Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley report from Scaling New Heights 2026 in Orlando, where the theme “Strange New World” captures the profession’s AI-driven transformation. They discuss conference highlights, AI-powered general ledgers, data cleanup, AI governance, privacy policies, Microsoft Copilot, probabilistic systems, and why accountants must approach AI with curiosity, caution, and professional discipline.
The Accounting Tech Lab is an ongoing series that explores the intersection of public accounting and technology.
The conversation moves from conference recap to practical implications for the profession. Randy and Brian explore how AI is changing advisory services, why clean data remains essential, and why accountants need to understand the difference between deterministic accounting systems and probabilistic AI systems. They also discuss AI governance, privacy policies, EULAs, subprocessors, Microsoft’s compliance posture, and why professional standards require accountants to be more careful with client data than many other business functions.
This episode is ideal for accounting professionals who want a grounded perspective on AI’s role in the profession, what was being discussed at one of the year’s major accounting technology conferences, and how firm leaders should think about education, governance, and responsible adoption.
Transcript
(Note: Some errors may appear due to automated transcription.)
SPEAKERS
Randy Johnston, Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:00
Welcome to the Accounting Technology Lab, brought to you by CPA Practice Advisor, with your host Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley.
Randy Johnston 00:09
Welcome, the Accounting Technology Lab. We’re coming to you live from Orlando in the Marriott World Center, where we’re attending Scaling New Heights 2026 Now it turns out Brian and I are fortunate enough that we’ve produced sessions here, but just wanted to give you a sense of what’s going on here, and as you try to evaluate which show or shows might be appropriate for you, you know, this year’s show actually had quite a little bit of attraction, but it was called Strange New world, and you know there’s just a lot of things that are strange with AI, but what wasn’t strange is attendance was solid, about 2000 attendees here, and by my count, 133 exhibitors. I had the good fortune to actually do a walking tour of all of the new AI-powered general ledgers, which we’ve covered in other accounting technology labs. I’m sure there’s going to be more that we’ll talk about in the future, but just to set this up, the Sunday sessions, the orientations for first-time attendees, I actually decided to attend for a change, and it was healthy because I got to hear what newbies were being told, and I don’t have a good count on the first time attendees, but I would say it was probably 100 to 150 and it might have been more than that, and then the practice advancement session, which Joe has taught frequently on Sunday mornings I had not sat in one on a while, and he did a nice job talking about AI, and Joe basically started the 40,000 foot overview of AI, and then drilled down to a 30,000 foot overview, and then down to 20,000 and you’ve heard me do that. In fact, we’ve both done that, talking about workflow through the years, but Joe’s points were that, you know, here’s the big picture on AI with all of the Chat GPTs and so forth, but the landscape has really combined has evolved into a combination of the large language models, the machine learning, and so forth, and that the 20,000 foot view says that you can actually use AI to provide more advisory services, I think that’s probably true, by the way, and then at the 10,000 foot view, actually having AI as a growth engine, and then what he would call on the ground, where there were actual live steps, overall a nice setup for the people that were there, and that is a lot of the members, and a lot of the newbies got to hear all of that.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 02:49
Unfortunately, instead of being in fabulous Orlando, I had the privilege of spending the day in the Miami airport, courtesy my friends in American Airlines, but the good news is they had an Amex lounge, so you know, I noshed and watched World Cup, and just had a good time, but unfortunately he only had the main man here.
Randy Johnston 03:08
Yeah, so on that point, then I attended a couple of sessions. I wanted to see what Mara Negarovsky said about bigger data, and that was a nice session. So again, we know that to make AI work properly, you have to get your data clean, and we’ve talked about that, and we’ve seen that in other events.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 03:28
I like his operation, he just Nuba Networks and Negroski Consulting, I mean, it’s he, for so many years, has solved so many pain points in CAS that nobody else did.
