Accounting technologists Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA,discuss their experiences and the technologies presented at the 2025 CCH Connectons User Conference. In this, the second of a two-part series, the focus is on accounting and audit services.
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Transcript (Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)
SPEAKERS: Randy Johnston, Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA
Randy Johnston 00:09
Well, good day. Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnston with my co host, Brian Tankersley and we wanted to report to you about the 2025 cch User Conference in San Diego. Now this conference was October 20 through 23 and it was right on the harbor, as all cch events go. There was absolutely upscale treatment in this and this Manchester Hyatt, where the event was held, was pretty nifty. Over the period of time, the reception on the pole deck the first night, the Reception The next night on the carrier Midway for the museum, was pretty fabulous. And then the next night, we went to the gas lamp district. Now
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:54
I can’t speak to its fabulous city personally, because I was not there, because I was elsewhere, but Randy assures me that it was purely
Randy Johnston 01:03
fabulous. And Brian has been to pretty much most of the others, most of the others, yeah, just not this year, and I’m one of the few that have been to all of them as an outsider. But you know the major themes here, and this is really the big thing we wanted you to be aware of. Cch launched their access expert AI, including five different modules, and the CEO, Jason marks, did a keynote emphasizing this shift from automation to Orchestration with these tools. And that was kind of a big deal because the company emphasized responsible AI having secured digital core information for clients and for firms, and that they had tried to continuously reinvent themselves on their platform. I think Jason positioned that well. He also positioned, though agentic AI as a driver of a competitive advantage. And I think he’s true correct, or that’s true also now, he also went on to talk about, you know, several different concepts, including, you know the need to lead firms, and you know how to redefine your firm and be bold and be enabled in several different concepts. But he yielded the stage then to Brian diffin and Kathy Rowe. Now Brian controls the CCH access infrastructures. Kathy Rowe currently is in charge of the access tax platforms, and both of them have audit experience in their background, so both are CPA, and they really proceeded to explain what they were doing with all this agentic AI release. Now, one of the things that they were quite explicit about was in text workflows. And this is not like your traditional access workflow or the old xcm product. It’s not that type of thing. This is really automated processes that they’re building into the CCH platform. They really, truly are agents. And I wish I had the videos to share with our listeners, Brian, because the demo of tax and the demo of audit were both like, that’s the deal. That is the real deal. Okay, so now that said, there were five different agentic models introduced, and they’re all under the brand, cch expert AI. Now couple of comments to set this up. One, many of the attendees wanted to know how much they were going to be and number two, when they were shipping, and cch was not talking about that at the conference. So that was a little out of the ordinary, as I would see it. But you know, when it came down to these different tools, the first one was access intelligence, in effect, research that
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 04:14
is AI enabled. But let me say this about AI. Okay, when Microsoft launched a copilot, you’ll recall that they pulled it back from big companies and they pulled it back from Microsoft, because these tools are hard to get just exactly right, and I have to take my hat off to cch for law for not launching something that that needs improvement, but rather waiting till they get it right, because that’s with AI, there’s, there are things that can happen that, you know, they can reach the wrong conclusion. It could, it could leak data. And you know, again, an abundance of caution is in the delay is not a bad thing,
Randy Johnston 04:56
not a bad thing at all. And in fact, there were multiple times where they talked. About the importance of being right, right, which is one of their slogans, but they’re really very sincere about that. And the five agents that were released, they had confidence that they were good in separate side conversations with management team. They have 25 other agents already written.
Speaker 1 05:18
Yeah, they have as many agents as the FBI. Good grief, it’s pretty close to
Randy Johnston 05:21
and they’re going to test those during this upcoming tax season. So don’t be surprised if there isn’t a whole bevy of new agents introduced, but these five make pretty good sense. One’s built on a platform they had pretty far along. They enabled their portal, or the access client collaboration portal with AI. So that was kind of a big deal. They had announced earlier in the year their k1 product in limited release. They got it fully released here. So the k1 scan product is an AI enabled product. Then the next one was the end to end audit. And that was fascinating, because there were multiple steps in the audit process shown, and it was dominantly built around their access, engagement style, not a lot of third party at least. It didn’t feel like it to me. And it’s like, Wait a minute. I didn’t seen anything like this in the demonstrations we’ve seen of cch access audit up to this point. And then, you know, finally, they had the new access advisor and advisory platform. So you know, five different offerings on multiple fronts. Because if you think about it, research portal scan, audit, and then, of course, the advisory piece. So you they had pretty much all the fronts covered with their announcements. Oh, by the way, the tools that they introduced last year on practice management, the access IQ and all that that was all also formally released. But the neck and I went to a lot of sessions, and I taught a lot of sessions, Brian in San Diego, but one that I attended, 100 minute session, I was more than over the top. Impressed. You know, Fabio from their AI team out of Switzerland, lives kind of a Swiss Swiss Italy, borderly border came across, and he presented with a Microsoft employee on MPCs. And PCs are basically the technology that allow you to interface to the databases in a secure role based fashion. So what they’re enabling, and had running at the conference was an MPC for the entire cch access platform. So rather than using the application program interfaces that we’re used to, NPCs, allow AI tools to talk directly. So it’s kind of an API for AI
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 07:59
knows this model, protocol context is what it is,
Randy Johnston 08:04
okay? And so we’re going to see NPCs in lots of fashions. In fact, you know, you and I are planning to create an MPC course for k2 in the coming year. So we’ll talk about any vendor that has an MPC model and how you get to it. But what they then proceeded to do, which was even more fascinating, they built five agents live in front of the audience during the session. So they spent about half the session explaining, and then probably built an agent about every 10 minutes for the rest of the session. And they were building them on the fly, sure they had practice, but Fabio had actually told me in advance he was going to build all of them using chat GPT methodologies. And he said about a week before the conference, he said, because of the Claude integration into copilot, he decided he’d use the Claude approaches instead. So he did Claude builds on these agents, and they were stunningly well done. So for an MPC, probably the best way for you to think about it is it’s, it’s like exposing all the data, but controlling who can see the data, and then, you know, you use it in the way that you want. So again, I don’t want to understate or overstate what happened. You know, this event had a lot of Round Table events, small discussion groups, most of the time on cch this time, they were doing about three tables in a room, but they do some specific topic. And the interactions there, because I did sit in on two or three of those were really interesting. But I also sat in on access tax training, the access audit platform training, all of the products that were kind of new, I wanted to see how they were different. And you know, these things were fairly feature complete. Didn’t see a lot of shift in access tax this year, for example, but good improvements in access engagement. So they still
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 10:00
have, what, 3400 forms in Access. 3415 I think was the number that Brian quoted us that they have in access tax. So it’s Yeah, so it’s a lot. It is no, actually, actually, they’re over 4000 aren’t they?
