CPA Practice Advisor has announced the 2026 Tax and Technology Innovation Award winners and finalists. Now in their 23rd year, the awards serve to honor new technologies that are helping advance the profession through increased efficiency and productivity.
The winners and finalists are selected by a panel of thought leaders, technologists, and key influencers in the profession. Presented by CPA Practice Advisor, the Innovation Awards debuted in 2004. Nominated products or technologies must be less than 2 years old or have had new, significant features or enhancements during that time. Read below for more information on each of the 2026 award winners and finalists, as well as a list of all 2026 award nominees.
| 2026 AWARD WINNERS | 2026 AWARD FINALISTS |
| Amelio AI Bead AI Canopy Close Automation, by Canopy Digits Ramp Stack, by Ramp Remitian | 4ID Foresight by 4ImpactData AuditFile Agentic AI Orchestrator Suite Caseware Verity Kai by Karbon Kaseload |
Award History
The Innovation Awards were first created in 2004 under the editorial leadership of Gregory L. LaFollette, CPA. In that inaugural Tax and Accounting Technology Awards, CPA Practice Advisor aimed to recognize new or recently enhanced technologies that benefit tax and accounting professionals and their clients through improved workflow and efficiencies, increased accessibility, enhanced collaboration, greater accuracy, or other means. The publication and online technology resource was founded in 1991 as The CPA Software News and has evolved technologically along with the profession.
Just as automation, remote technologies, and paperless office technologies dramatically shaped the profession in the early 2000s and 2010s, since the pandemic years it has been the advent of artificial intelligence that has driven much of the latest innovations in practice technologies. Reflecting this phenomena, most of this year’s award winners and nominees have core AI integrated into their operations.
“Every year, new and exciting technologies are developed to help tax and accounting professionals work more efficiently, or to help them service their clients more effectively,” said Isaac M. O’Bannon, managing editor of CPA Practice Advisor. “The profession is continually evolving with these technologies, allowing firms to do more and to focus staffing efforts on the most valuable client service areas.”
Winners of the awards are selected from nominated products by an awards committee, which includes thought leaders and professionals engaged in various practice specialties across the accounting space. Products must be either 2 years old or newer, or have undergone significant enhancements in that time. CPA Practice Advisor provides a variety of independent digital and print resources for accounting professionals, including practice resources, podcasts, reviews of practice technologies, interactive tools, and content that helps firms achieve greater productivity.
Award winners are listed in alphabetical order – the descriptions are provided by the nominating companies.
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2026 Award Winners:
Amelio AI
Founded and led by CPAs, Amelio is the workflow and methodology governance platform for accounting firms, spanning engagement letters, tax and audit workflows, and audit methodology. Firms build their own methodology in Amelio through web-based forms and workflow builder: the logic is declarative, the firm defines it, and Amelio enforces it on every engagement. Amelio AI is the intelligence layer now embedded across that platform, and it inverts how AI has typically entered the profession. Instead of shipping pre-defined automation that performs the vendor’s version of a task, Amelio applies AI inside the rules the firm has already defined. That embedded layer lets Amelio build deliberately different capabilities, held together not by a shared mechanism but by a shared discipline: the firm’s rules, and a professional’s judgment.
The flagship of the three is WorkPaperAi, which targets one of the most stubborn drains on audit productivity: manual workpaper preparation. Today an auditor opens client PDFs one at a time and retypes figures into an Excel workpaper by hand. It is slow, it varies by preparer, and the firm’s hard-won approach lives only in people’s heads. Amelio’s WorkPaperAi changes that by letting a firm build a skill that captures how one of its workpapers gets constructed. The firm defines the structure and the rules once, and the skill applies them to each engagement, adapting the workpaper to the client’s records while holding the firm’s format and logic constant.That combination is the crucial innovation: the output is neither improvised each run nor rigid. It follows the firm’s rules, so a workpaper arrives with the same structure, headings, and purpose language in every office. Trust is established before go-live: the firm runs the skill against prior-year engagements and confirms the numbers match what it produced. Once activated, an auditor drags client files onto the audit procedure the workpaper supports, clicks once, and receives the finished workpaper attached in place. A firm’s proprietary way of working becomes a repeatable asset instead of a bottleneck.
