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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Accountants Race to Tame AI before AI Outruns the Practice

Only 1 in 5 firms has an AI strategy, leaving most firms with varying degrees of chaos.

Barely three years since ChatGPT launched, 98% of accountants are using AI regularly. 88% use it in client service.

By CPA Trendlines Research

With artificial intelligence now firmly embedded in the daily life of tax and accounting firms, the profession’s next test is whether practitioners can learn to run AI before AI outruns the practice.

A new crop of research studies and benchmarking surveys suggests firms have yet to fully govern the tools, price the work, train the staff and protect client trust under AI regimes. Reports from the AICPA, Karbon, CPA.com, Blue J, Intuit Firm of the Future, KPMG, Personiv, the ACCA, Rightworks, Business.com and Citrin Cooperman show AI adoption is no longer in doubt. Coping with it is.

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Karbon says 98% of accounting professionals use AI, up 15 percentage points from last year, with 55% using it several times a day and 74% using it daily or more often.

Intuit says 88% of accounting professionals used AI for at least one client service in the last 12 months, and 86% used AI for at least one firm operation. Some 46% of firms are investing in AI training, 21% have an AI policy, and 21% have an AI strategy. Intuit says 30% describe AI as embedded by default in daily work, while 54% use it only when it seems useful.

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CHARTS & GRAPHS

With $1.8 Billion Deal, Eide Bailly Set for Explosive Growth

Reverence Capital turns a regional powerhouse into a national growth engine.

Eide Bailly MP/CEO Jeremy Hauk: Pre-building a private equity platform in plain sight.

By CPA Trendlines Research

Eide Bailly doubled billings in six years, to $840 million. They plan to do it again, but in half the time.

Eide Bailly didn’t need private equity to roll up more than a dozen local CPA firms in the last two years.

But the Reverence Capital Partners takeover, which values Eide Bailly at about $1.8 billion, means the Fargo, N.D., CPA firm can shift into hyperdrive and take a shot at competing on a national stage. With about $840 million in billings, up from $780 million a year before, the deal prices Eide Bailly at about 2.1 times revenue.

MORE Private Equity | What $1 Billion Buys in Today’s CPA Market

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Less than two weeks before Eide Bailly’s deal, Chicago-based Crowe agreed to sell to KKR, famous for leveraged buyouts, for nearly $3 billion, at 2.2 times revenue.

The two deals mean that just over half of the top 30 firms are muscling up for expansion with outside capital. Only five of the firms between No. 6 Baker Tilly and No. 26 Sikich are left as independents. In the top 50, about half the firms are taking outside capital. At 100, it’s 29 firms. Overall, the CPA PE Deal Trackertm from CPA Trendlines Research counts more than 500 deals, most of them in the last three years.

In the top tiers of the accounting profession, the market has split into three clear, distinct philosophies: the PE-backed consolidators (like EisnerAmper or Baker Tilly), the ESOP pioneers (led by BDO), and the traditional independence holdouts (Forvis Mazars, CLA, Plante Moran, and Withum), who view partner-ownership as a major asset for long-term talent retention.

 

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FEATURED

How Private Equity Turns CPA Loyalty into Legal Risk

Overlapping ownership tests conflict and control. Cue the lawyers.

Rivals in the Loop: Grant Thornton and Wipfli, now stablemates under New Mountain Capital’s billion-dollar investments, seek to maintain separate operations and arm’s-length decision-making. Shown in Chicago: The Grant Thornton Tower on North Clark (left) and Wipfli offices at the Chicago Title building on Wacker (right).

By CPA Trendlines Research

Grant Thornton and Wipfli keep offices barely a half-mile apart in Chicago’s Loop — about a 10-minute walk, or a single stop on the “L.”

Zoom out. After a generation of competitive drive, the rival firms are now part of the same investor’s stable.

MORE Private Equity | What $1 Billion Buys in Today’s CPA Market

Private equity’s push into accounting is making for some strange bedfellows, as some investment firms build out networks of ostensibly independent firms that increasingly overlap in clients, services, acquisitions and talent markets.

With more than 500 deals under study, the CPA PE Deal Tracker™ from CPA Trendlines Research provides a vivid picture of private equity firms quietly adding a new layer of consolidation as they roll up the CPA profession. Sponsors are evolving into holding companies with multiple platforms, built simultaneously on a number of large CPA firms as acquisition engines. At least five sponsors now hold two or more competing platforms at the same time.

“As the Peter Parker principle reminds us, with great power comes great responsibility,” Proskauer Rose LLP, the private-funds legal powerhouse, says in a client playbook. “Sponsors should remember the portfolio company corollary: with greater control comes greater exposure to liability.”

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Gear Up for Growth

Allan Koltin: What Elite CPA Firms Do Differently | Gear Up for Growth

The best firms build accountability cultures, develop climbers, and make tough calls.

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Gear Up for Growth
With Jean Caragher
for CPA Trendlines

“Some firms dream of being great but only are willing to make the commitment to be good,” Allan Koltin, CEO of Koltin Consulting Group, says in the new episode of Gear Up for Growth with host Jean Caragher. “Leadership is the delta that separates all.”

MORE Jean Caragher here | Get her best-selling handbook, The 90-Day Marketing Plan for CPA Firms, here | MORE Gear Up for Growth here | MORE CPA Trendlines Streaming Network here

MORE What $1 Billion Buys in Today’s CPA Market

Koltin says the gap between elite firms and average firms keeps widening, and leadership is the defining factor. Widely recognized as one of the profession’s top consultants, he argues that firms chasing high performance must stop avoiding hard decisions, embrace accountability, and rethink what leadership means.

“You can have the same clients, same talent pool, same market opportunities, and one firm ends up in the upper quartile while another struggles,” Koltin says. “The difference is leadership.” READ MORE →

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Private Equity’s Big Bet Faces an AI Shake-Up

But scale may matter more, not less, in the accounting and legal markets.

By CPA Trendlines Research

The same technology that promises higher margins could weaken the billable-hour economics that made professional services so attractive.

MORE Private Equity | What $1 Billion Buys in Today’s CPA Market

Private equity’s rush into law and accounting is running into a new question: What happens to a roll-up strategy built on professional labor when artificial intelligence starts doing more of the work?

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