Randy Johnston 10:15
I was gonna say I think 45 right, you’re right. So, you know, a very robust tax platform. But overall, the the event and the vendors that were there, the attendees that were there, you know, it was a fairly like cch conferences usually are fairly high end deal. Now, next year, they’re going to return to Orlando, so they’re going back to properties that they’ve been at before, and I’m anxious to see how that all comes out. But that’s, that’s what we saw, and again, without Brian being there, because I I felt bad to her several
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 10:55
times. I trust you on the fabulosity. I’m sure it was fabulous I get that.
Randy Johnston 10:59
But a lot of people ask where you were at. And I said, Well, yeah, you know, poor guy,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 11:04
I can’t like work. I was, I was out telling jokes somewhere. I can’t remember where it was. Yeah, you know, it’s a hard world for us out of work
Randy Johnston 11:10
comedians. Randy. Yeah, it is. Well, that’s kind of the quick summary of what we saw at the CCH User Conference this year. And one final admonition, if you have any cch products in your firm, we do believe it’s worth the time and money to send at least one of your team, if not more than one, to the event that they held each year. Many of the firms here had six and seven people from the firm, trying to cover all the different topics. And that’s a that’s a pretty good stretch.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 11:45
And I will say this, you know somebody you know because I started out, I started my career leaving, leaving accounting largely, and doing a lot of CPA from tech starting in 1999 and I can tell you that one of the hardest things for anybody at a midsize accounting firm like I was, is to figure out how to find out and know what you don’t know by having people to call and having connections that can help, that can help you solve problems that are extremely time sensitive. And this is a great way to build out your network and to create those connections with both people with the vendors and people with the exhibitors, because they, I’m sure they had a lot of other companies there, because I think Bill Kornfield from WSG went and a lot of others were there, but, but I will say that you know this, this the title connections, I think is important, because at even if you’re at a massive firm, like a with them, or a CRI or somebody like that, you still don’t know what you don’t know, because the organization size, you know, the organization size even of a top 10 firm, you know, if you’re not one of the big four, the Big Four are, you know, some of the big four are as big as just about everybody else, from firm five to 100 and so the thing Is, is that it’s really critical that you create this community so that you can be successful and you can help others and they can help you, because nobody gets to this world
Randy Johnston 13:09
by themselves, and has, as has been the case in all prior years, almost every significant cch, top level employee was there, so You got to meet a lot of the product managers and people who could actually make things happen. And they were listening carefully, because I noticed this time, they were very intent on hearing what users had to say, maybe even more so than any other year.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 13:35
So the people I know that are successful at these vendor conferences will make a list of the things that they want to accomplish and the people that they want to meet. And many times, they will even set up appointments in advance, you know, if you’re having problems, go follow him. Find Louie. Find somebody that runs support for go follow him, you know. And you can actually meet these people face to face, describe your problems, and they’ll not go follow him, but you get the idea, not Louie either. God, I guess I need to pull that whole thing out. But you can meet. You can meet, you know, again, the people that, the people that run the infrastructure, like Brian diffin, and you can meet Kathy Rowe and shake her hand and and talk to her. And I will say this, that with Kathy and her team, they’re very good at responding to to these kinds of situations, and you’ve got a real opportunity here to make those contacts and to make those deposits so that when you’re up against it, you have somebody to call, and you at least can, can get somebody that can help you get a plan when you’re when you don’t know what you don’t know.
Randy Johnston 14:38
Yeah, absolutely right. And you know, I was just thinking about the panel experience that I had because I was invited to be on the panel here Brian, and throughout the conference, there’s been three or four things that I learned that I’m still mowing and saying, I wonder if this is a shift that’s occurred, and I’m just. To call this one out from the panel. The claim was made by cch product managers that the use of AI is going to be verbal. We’re going to speak to these platforms, and it’ll just drop us right into the platform for what we needed to use. So the importance of the user interface might be less than it used to be, conceptually. That’s very interesting. I’ve heard that repeated by others since the CCH User Conference at this point. And so things like that just help you think things through different like so
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 15:35
you don’t know what you don’t know. Alexa, prepare my PBC list for my accountant.
Randy Johnston 15:39
Yeah, exactly. All right. Well, very good. All right. Well, that being the case, we appreciate your time here on the accounting Technology Lab, and you have a really good day.
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