The same layer also does the upstream thinking that decides which procedures, and therefore which workpapers, an engagement even needs. Amelio Risk Assessment Ai works where judgment matters most. On a traditional engagement, the team gathers financials, board minutes, bank reconciliations, and accounts payable journals, looks for patterns, and documents risks by hand. Connections buried across documents are easy to miss, and everything downstream depends on getting this right. Amelio reads the client documents alongside the risks already recorded on the engagement, then proposes new and updated risks with its reasoning and suggests ratings. Control returns to the auditor, who reviews each proposal and decides what to accept. A visual review shows at a glance what the AI added, changed, and left alone, so nothing enters the file without someone agreeing to it. Accepted risks then drive the work. The highest rating per account and assertion sets the risk of material misstatement, which determines the narrowed set of audit procedures matched to that account, assertion, and level, the very procedures WorkPaperAi then prepares the workpapers for. A single line of reasoning runs from a flagged risk to the finished paper in the file, so teams spend their hours where the evidence says they should.
The layer began with Alli, an assistant that lives inside Microsoft Teams, and Alli is how a team stays on top of the work the other two capabilities generate. Instead of launching a browser, opening the platform, and navigating to find what is on their plate, a staff member asks Alli in plain language: “What’s open for this client?” or “What deliverables are due in June?” Alli interprets intent rather than demanding exact phrasing, returns a clean, linked list, and provides deep links that open the exact screen already authenticated, on desktop or mobile. For the most time-sensitive items, Alli also sends a notification without being asked. And because it runs in Teams, a professional can sign off from a phone.
Running through all three is a single design philosophy that continues to set Amelio apart. First, the firm’s way, not the vendor’s: the automation is custom and proprietary to each firm rather than an off-the-shelf catalog. Second, a human always decides, because the AI proposes and the professional approves, which preserves professional responsibility and judgment exactly where the standards require it. Third, consistency at scale, meaning the same structure, logic, and quality applied across every engagement, so growth no longer means a proportional rise in headcount or a drop in quality.
The implications for efficiency, productivity, and profitability follow directly, and because the three work as one layer the gains compound. Removing the rote, low-judgment work of building a workpaper by hand returns hours to the work that actually requires an auditor. Consistent output reduces review time and rework, because reviewers are understanding numbers rather than reinterpreting a format. AI-surfaced risks lower the chance of a missed issue while narrowing procedures to what the evidence justifies. And an assistant that removes navigation friction cuts the day-to-day drag that quietly erodes realization. Together, these let a growing firm take on more work, and execute it more consistently, without adding proportional staff, the central economic challenge firms face today. Amelio AI is a distinct and practical vision for AI in tax and accounting: not automation imposed on the profession, but one connected way for a firm to apply its own way of working uniformly at scale, across risk, workpapers, and the daily flow of the engagement, while keeping a qualified professional in control of every consequential decision.
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Bead AI
Bead AI is the first platform where AI agents execute a team’s existing SOX testing plans end to end: evaluating any evidence format (complex spreadsheets, screenshots, logs, email), testing full populations instead of capped samples, and producing marked-up working papers in the team’s own Excel templates. Every judgment is recorded in a decision log traced to the underlying evidence, so reviewers and external auditors can see how each conclusion was reached.
Teams automate about 70% of controls and cut testing time by about 80%. SOC 2 Type II; customer data never used for training. Generally available; in production with enterprise customers including Fortune 500 companies. The founder’s vendor-neutral book, The Audit Leader’s Guide to AI for SOX Testing, has become a widely shared field guide for audit leaders evaluating this category.
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Canopy Close Automation
Canopy Close Automation represents a fundamental shift in how tax and accounting firms operate. By integrating continuous ledger monitoring, automated anomaly detection, and unified practice workflows directly into practice management systems, Canopy Close Automation turns a chaotic monthly crunch into a continuous, controlled process.
Here is how close automation exemplifies innovation in accounting and drives quantifiable gains in efficiency, productivity, and firm profitability:
- Goodbye to the Month-End Scramble
Rather than waiting until month-end to clean up transactions, Canopy’s continuous close run data-quality algorithms to flag uncategorized expenses, duplicate transactions, and ledger anomalies in real time
By unifying general ledger tracking (e.g., QuickBooks Online integrations) directly inside the firm’s central workspace, accountants no longer need to switch between standalone reconciliation tools, practice management platforms, and inboxes
When a ledger issue is flagged, Canopy Close Automation generates actionable tasks tied directly to source transactions, allowing reviewers to fix errors instantly without digging through underlying source files or manual logs.