Randy Johnston 03:40
Yeah, and when you look at that whole Mendelssohn operation, you know he’s just trying to do a lot of the right things, but you know, like we learned when we did the black ore release work in New York, everybody to a person was talking about cleaning up data consistently here so far, you know, cleaning up data is still a big deal, and it was clear Mario was on that same path.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 04:02
Well, you can’t make filet mignon at a hamburger. I mean, it’s, you know, and if you’re gonna, if you’re gonna make filets, you gotta have good cuts.
Randy Johnston 04:10
Yeah, that is absolutely true. So then I was fortunate enough to see Christy Monahan do a standard operating procedure written with AI sessions. She again did a nice job, and it kind of set the tone for, you know, the way I was thinking about a lot of the sessions. Usually at Scaling New Heights, the sessions tend to be rather short and practical, and all of them are recorded so members can see all of the sessions, so unlike us, where we maybe just get to see a few and present a few, that’s a little bit different, but it was such a pleasure then to do Tech Update here, you know, the crowd here, we’ve got a long-term relationship with, and we just had fun doing Tech Update, and you’ve seen me do Tech Eight update for fun, you know, a few times. Times this year, but there’s a lot of content that is the hardware needs and the AI, and again, just a good overview, but it really, I think, just resonated well with the crowd this time. So that got us over then to the main stage opening events, so that usually happens for Scaling New Heights on Sunday night, and the way Joe tries to manage the show, there’s usually main stage events to kind of end the day, start the day, so book in the day, if you will, and he had brought in a well known as the world leading tech magician, Akilan Leiser, out of the UK, and his wife, I think her name was Elizabeth, but you know, bottom line was he did some wonderful tricks for using iPads and robots, and so forth. And what I thought was fascinating about that, and you didn’t get this experience, they said they would not open the doors once they started the main stage for at least 10 minutes until the first sequence was done.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 06:00
That sounds like something you do on Broadway when you have, you know, like some monolog or something,
Randy Johnston 06:05
and it was absolutely didn’t need the interruption, so and he did a really nice job, but you know, being able to have an iPad where you know it has a picture of a tennis ball and you pull the tennis ball out, as an example, or a spinning wheel, and then all of a sudden he’s got a medallion in his hand, or one of my favorites was the butterflies, where the butterflies started coming out, and all of a sudden there’s butterflies flying everywhere, or the reverse, it had a red scarf, and it got sucked into one of the iPads, that type of thing, and they used a robot dog. Well,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 06:37
some iPads do suck.
Randy Johnston 06:39
Yeah, well, that does happen, but this one was hard to picture where it went, but the robot dog, where they actually did card tricks, was also fascinating, because the robot dog picked the card that was identified by an audience member, written on by an audience member. You know how magicians work, it’s kind of deal, but that was kind of the idea, and it turns out that Joe opened up with just a few general comments for the conference, and then did an interview with Sasha Orloff of Puzzle, and Sasha’s company, Puzzle, now has about 10,000 users, which is good, and they just chatted about how AI can serve the profession, and it should not be the other way around, was part of their conclusions on that, and also an interesting observation. The question about AI replacing accountants, no, but 50% of all token spend right now, they said, was for software engineers and the salaries were the highest they’d ever been, so not.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 07:47
And I have to say this about the token spend, I think that’s an important thing when you see the stats, because when you look at the stats on subscriptions, people that are buying this through subscriptions, Claude is only like five or 6% but everybody that’s developing, or most of the people developing software, either have a $200 a month cloud pro plus titanium, I don’t know what it’s called, but some superlative plan that has a bunch of, as a bunch of tokens available, but most many people are just buying tokens, kind of like you buy gas for your car and then use them, so they, they’re not. It’s harder to measure who’s using how many tokens and what the real user count is.
