want to start: open an AI tool every morning alongside your email. Experiment daily. Build a small peer group—a lunch rotation—where members share one thing that worked each week. Let the AI itself suggest what to learn next. Then set your news feed to surface the latest developments. Competence compounds quickly when approached this way.

The Experience Gap Is Not Generational—It’s Experiential

For decades, accounting has operated as an apprenticeship profession. Staff learn from seniors, seniors from managers, managers from partners. That hierarchy rested on the assumption that experience accumulates linearly. AI has disrupted that assumption in a fundamental way.

“The gaps we’re seeing are not between partner and staff. It’s between who is using AI and who is not,” Wood said.

Wood shared an example that captured this idea: one of his students was invited to walk a multibillion-dollar private company’s C-suite through a generative AI governance framework. The executives had more years in the profession than the student had been alive, but the student had spent time immersed in the technology and they had not. The gap was experiential, not generational.

For firm leaders, the takeaway is that internal AI capability—or the lack of it—is already sorting talent in ways that traditional credentials cannot capture. Hiring decisions, development investments and client assignments may all need to be reconsidered through this lens. It also means firms have an opportunity to invest in AI fluency today to create a meaningful and durable competitive advantage, regardless of firm size.

The Future of Audit and Tax: Big Questions, Bigger Opportunities

Wood reserved some of his most forward-looking comments for the audit and assurance space, where he does much of his research. He described the current environment as a three-way standoff: regulators trying to understand AI, audit firms trying to implement it and preparers waiting for guidance.

The result is a profession that knows transformation is coming but is struggling to move in concert.

In the near term, he sees AI agents taking over tasks that have long consumed staff hours: rolling forward prior-year work papers, reconciliations and preliminary analytical procedures.

Wood also described ongoing research into AI-powered audit interviews. Studies conducted before generative AI emerged found that individuals were more willing to disclose misconduct to a computer than to a human being, because there was no perceived judgment. If AI interviewers can outperform human ones in eliciting accurate disclosures, the implications for fraud detection and internal audit are significant.

Looking even farther into the future, Wood offered a continuous assurance model, where a financial institution, for example, could deploy a program that allows any authorized party to query financial records in real time, rather than waiting for a point-in-time audit. That may lead to a time where the annual audit engagement is supplemented—or supplanted—by ongoing, AI-driven monitoring with a human auditor verifying that the system is properly installed and functioning. For CPAs in assurance, this is both a challenge and an invitation to invent entirely new service offerings.

Trust Remains the Profession’s Unassailable Asset

Amid all the disruption, Wood stressed that one constant of the accounting profession is not going anywhere: it is built on trust, and that is something AI cannot replicate.

“We are all about trust. Someone gives me all their financial information. They have to trust me. That requires relationships, and that human skill is so important,” he said.

As AI absorbs more of the procedural work that once occupied junior staff, the time and capacity freed up will flow toward the work that matters most: understanding client goals, navigating complex situations, providing judgment-driven counsel and maintaining the relationships that make clients return. The CPAs who thrive will be those who deploy AI to handle the column of a thousand numbers and then invest the recovered hours in deepening the human relationships that no algorithm can replicate.

An Optimistic Charge for the Profession

For CPAs, the answers to current and future questions about the impact of of AI will be written in the choices made now: whether to experiment or wait, to invest in learning or protect existing habits, to see AI as a threat or as the most powerful tool the profession has ever been handed. The conversation is happening everywhere—in classrooms, boardrooms and regulator roundtables.

“The big question everyone is asking is: what should the accountant of the future look like?” Wood said. “We’re trying to gather as much data as possible to help answer that.”

But he emphasized that firms themselves must be part of the conversation.

“If you’re an accounting firm hiring students, you should be talking with universities,” Wood said. “Tell them what skills you need. Ask what they’re teaching. That dialogue is critical.”

Ultimately, the profession’s ability to adapt will depend on how willing CPAs are to experiment and learn alongside emerging technology.

“The people who will succeed in this environment are the ones who stay curious,” Wood said. “Start using AI every day, try new things, and learn from others who are experimenting too.”

For CPAs, firms and financial professionals alike, the AI era isn’t something to watch from the sidelines. It’s something to actively help shape.

Check out the full CEO Chat on demand by registering and accessing the event in your Activities. Designed exclusively for our Elite Tier members, these CEO Chats bring you insights from some of the leading experts in the accounting and finance profession to keep you informed on the biggest challenges and trends. Be a part of the next conversation: Join us June 17 for the next CEO Chat installment.