- Teams Get Their Time and Sanity back
Canopy Close Automation replaces unstructured email chains with automated client request flows. Uncategorized items or missing documents are surfaced directly through secure client portals, eliminating admin follow-up overhead.
Portfolio-wide health dashboards allow managers to monitor client book quality and team workloads at a glance. Instead of conducting manual reviews on every ledger item, senior staff focus strictly on high-risk exceptions.
Spreading close activities across the entire month reduces fatigue, mitigates burnout, and prevents peak-capacity bottlenecks during critical reporting and tax prep deadlines.
- Clean Books Lead to Bigger Margins
By automating routine mechanics like ledger monitoring and basic reconciliations, firms can manage significantly more clients per team member
Book Health Scoring & Fee Defense give managers real-time visibility into client data hygiene. When a client routinely submits messy transactions, firms have concrete, defensible data to adjust retainer pricing or scope advisory add-ons appropriately.
Shrinking the time spent on historical data entry and cleanup opens up capacity for higher-value advisory services, transformed reporting narratives, and strategic financial decision support.
Canopy Close Automation fundamentally redefines accounting from transactional back-office cleanup into a continuous, data-driven practice so firms can scale margins, retain talent, and deliver a vastly superior experience to their clients.
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Digits AI
For decades, accounting software has been sold as the system of record while leaving the actual work — the booking, reconciling, scheduling, reviewing, and reporting — to accountants and a sprawl of bolt-on tools. Digits, the world’s first AI-native general ledger built for firms, starts from a different premise: the ledger itself should do the work.
Over the past year, Digits has delivered on that premise with a series of launches that together transformed the ledger from a passive database into a continuously operating close system. AI Bank Reconciliations (https://digits.com/blog/ai-bank-reconciliations/) replaced statement exports and fragile matching rules with an always-on agent that ingests feeds, statements, and ledger data, matches transactions, and surfaces only true exceptions — cutting reconciliation time by up to 75%. Digits Schedules brought accrual accounting into the system of record for the first time, proactively detecting transactions that need fixed asset or prepaid treatment, drafting the schedule, and maintaining every journal entry automatically for its life. Expanded payroll connectivity (https://digits.com/blog/introducing-expanded-payroll-connectors/) across 18 providers eliminated CSV exports and hand-built journal entries, booking wages, taxes, and benefits by department the moment payroll runs.
In June 2026, these capabilities converged in Agentic Close (https://digits.com/blog/agentic-close/): an end-to-end system that collects, books, reconciles, schedules, reviews, and reports on financial activity as it enters the ledger. Firms express their review standards — materiality thresholds, parent-category rules, client-specific policies in plain English, and Digits converts them into deterministic, auditable checks that run continuously across transactions and every client. Powered by domain-specific models trained on 180 million transactions representing nearly $1 trillion in financial activity, Digits knows when it’s confident and when it’s not, escalating only what requires professional judgment. Firms manage by exception instead of rebuilding the same review process across every client, every month.
The results are measurable. One Top 400 firm serving over 100 CAS clients saw automated transaction handling climb from 75% to 98% in a single year — by year-end, its team touched just 2% of transactions during close. Digits stands so confidently behind these outcomes that it became the first accounting platform to introduce outcome-based pricing: firms pay only for clients where 95% or more of transactions are fully zero-touch. If Digits doesn’t do the work, firms don’t pay.
Innovation extends to how firms engage clients. Ask Digits (https://digits.com/blog/announcing-ask-digits/) gives business owners plain-English answers grounded in live, reconciled books. The Digits app for iPhone and iPad (https://digits.com/blog/digits-everywhere/) lets clients approve bills, send invoices, and capture receipts in the moment. The free Digits MCP Server (https://digits.com/blog/mcp/) connects real-time, structured financial data directly to AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT. And partnerships with Ignition, Reach Reporting, and Karbon ensure that when the ledger closes the books, every tool in the firm’s stack can finally do what it was designed to do — all protected by SOC 2 Type II compliance and end-to-end encryption.