Randy Johnston 08:28
Yeah, they’re very difficult to figure out. So, you know, then at that point, you know, a little bit of a history walk with Joe, but this is the 18th scaling new heights, and he started the first one at the Crowne Plaza in Atlanta with 250 people, for this to be 2000 people this time around, you know that’s quite an accomplishment. But next up was David Barrett, you know, David founded Expensify, and actually something I didn’t know, and I can’t verify, in fact, but I am going to repeat it here, David Barrett had coded Expensify with blockchain the year before Bitcoin’s blockchain came out,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 09:09
really,
Randy Johnston 09:10
and I, that’s pretty verifiable, and it’s like that’s pretty interesting, you know. I knew he was, you know, hardcore coder, but that was also interesting, and then he went on to explain how AI should work and what the experience should be like, and I hadn’t really thought about the AI enablement in the expense tracking products that he’s built, but he was very thoughtful about how he deployed the AI, and so that was worth seeing, and then really the star of the show was, you know, Dr. Daniel Susskind. We’ve recommended the book before. His book originally was out about 2015 and I reread it anticipating his presentation.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 09:52
What the professions.. what’s it called.. the, you know, the next generation of professions, or something like that,
Randy Johnston 09:59
and that. Book, as it turns out, he’s actually got a new one coming in the fall, which is about, you know, what the, what you should do with children, so forth, but the key here is that he quoted a fair bit of statistics and tried to show the arc of what had happened with agricultural and manufacturing, and so forth, and, you know, also the impact on several different areas, so he basically said, “Look, I’m going to talk about six areas: I’m going to talk about blue collar, I’m going to talk about white collar, then I’m going to talk about AI, and then I’m going to return to white collar, and then I’m going to talk a bit about education, and then artificial general intelligence, and it was a nice arc. He moved fairly quickly. There were a lot of facts that he covered, things that you and I have talked about in the past, and you know, including things like Deep Blue, the chess piece, and you know, the Garry Kasparov defeat. And then
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 11:01
30 years ago, isn’t it? Now, I mean, it’s
Randy Johnston 11:03
1997 which is hard to believe, and then also the Jeopardy situation with Watson, which he cited, and you know, his father was actually early on in AI and created the first AI-based law system, so father-son, or you know, both heavy into this stuff, but the disruption,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 11:25
but that’s a fun Thanksgiving, isn’t
Randy Johnston 11:28
it? Yeah, you know, sometimes you can
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 11:31
get,
Randy Johnston 11:32
how do you say, blah, yeah, kind of like
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 11:34
halbla hubbla, hey, huh, blah blah blah, you know,
Randy Johnston 11:38
kind of like Charlie Brown and Lizzie, exactly. but it was fascinating because he cited an Economist article from October 17 of 2015 which I had put in Tech Update that year, and so it was a little bit like Old Home Week, but many of the statistics I knew from his book, but also had incorporated in our presentations through the years, so
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 12:04
future of the professions, that’s the title,
Randy Johnston 12:06
future the profession,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 12:07
the title, it’s great book,
Randy Johnston 12:08
it is, so as it turns out, in 2017 McKinsey published a piece saying that 5% of jobs can be automated, and he breaks down tasks, and that’s really the key learning here. His theory is that even if you’ve got a profession, many of the jobs are tasks that can be automated, and so if you can automate the tasks, that gets you some leverage. But he went on to say it’s the human interaction and the creativity that the machines have not been able to duplicate at this point, and then he went on to talk about the Khan Academy and the Mika, a piece that had been built, and honestly, for this on this recording, the book that I’m in the middle of is AI for Good Josh Tarantiel book, and it’s a great book, but I don’t recommend most books until I’ve finished them. There’s three sections, and the Khan Academy was the first, and it’s like, oh, that’s very good, and right now we’re in Cleveland Clinic territory, but in the big picture of things, he goes on to drive that education is the response to AI, if you educate and do the change management, educate, but several attendees that I respect here, and several innovators are saying that they’re using as much as 1/3 of their time on education right now. So, if you think about it, and we’ll just talk 40 hour weeks, you know, if you’re spending 1012, hours on AI every week, most of us don’t have that type of,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 13:42
