Yup, it’s time once again to dust off the crystal ball and deliver our accounting technology predictions which we see impacting the profession in the year ahead. Below, we start with our top ten inklings which we suggest you “noodle on” as you plan your firm’s 2026 firm automation and improvement strategy.…and after that, we recap our 2025 predictions and how self-assessment of how we fared.
- Event Horizon Continues for Engagement Binders: One of my biggest disappointments of the previous few years has been the lack of progress being made to transition firms from traditional on-premise engagement binders to cloud-native solutions for both assurance AND tax binders. Progress continues to be stunted by comparable application features and lack of effective data conversion tools. I think it will be another two to three years before a clear heir-apparent is crowned, so for now we are focusing on tools that improve client ingress and delivery and predicting minimal change away from the status quo.
- Change Management becomes Super Power: We are being inundated with innovative new applications that are improving firm automation leading to more firms taking a “Best of Breed” approach and requiring faster adoption cycles. We see firms proactively adopting “learning organization” concepts and prioritizing a “change management” focus into their strategic plans will be at a distinct competitive advantage in the next few years so training should become a top priority!
- Vendors Lead Agentic AI Adoption in Firms: We believe agentic AI will be the future of accounting automation, but there are a lot of concerns around data security, hallucinated data, and sloppy verification. While firms will become familiar with the agentic AI concept, we believe the first “agents” they will actually adopt will come from accounting vendors (following Intuit’s QuickBooks lead).
- AI Data Ingestion puts PDF Vendors on Notice: CPAFMA statistics point to 66% of firms utilizing OCR capabilities to capture data from digital tax source documents and put them into tax programs. The vast majority of these firms are paying for Adobe DC to do this and also complaining about the high cost. AI tools are now showing they can effectively do the same work so would this make those PDF licenses obsolete? We’ll find out next year!
- AI Startup Bubble Pops: PE money has been flowing into AI startups in the accounting profession for 2+ years and those companies need to show potential before their funding runs out. Industry pundits outside of accounting predict between 60% and 90% of AI projects will fail in the next year, which will cascade through to startups targeting accounting projects as well. On the bright side, some of these startups will have advanced IP (intellectual property) which could be acquired by competitors to make those products better but we predict a noticeable drop in vendors in 2026.
- Copilot in Fabric Drives Finance Awareness: As our auditors and advisors work with CFOs in the year ahead, they will be surprised by the effectiveness of AI tools being utilized by their more advanced clients for internal reporting and analytics. Copilot in Fabric (for finance) will make Power BI the dominance reporting tool for accounting firms (beginning with their own financials!)
- Legacy Document Management Challenged: Accounting firms are appalled by the cost of the major document management providers in the accounting profession and the lack of innovation and capabilities they are getting for their annual investments. We predict at least one major accounting vendor will roll out a document management system with built-in AI query capabilities, (most likely around Microsoft SharePoint since the accounting profession is so MS-centric).
- Email Goes the Way of Phone “Pink Slips:” There was a time when clients telephoned their accountant and the firm’s front desk person would write down the client’s message/phone number on a pink slip and place it on the accountant’s desk. We predict that collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom and even practice management systems that ingress email automatically, will surpass the use of traditional email to become the primary collaboration tool utilized by accounting firms in 2026.
- Dark AI Drives Enterprise Security Solutions: Cybercriminals are amongst the most effective users of AI tools to automate malware creation and delivery, and they are becoming progressively more effective. Traditional cybersecurity governance will fail, driving the majority of firms to transition to accounting specific “managed cybersecurity service providers” rather than risk pretending their own solutions are adequate.
- Client Ingress Automation Thrives: This is the year of digital ingress! I think surveys will validate that in 2026, the majority of the documents that firms receive from clients will be in a standardized electronic format through data ingress tools.
So, there you have it, our IT predictions for 2026. We hope this listing plants some “innovation seeds” in the back of your minds to help you notice opportunities to improve your firm’s production processes.