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Ramp Stack
Ramp Stack is an AI operating system built specifically for accounting firms at a moment when the profession urgently needs a new operating model. More than 300,000 CPAs have exited the profession, accounting degrees recently reached a 20 year low, and firms are turning away clients because they lack the capacity to serve them. Stack helps firms address this challenge by using AI to complete repetitive accounting work, allowing professionals to serve more clients and focus on higher-value advisory work without increasing headcount at the same rate.
What sets Stack apart is that it is agentic by design and both does the work and manages the work for you. Instead of requiring professionals to navigate a traditional software interface or repeatedly prompt a general purpose chatbot, firms assign work directly to AI agents. Stack can complete transaction coding, bank reconciliations, journal entries and monthly close workflows, while its Close Checklist and Advisor Console give managers a single view of progress, open tasks and work requiring attention across their client portfolio.
That automation is built around the control accounting requires. Stack exposes the sources, calculations and reasoning behind its work, producing formula-backed outputs structured like accounting workpapers. Accountants can review and revise the work, and ERP write-backs require explicit user approval or action. This makes AI execution reviewable, traceable and defensible rather than a black-box answer.
Stack also adapts to each firm rather than forcing firms to change established processes. Accounting teams teach Stack how they work, and the system captures those processes as standard operating procedures that remain current as clients grow and workflows evolve. This turns knowledge that might otherwise live with individual employees or across spreadsheets, documents and prompt libraries into durable firm intellectual property, helping firms standardize quality, accelerate employee onboarding and reduce the operational risk of staff turnover.
Unlike point solutions that work only within a closed ecosystem, Stack is a standalone product that does not require firms or their clients to use other Ramp products. For QBO-based clients, it connects the accounting system with files and financial data agents need to execute the work, while firms whose clients use Ramp gain additional native financial context. This flexibility makes it practical for firms that want to adopt Stack independently while benefiting from deeper Ramp integration where available.
Ramp developed Stack in partnership with accounting professionals, drawing on relationships with more than 4,500 firms. Ninety two of the 100 largest CPA firms already serve clients that use Ramp. Stack was also evaluated across more than 200 accounting tasks created and graded by working accountants, including coding transactions, reconciling accounts, posting journal entries and running the close. It outperformed general purpose AI models in those evaluations.
The efficiency gains are already measurable. Specialized Accounting reports that Stack is eliminating or reducing month end close time by as much as 50% for some clients, with reductions reaching 60% among certain hospitality and service clients. Sax, ranked number 66 on Accounting Today’s list of the 100 largest firms, is deploying Stack across numerous clients as it evaluates how AI can increase capacity and reshape firm economics. By reducing the hours required for repetitive close work, Stack enables firms to take on more clients with their existing teams, improve margins and redirect professionals toward strategic work that commands greater value.
Today, Stack focuses on accounting execution such as close, reconciliation, transaction coding, schedules, book cleanup and client onboarding. Ramp is building toward a broader operating layer through which firms can run tax, audit and advisory workflows as well.In a roughly $150 billion industry facing a historic talent shortage and rising client expectations, Stack gives accounting firms a practical path to greater efficiency, productivity and profitability. It does more than automate isolated tasks, giving firms a new operating model for how accounting work gets done.
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Remitian
The accounting profession automated tax preparation decades ago, but actually making tax remittance payments never got there. After a return is filed, the money still moves through fragmented government portals, mailed checks and spreadsheets of banking credentials, with every federal, state and local authority running its own logins, formats and deadlines. It is the last manual workflow in tax, and it burns the profession’s scarcest resource: senior practitioner time.
Remitian is the first AI-powered platform built to close that gap. Its agentic AI executes tax payments end to end while licensed professionals approve rather than key in: the system schedules, formats, routes and confirms payments across more than 60 federal, state and local jurisdictions. The innovation is as much trust architecture as intelligence.
Every payment is cross checked and validated before funds move, high risk transactions route to human review, and every action produces a jurisdiction level audit trail with proof of payment. The platform is SOC 2 compliant, with audit ready activity logs on every transaction. In a profession where a wrong payment is not an inconvenience but a penalty with a client’s name on it, that architecture is what makes automation usable at all.