I’m spending about 30, yes, because it’s it’s one of those things that is, you know, for what we do, which is training and development and consulting and workflow tracking and all that, it’s just, it’s you can either run as fast as you can now or you can take early retirement, you know, and so we’re, you know, tying those shoes,
Randy Johnston 14:05
yeah. So it turns out, then closing up with artificial general intelligence, and you know, just end to end a well thought out presentation, but we, he suggested that you take AGI a lot more seriously, but it’s going to take a combination of business leaders and politicians and parents, and it’s a profound change, but that I’ll say caution about taking that seriously is a big deal. So, in any case, then from there, you know, the conference started unfolding, and you know, again, every time there was a main stage presentation, usually the magician would come back out and do some sort of routine at the beginning of their end, so Keelan and his wife, as the assistant, did a number of those, and that really was true on. Each one now, because of time constraints, we probably will talk a bit more about vendor sessions and other observations in another accounting technology lab, but it is clear that there’s much going on, and the level of scaling new heights is quite different this year than it has been in prior years,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 15:22
but we still got, I still got to have my audience with the Pope of pricing, Ron Baker, you know, and it’s, I got to see, I got to see, you know, Joe and Caleb, and got to meet a lot of new people here. It’s always fun to go here, because they’re. it’s. it’s. I don’t know, it’s some very nice crowd,
Randy Johnston 15:43
yeah, that good people doing good things for a lot of businesses, and let’s face it, Microsoft was a anchor sponsor, and realistically, your ability, my ability to deliver AI sessions here was probably enhanced because of that, I think between us we’ve got five AI sessions in addition to tech updates, and I will
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 16:03
say this: we’re not the only AI sessions here, and you know, Microsoft, though I will say this, I think people don’t under, you know, people getting all excited about Claude, and they got really excited about ChatGPT, but what I think they don’t get is that Microsoft is taking the compliance very seriously, and I think it’s, I think they’re the only ones that I’m seeing, especially in light of the logging that they started to do with the new Claude, that’s that even enterprises could opt out of. I think that, you know, the Claude five that they pulled Fable, I guess it is. I’m, I think Microsoft has got the right approach to use of AI inside of companies, because they, you know, they’re just, they’re dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, and as a profession, where when you don’t dot the i’s and cross the t’s, bad things happen. I, you know, it’s a very, I think you need to pay attention to that,
Randy Johnston 17:00
and you know, along that line, this is a big year of AI governance. Last year we said you always start with a policy, but now you’ve got only got to try to restrict things with governance, and I brand reviewing a new AI policy that we’ve created, but it’s got 26 different governance-related issues on AI platforms, including all of the bigs, Walters, Kluger, and Thomson Reuters, and so forth, but even smalls like Kanopy interfacing with files, and we talk about the reasons that happens, but as I started digging into what you have to think about as you use different platforms, there’s way more there than I thought, and so the simplistic AI policy that I’d recommended in the past, it just didn’t stack up to today’s needs, and you’re going to hear us talking more and more about the governance and coding and all these things that you can do with AI,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 18:00
and I’ve got a session that I’m doing, actually tomorrow, as we’re recording this. It’s Monday night, I’m going to record the.. I’m going to do the session tomorrow afternoon, but we’re going to talk about the governance issues in pretty good detail, and one of the things that we’re going to talk about are privacy policies in EULAs, because EULA, of course, is an end user license agreement. One of the things that I think that people don’t realize is that in many of these EULAs they incorporate by reference the sub processors’ user license agreements, and sometimes they don’t even tell you who that is, they just say we have sub processors, and by the way, they have their own user license agreements, and you’re stuck with theirs, and it’s, it, you know, this figuring out who’s really who really has access to your data and who’s using the data for training, you know, I, I’ve done a bunch of reading lately about the impact on HIPAA and FERP, and a lot, and you know, all the PHI and PII rules, and it’s very unclear what’s permissible, but it’s also clear that there there’s a lot of stuff going on that, at a minimum, is highly frowned upon. Yes, of using data for things that are not good,
