On the agenda: Consolidation, ethics, AI, and talent.
By CPA Trendlines
The CPA profession arrives at its biggest annual gathering this month, carrying two truths that refuse to sit comfortably together: It has never been worth more money. And it has never been less sure of what it is becoming.
MORE AICPA
AICPA and CIMA convene ENGAGE 2026 at the ARIA in Las Vegas, June 8 through 11 and the 10th-anniversary theme — “The Next Wave: A Decade of Possibility Starts Now” — markets the milestone while signaling the unease beneath it.
More than 250 speakers spread across nine tracks, and somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 attendees fill the rooms, but the program reads less like a curriculum than a diagnosis. Artificial intelligence, private equity consolidation, a stubborn talent gap and shifting licensure rules all press on the profession at once and the agenda treats them as the same story told from different angles.
The keynote slate is built around outsiders looking in. Actor and entrepreneur Ryan Reynolds shares the Monday stage with former Costco CFO Richard Galanti in a paired conversation about brand, growth, and the financial decisions behind headline exits – creative disruptor beside four decades of disciplined finance stewardship, sold in the same 75-minute block.
Clara Shih, who led Agentforce as CEO of Salesforce AI and now runs Business AI at Meta, carries the AI keynote, framing the year’s central question as how to preserve human judgment as intelligent systems absorb more of the work.
Town Hall
“If you want to find a job and if you want to keep your job, you need to learn how to get really good at using AI agents,” she says.
Geopolitical analyst Ian Bremmer closes Thursday with the macro backdrop for a year in which most business leaders already tell the AICPA that tariffs are scrambling their planning.
The substance, though, belongs to the people who run the profession.
The AICPA Town Hall opens the conference as a keynote for the first time, putting AICPA officials Mark Koziel, Erik Asgeirsson, Susan Coffey and Jan Lewis on the main stage, with Mark Peterson’s Washington Update closing the week.
Pivotal moment
Koziel, who succeeded Barry Melancon, the longest-serving CEO in AICPA history at the start of 2025, spends his second year naming the same pressures he named in his first.
He points to an additional pathway to CPA licensure, the talent pipeline, AI as a way to strip out routine work and the expansion of advisory services. On private equity, he is notably non-defensive. He insists PE money cannot be allowed to compromise audit quality, then argues that the capital teaches the profession a lesson it has dodged for years.
“What can we learn from private equity?” he asks. “Partner accountability.”
Asgeirsson, who leads the AICPA’s technology arm CPA.com, has made agentic AI the organizing idea. Announcing the 2026 startup accelerator cohort in March, he called it a pivotal moment for the profession, and that cohort presents at ENGAGE, turning the conference floor into a showroom for the next round of accounting-specific AI tooling.
New tools
The keynotes set the mood. The breakout sessions show the anxiety. Consolidation runs through the agenda, from a session on the five seismic shifts reshaping the next five years, led by Platform Accounting Group, to a candid M&A panel of firm owners who sold, merged or walked away, featuring Sorren and Basis.
Private equity ethics, once a thought experiment, is now a live regulatory matter. Every firm that broke into the 2026 Accounting Today Top 100 carries private equity backing, and within weeks, the International Ethics Standards Board for Accountants launched a formal inquiry into whether new standards are needed. The board’s move followed the AICPA’s own Professional Ethics Executive Committee, which approved an exposure draft on alternative practice structures in December. A progress report on the international workstream is due at the board’s June meeting, the same month ENGAGE convenes, and a dedicated session walks firms through what the inquiry means, whether they are PE-backed or watching from the sidelines.
AI shows up less as spectacle than as plumbing. The agenda includes a technical build workshop with required pre-work, a rapid-fire panel on tools that did not exist 12 months ago and a live automation build that promises one hour, one real accounting problem and one working automation constructed from a blank screen, with no canned demo.
The deeper question surfaces in a session, asking how junior accountants learn when AI does the grunt work that used to train them. Talent fills the rest of the program, in return-to-office debates, distributed and offshore team management, neurodivergent-inclusion systems and the retention of younger professionals, with a framing that has moved well beyond free lunches and flexible hours.