Reflections on 2025 Predictions:
Now that we’ve shared our expectations for what we think 2026 will bring, let’s take a look at how last year’s IT predictions fared. For 2025 predictions I’m giving myself 4 WINS, 3 DRAWS and 2 flat wrong LOSES, which means I pushed the envelope too much. However, I will point out that while I self-graded my as were mediocre, they definitely did better than the Generative AI additions which scored ZERO for 3 on LLM predictions!
- Generative AI/Copilot Adoption Surges (WIN): It’s no surprise that generative AI solutions are our number one technology prediction (and accounting process disrupter). We see multiple variations of GenAI tools being implemented within firm.
- Cybersecurity Response Elevated (WIN): AI’s dark side is that it is being used by cybercriminals to develop uber-sophisticated phishing schemes, create unique malware at scale, and take advantage of zero-day vulnerabilities (300% more attacks in 2024!).
- Cloud Surpasses On-Prem Across the Board (WIN): While recent surveys point to most medium and large firms already having the majority of their applications in the cloud, most small firms have continued to run slightly more applications and data locally on their own equipment.
- Everyone, Everywhere Collaboration (WIN): Firms will need to utilize remote, hybrid AND outsourced employees to stay competitive, which by default means every firm must have a reliable and secure “everyone, everywhere” platform.
- Firm Client Datafication Approaches 100% (LOSE): We predicted that interactions and document sharing within the firm and with clients will be above the 95th percentile in digital datafication across all firms in 2025, which did not happen.
- Tax Research Startups Challenge Big Three (DRAW) We anticipated tax research would be one of the first areas where firms break away from the Big Three and utilize tax research tools built atop the “generative AI” solutions (driven around our prediction #1), while we saw many firm utilize BlueJ, there were not enough to make this a WIN in our minds.
- Engagement Binder Transition Stagnates (WIN): Ok, we’re disappointed to say this again, but we believe firms will stay with the “status quo” for their engagement binder applications at least for ANOTHER YEAR, and they did!
- CAAS Notices Copilot for Finance (LOSE): I though CAAS practices would be impacted by generative AI solutions in 2025 as accounting firms take note of “FinTech” adoption of products such a Microsoft Copilot for Finance but that just did not happen.
- Skill Transformation a Priority (LOSE): We predicted that adoption of learning organization concepts that facilitate change and learning new methods (and unlearning old ways) would increasingly become a priority in 2025, which we heard a lot of talk about, but very little action.
Yeah, the assurance people reading this article immediately noticed that there are only nine technology predictions listed, when ten were promised. For 2025 I felt the above nine items were distinct enough in my mind, so for the tenth prediction, I asked ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot what “their” top ten technology predictions impacting accounting firms in 2025 would be. All three incorporated variations of the nine items listed above, but three “unique” items outside of the above purview popped up. I have to rate each of these in the LOSE column for this year:
10a: Blockchain: All three predicted that blockchain would make significant inroads in the year ahead stating that blockchain would “revolutionize record keeping and data integrity.”
10b: Regulation/Sustainability Reporting: Copilot and ChatGPT predicted that increased demand for RegTech (regulatory technology) for reporting and providing sustainability metrics (ESG/BOI) would be a significant trend in 2025.
10c: Augmented/Virtual Reality: And finally, Google Gemini predicted that accountants would utilize AR/VR to visualize complex financial data and conduct “virtual” audits, which from a technology perspective would be the #10 we hope happens as we could be flying drones or playing “Minority Report” from your home offices which I didn’t see happen!
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Roman H. Kepczyk, CPA.CITP, CGMA is director of Firm Technology Strategy for Rightworks and partners exclusively with accounting firms on production automation, application optimization and practice transformation. He has been consistently listed as one of INSIDE Public Accounting’s Most Recommended Consultants, Accounting Today’s Top 100 Most Influential People, and CPA Practice Advisor’s Top Thought Leaders.
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