Randy Johnston 19:17
and vendors at this conference, Scaling New Heights, and the prior conference, AICPA engage, who wanted us to look at their products, you know. Normally, the first thing I do is go look at the privacy policy, and the last one that I looked at today said we used sub processors, didn’t name them, didn’t say anything, didn’t know reference, and it was like, oh, good, but you know, let’s take a couple of other names, I am
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 19:41
Oz, that’s who the sub processor is. Yeah, the guy behind the curtain,
Randy Johnston 19:44
behind the curtain, for sure. But you know, I want to call it two other things, which we’re not really trying to talk about in this podcast, but just of note, the Meta Ray band glasses. There was a winner from Main Stage today, they got a pair of those, and you know, if you look at the price. Privacy on meta ray bands, it’s not pretty, and
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 20:04
you met meta and privacy are two words that should not be in the same sentence
Randy Johnston 20:08
most of the time, not. And then the other big announcement with the worldwide developer conference from Apple was the alliance between Apple and Google, which will unfold as the year goes on, so when we look at the new generation AI computers, Google’s the Google book, which is not a Chromebook, it’s an AI machine, and Nvidia’s machine. I’m watching this processing power at the edge, and you know where the big players are playing, and we’ll try to get some clarity for you, that for you on those topics in future accounting technology labs, but I gotta tell you, it’s not clear to me right now, so I’m not sure I could explain it to you.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 20:45
My gut is that accounting is, we are so reliant on having stable systems that this new crazy stuff at the edge that’s experimental and everything, we have two or three years before it really starts affecting us, and the other thing is that, with from a regulatory perspective, because we have all this super private data, we have to be grown-ups all the time, and that’s the hard thing, you know, because the sales people, a lot of them can do all kinds of crazy things with data, and they can put leads in there, and everything else, because, you know, when somebody puts their data in a form and they hit send, you can do just about anything you want with it, but it’s a, you know, the thing that you’ve got to understand that sets the profession apart from, you know, from the sales people and from the marketers and all the folks like that. The marketers and sales people aren’t doing anything unethical, but they just don’t have the legal requirements that you and I do with PII, and that’s why I think Microsoft is has, I think that’s why I think Copilot really has some legs, even though there have been some criticisms of the platform. I am quite excited that it’s starting to include some of the cloud models, so you can pick your model and yet still be indemnified, and all that, which I think is glorious, and one other piece that Sasha, CEO Puzzle, said, which is also landing pretty well with me, probabilistic versus deterministic, and if you think about our legacy accounting software products, you put in a number, you got the same answer all the time,
Randy Johnston 22:16
and with the statistical models on AI, they’re not quite as predictable on the outcome, and the analogies that he used in several different situations did make sense.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 22:27
Yeah, one of them was one of them was, do you want vending machine, you want the accuracy of vending machines or the accuracy of slot machines? You know, do you want something where every time you put a quarter in you get a, you get a bag of chips, or do you want something where you put a quarter in, and maybe you do, and maybe you don’t. It’s a.. it’s.. and that’s.. I think that’s one of the hardest things for a lot of accountants to understand about AI, is that it is very ish, you know. It’s not some.. you know, it’s kind of like when you know you could have a huge.. you could have a huge English class that had 800 people in a massive chemistry lecture hall, and you could give them all the exact same education, the exact same text, and the exact same assignments, and just like with AI, you would get 800 different answers, and some of them would be out here on the bell curve as A’s, and some of them will be up here as C’s, and some will be down here as F’s.
Randy Johnston 23:22
Yeah, it’s we, as you said multiple times, we live in interesting times.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 23:26
Yes,
Randy Johnston 23:27
so we’ll be back with some more interesting times for you in the Accounting Technology Lab. We appreciate you listening in today, and we’ll talk to you again very soon today.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 23:35
Thank you for sharing your time with us. We’ll be back next Saturday with a new episode of the Technology Lab from CPA Practice Advisor. Have a great week.
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