The results from Remitian’s first US tax season: $100 million processed across 60-plus jurisdictions. MBE CPAs, a full-service Wisconsin firm, ran 194 payments totaling $2.65 million through the platform across the IRS and six state authorities with zero late penalties and zero payment errors, reclaiming an estimated 275 hours of senior tax manager time in a single season. That is close to seven weeks of a senior manager’s capacity, returned from clerical remittance work to billable advisory work, at one firm in one season. Aprio, a top 25 firm, became the first of its size to deploy fully automated end-to-end tax payments, and CEO Richard Kopelman joined Remitian’s board after deployment. Platforms including Aiwyn, april, TaxBandits and Truss now embed Remitian’s payment rail via API.
The timing is not incidental. Executive Order 14247, signed in March 2025, directed Treasury to stop issuing paper checks for most federal disbursements as of September 30, 2025. New individual EFTPS enrollments closed in October 2025, and the IRS is directing trustees and fiduciaries to prepare for fully electronic payment transmission. Tax remittance is being forced into the digital era just as the profession confronts its own capacity problem: roughly 340,000 accountants left the field between 2019 and 2023, per the AICPA and NASBA’s National Pipeline Advisory Group. Firms cannot afford to spend their most senior people’s time on portal logins and check runs.
Remitian, led by Solon Angel, whose previous company MindBridge brought analytical AI to auditing, represents the second wave: AI that does tactical work itself under professional control. The hours it returns go where judgment matters: advisory relationships, complex returns and capacity for growth without partner burnout.
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2026 Award Finalists:
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4ID Foresight by 4ImpactData
4ID Foresight is a new product launched by 4impactdata, purpose-built for CPA firms rather than a generic BI or analytics tool retrofitted for the profession. It identifies which clients are ready for expanded services, deeper engagement, or strategic advisory service offerings, and when to act, turning a firm’s entire book of business into a source of measurable, ongoing revenue growth rather than a static list of accounts to react to.
The innovation is built around two core capabilities. The Opportunity Map uses client personality profiles powered by 4impactdata’s proprietary intelligence engine to reveal unrealized revenue opportunities already sitting inside a firm’s existing book of business, surfacing exactly which clients are positioned for growth and what to do about it. The Portfolio Monitor complements this by continuously monitoring a practice’s entire client portfolio and flagging developing risks 18 to 24 months before they escalate, giving advisors the runway to intervene before a client relationship is at risk rather than after it’s already lost.
This directly addresses productivity and profitability at the practice level. Firms using the Opportunity Map can expect to uncover an estimated $2 million to $3 million or more in advisory service opportunities per 100 clients already in their book, meaning growth no longer depends solely on new business development. Firms using the Portfolio Monitor can expect to protect an estimated $1 million to $2 million or more in annual client revenue per 100 clients, turning client retention from a reactive scramble into a manageable, forward-looking process.
The efficiency gains extend beyond dollar figures. Through Codified Wisdom®, the institutional expertise of a firm’s top-performing advisors is encoded directly into the platform, so every advisor on the team, not just the most experienced ones, operates with the same level of insight and consistency at scale. This closes a long-standing productivity gap in accounting firms, where quality of client guidance has historically depended on which specific advisor a client happened to work with.
4ID Foresight is SOC 2 certified and integrates natively with QuickBooks Online and Xero, allowing firms to put it to work without disrupting existing workflows. 4impactdata has earned recognition from the profession’s most influential voices, including a prior Technology Innovation Award from CPA Practice Advisor, recognition as a Go-To Authority for CAS Technology by CPA Trendlines, and selection for the AICPA and CPA.com Startup Accelerator program. Barry Melancon, CPA, CGMA, former President and CEO of the AICPA, serves as a strategic advisor to the company.
By replacing reactive, historical reporting with forward-looking, firm-wide visibility, 4ID Foresight is changing what’s possible for accounting professionals: less time spent reacting to problems that were visible years in advance, and more time spent acting on the growth already sitting in their own client base.
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AuditFile Agentic AI Orchestrator Suite
From the company that was first to bring audits to the cloud, first to patent the application of artificial intelligence to financial statement audits (US Patent 10,891,294), and first to bring agentic AI to the audit, comes the next breakthrough innovation: AuditFile Agentic AI Orchestrator Suite. Now, staff long-running autonomous AI agents alongside your human staff, and run your practice from your phone.
