On Monday, Vault came out with its Accounting 25—the best 25 accounting firms to work for, according to more than 13,000 professionals the career intelligence company surveyed—and the top spots are likely unsurprising to anybody. PwC, KPMG, and EY took first, second, and third place, in that order.

Deloitte, the fourth of the Big 4 accounting firms, wasn’t ranked this year because the company chose not to distribute the survey to employees, Derek Loosvelt, Vault’s editorial director, told CFO Brew. Deloitte ranked second overall last year, Loosvelt noted.

Rounding out the Top 10 were BDO USA, Plante Moran, CohnReznick, Baker Tilly, RSM, Schellman, and Moss Adams.

Vault ranks firms based on criteria including prestige, company culture, compensation, diversity, and work/life balance. Respondents ranked PwC as the most prestigious accounting firm. Next were Deloitte, EY, KPMG, Grant Thornton, BDO, RSM, Baker Tilly, Crowe, and CohnReznick. Deloitte appeared on this list because Vault asks respondents to rank the prestige of companies other than their own, Loosvelt explained.

For more on the top accounting firms, click here.—AZ

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If you’ve heard anything about Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s annual shareholder letter, chances are it was his prediction that AI could become the biggest tech development since the internet itself. But it’s what he said elsewhere in his nearly 5,500-word letter that really got our attention. Let’s see what the world’s second-largest retailer has in store (in about 5,000 fewer words).

“Shovels” ’n’ More. About that AI prediction. While AWS is the world’s largest cloud provider, AWS and Amazon overall have not kept up with big tech rivals on AI. Jassy himself wrote that “the vast majority” of new AI applications that could “transform virtually every customer experience that we know (and invent altogether new ones as well)” and “will ultimately be built by other companies.”

Wait. Amazon, of all companies, is heralding the future of a technology (1) that they’re getting beat on and (2) for which they have no plans to dominate? That doesn’t sound very Amazonian.

Except it is, because “much of this world-changing AI will be built on top of AWS” through its software services and AI chips, Jassy wrote. Amazon will benefit from AI developers’ massive demand for computing power and tools without the risk of building the world-changing AI itself. It’s the strategy of “in a gold rush, sell shovels.”

Click here to read more about Amazon’s AI plans.—GD

Allow us some late ’90s cringe for a second here: People be shopping.

At least, that’s what the latest batch of Census Bureau data, not a wince-worthy standup comic, had to say about the matter. Retail sales climbed 0.7% in March, handily beating the 0.3%–0.4% economists expected, per Dow Jones and FactSet.

And while the jump wasn’t as high as February’s 0.9% leap, it still marked the second consecutive month of gains.

The climb in spending is also notable given last week’s data from the Labor Department, which found that in March, the consumer price index rose 0.4% from the previous month, and 3.5% year over year. Even in the face of rising prices, people be shopping.

The solid retail stats could also complicate the Fed’s rate cut plans. Coupled with the hotter-than-expected March jobs report, the economy continues to look solid, likely giving the Federal Reserve little incentive to cut rates in the near future.

For more on the impact of the March retail spending report, click here.—NP

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