Manage equity without headaches. Running a company is a complex skill. Managing your cap table shouldn’t make it harder. Growing companies use Pulley to simplify equity management from fundraise modeling to tender offers. Master running your business with help from Pulley.
The AI-in-accounting takeover is real, and it’s here. More than one in five professionals at tax accounting and audit firms said they’re already using generative AI technology, a big jump from 8% in 2024, a Thomson Reuters survey found. Just this week, accounting firm RSM announced a $1 billion investment in AI technology.
As AI gains a stronger foothold at accounting firms, the next logical question is how they’re using the technology, exactly. Executives at two of the six largest US accounting firms helped CFO Brew answer that question.
The big takeaway? AI will place employee productivity on a higher plane of existence.
“We expect AI to make us more productive, make sure people are focused on their highest and best use, and not spending their time on lower-value activities,” Eric Miles, CEO-elect of Baker Tilly, told CFO Brew. Baker Tilly, by the way, recently joined forces with Moss Adams to become the sixth-largest accounting firm in the US.
Boredom, begone. One of the potential promises of AI is that it’ll remove the mundane, drudge work from our jobs. For PwC CFO Colin Wittmer, that promise is panning out.
PwC teams have already created AI tools for account reconciliation and consolidations, payroll, expense reports, journal entries, and pieces of internal auditing, according to Wittmer.
“I’m starting with the low-hanging fruit, but you get really good results with the low-hanging fruit,” he said.
Wittmer told us one of the biggest improvements has been around the company’s monthly management report. At the end of the month, his team prepares an analysis of its three lines of service: assurance, tax, and advisory. According to Wittmer, “the AI has accelerated that by at least a week.”
Dashboards that pull and aggregate from databases are nothing new, but for Wittmer, it’s “the query-ability” that sets the AI apart. He can load in the monthly package and ask the AI where the company should focus if it wants to, say, improve the tax business’s profitability. And it spits out an answer.
A how-to guide for implementation. PwC is also making a billion-dollar investment in AI, and recently rolled out corporate LLM tools, including a proprietary ChatPwC tool using Microsoft Azure’s OpenAI Service that integrates with OpenAI’s technology. The company has also given 95% of its US workforce AI training, and nearly 80% of its employees use the AI tools daily, according to Wittmer.
To help implement the tech, a specialist team at the company works in two-week sprints to see if it can automate a task using ChatPwC or ChatGPT. The team trains the AI by querying to “train the model to do what a human otherwise would do. And there's a lot of monitoring...They get better with time. They get better with more queries,” he said.
“Innovation should happen everywhere. Industrialization of an innovation should happen at the center and then go back out,” he added.
If the sprint hits KPIs like addressing a user need, “integrates into existing workflows, and drives measurable
improvements in efficiency, accuracy, and decision-making,” then the automation is expanded for the entire organization.
For PwC’s management report, Wittmer concluded the AI was successful because he saw increased accuracy and consistency, and his team spent less time gathering the data. When it came to AR reconciliations, his confidence in rolling out the tool stemmed not just from its efficiency and “reduction in manual effort,” but from the fact that many on his team were already using and trusting it. (One KPI for PwC is strong user adoption.)
Baker Tilly also has an innovation team that considers how new AI tools could improve efficiencies and how easily they can be implemented, according to Miles. The “ultimate test” for that team, he said, is to pitch their proposed innovations to service line leaders who’d be using it in practice, to see if the tool “has legs.”
“If an AI proof of concept can help us serve the middle market better, that’s got to be a criterion,” Miles said. “If it’s just an efficiency enhancement, but doesn’t make us more effective with a client service, to me, that’s not as impactful.”
But they do have concerns. “It’s smart," PwC’s Wittmer said. “And you can train it. But human intuition is hard to mimic.” And sometimes the AI is missing important nuances that are unique to PwC’s business, he said.
He wants his finance team at PwC to move beyond grunt work and focus on the business’s most impactful areas—using that human intuition for pricing and market analysis, developing new services, and identifying ways to improve cash flow.
“Every CFO has a list of 50 projects that [if] they could get to it, they would do it, but their people are tied up in things that AI could actually basically do for them,” he said. “Let’s take those people and focus them on higher-impact stuff.”
And in terms of job replacement, Wittmer said he wouldn’t be hiring “50 people to work down [his] project list” anyway. Instead, he envisions a future where the firm grows while headcount remains stable.
This tracks with what other finance professionals told CFO Brew at the 2025 Gartner CFO & Finance Executive Conference. Leaders at Brex and Microsoft said that, while they’re not letting anyone go, they also didn’t plan to grow their finance teams much, either.
Jeff Ferro, CEO of Baker Tilly, said AI will “enhance” rather than outright replace the work of many accounting professionals. Job replacements will happen only at the “lowest levels,” he predicted.
Alternatively, other executives expect a significant impact to white collar workers—which could include those in finance. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently predicted that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level office jobs in the next few years.
Regardless, the AI revolution is here, and public accounting seems ready to capitalize.
“It’s coming,” Ferro said of AI reforms. “What it’s actually, finally going to look like, I don’t think anybody really knows, but it is coming and it is going to disrupt.”