AuditFile Agentic AI Orchestrator Suite is the first multi-agent orchestration platform for audit, and the first audit platform professionals can command from every surface they work on: web, iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, command line, API, and MCP.
Single AI agents completing single tasks have already changed how CPAs perform audits. The question facing the profession in 2026 is no longer “can an agent do the work?” — it’s “how do we manage a team of autonomous agents?” AuditFile Agentic AI Orchestrator Suite is the answer.
The Orchestrator staffs engagements with teams of specialized, long-running autonomous AI agents for tasks like generating and reviewing PBC request lists, preparing risk assessments, classifying trial balances, generating financial statements, and completing the disclosure checklist. Planning, testing, documentation, preparation, and review can all now be performed by your team of AI agents.
Unlike human staff, your AI agents work continuously through nights and weekends and never complain about work-life balance. To the engagement, AI agents and human staff are fungible: assigned, tracked, and reviewed the same way. Partners and managers approve, reject, or redirect work through a sign-off queue, with every action, for both AI agents and human staff, captured in an immutable, evidence-linked audit trail. AI agents do the work; human auditors sign it.
Because supervision shouldn’t be chained to a desk, AuditFile Agentic AI Orchestrator Suite is the first audit platform to make oversight ambient. A partner can launch a set of substantive procedures from the office, get a wrist notification on their Apple Watch when the agents finish at 9 p.m., and approve from an iPhone at the airport. Software developers can drive engagements from a CLI or via the API. And through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a firm’s other approved AI tools can securely task and query AuditFile, making the Orchestrator the profession’s first interoperable, agent-to-agent audit platform rather than another silo. The Suite also supports BYOT — Bring Your Own Token — so firms can run their AI agents on their own model subscriptions and provider agreements, keeping model choice, cost, and data terms under firm control.
The work product is grounded, not generated from thin air: agents execute against trusted methodology, including the Advantage Audit™ content library, and against the firm’s own templates and prior-year files.
“With agentic AI, we solved ‘doing the work.’ Now we’re augmenting your human staff with AI agents,” said Steven Bong, CEO of AuditFile. “The Orchestrator Suite is the firm that staffs itself: agents do the work, humans apply judgment. With AuditFile’s iOS apps for iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch, you can manage your human staff and AI agents from the beach.”
AuditFile is the only complete, cloud-based, all-in-one engagement automation platform for public accounting professionals, named the #1 Audit Tool in the CPA Practice Advisor Readers’ Choice Awards for four consecutive years. Offered in three subscription tiers that scale from sole practitioners to government audit organizations, AuditFile includes data storage, training, and support in every subscription.
Audit software that can’t orchestrate AI agents from a phone is now obsolete.
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Caseware Verity
Caseware Verity (https://www.caseware.com/products/caseware-verity) is a purpose-built assurance intelligence platform that brings workflow-native, agentic AI directly into the work accounting professionals perform every day. Rather than requiring practitioners to leave their engagement environment and prompt a general-purpose AI tool, Verity works within the assurance workflow, using engagement-specific context including financial data, workpapers, prior-year files, firm methodology and supporting evidence.
This represents an important evolution in how AI can be used by the accounting profession. Auditors operate in an environment where efficiency must go hand in hand with accuracy, professional judgment, explainability and regulatory compliance. General-purpose AI can summarize information or answer questions, but it does not inherently understand an individual audit engagement, the firm’s methodology or the evidentiary standards behind an auditor’s conclusions.
Verity was built specifically to address that gap.
Drawing on Caseware’s more than 35 years of experience developing technology for accounting professionals (serving over 23,000 firms across 130 countries) and a $100 million investment in AI innovation, Verity combines frontier AI models with the context, workflows and governance required for professional assurance. Instead of functioning as a standalone AI assistant, it acts as an intelligence and orchestration layer across the engagement lifecycle, supporting activities including planning, risk assessment, evidence gathering, testing, review and reporting.
The result is AI that can help practitioners complete time-intensive work faster while keeping professional judgment at the center of the engagement. It surfaces risks, identifies anomalies, recommends procedures and powers specialized AI agents such as Disclosure Checklist Agent (https://www.caseware.com/us/products/disclosure-checklist-agent.)
Disclosure checklists are an essential but labor-intensive part of financial reporting and assurance. Practitioners can spend hours working through hundreds of questions and manually cross-referencing each one against a client’s financial statements. Disclosure Checklist Agent automates much of this evidence gathering and answer-drafting work. It analyzes the client’s financial statements, drafts Yes, No or N/A responses for individual checklist questions, explains the reasoning and links practitioners directly to the supporting evidence in the financial statements. When sufficient evidence cannot be found, the agent flags the question for professional review rather than generating an unsupported answer.
The efficiency gains are measurable. Disclosure Checklist Agent saves an average of 2.7 hours per disclosure review, generates an average of 677 cited AI suggestions per run and achieves 87% suggestion accuracy, while allowing practitioners to verify recommendations before approval.
More broadly, early adopters report time savings of up to 35–50% when using Caseware’s fit-for-purpose AI tools such as Disclosure Checklist Agent. These efficiencies can transform how firms deploy their people. Time previously consumed by repetitive document review, evidence gathering and administrative work can instead be devoted to risk assessment, professional judgment, client communication and higher-value advisory work.
Verity’s innovation also lies in its use of engagement context. Because the platform can understand information associated with the engagement, professionals can receive responses relevant to the work they are actually performing rather than generic answers generated from isolated prompts. This helps address one of the central limitations firms encounter when experimenting with general-purpose AI.
The platform was developed in collaboration with accounting firms through the Caseware Pioneer Program, allowing Caseware’s product and engineering teams to validate capabilities against real engagement challenges. This practitioner-led development model helps ensure new AI capabilities address actual workflow bottlenecks and professional requirements.
Governance is equally important to the innovation. Sensitive client information is protected through enterprise-grade security, permission controls and engagement-level data isolation and is not used to train public AI models. AI-assisted outputs are designed to be traceable through citations and audit trails, allowing practitioners to understand the basis for recommendations and apply their own professional judgment.
This combination of automation, context and governance is particularly important as accounting firms contend with increasing engagement complexity, growing volumes of data and continued talent pressures. AI offers firms an opportunity to increase capacity without simply asking professionals to work faster. By automating repetitive work and surfacing relevant information at the point where it is needed, firms can use their existing talent more effectively while giving professionals more time for the work requiring experience and judgment.
Caseware’s 2026 global research involving more than 1,000 accounting and audit professionals illustrates how quickly this transition is occurring. The research found that 66% of firms already have AI embedded in workflows or pilot programs, while 59% plan to introduce new AI technologies and tools within the next two years. Yet governance, explainability and trust remain important considerations for adoption.
Verity addresses both sides of that equation: enabling firms to take advantage of increasingly powerful AI while providing the professional context, human oversight and governance necessary for accounting and assurance.
Caseware Verity therefore represents more than an AI feature added to existing accounting software. It provides a scalable foundation for specialized AI agents that can assist professionals throughout an engagement. As those capabilities expand, the opportunity is to create assurance workflows in which AI continuously assists with planning, risk identification, evidence collection, review and reporting, while practitioners retain responsibility for professional conclusions.
For accounting firms, the outcome is practical: less time spent on repetitive work, greater capacity for higher-value professional activities and a more productive way to deliver high-quality assurance engagements.
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Kai by Karbon
Eighty-one percent of clients say their accountant becomes more valuable when AI handles routine work and the time saved is reinvested in monthly strategic conversations. That finding from Karbon’s 2026 Future of Client Trust in the Age of AI report captures both the opportunity and the challenge facing accounting firms today.
Clients increasingly expect more advisory, insight, and strategic value, but not at the expense of the foundational compliance and bookkeeping tasks that underpin those bigger-picture conversations. At the same time, many accounting firms face talent shortages, fragmented technology, and outdated manual processes. These challenges further squeeze potential advisory time away from the clients that crave it. Kai by Karbon is designed to give accounting professionals that time back.
AI that already knows the firm
Kai is Karbon’s AI coworker, built into Karbon’s AI operating system for accounting firms. Unlike other AI tools that require users to continually provide context, Kai starts with a deep understanding of a firm’s clients, workflows, and practice knowledge. Since 2014, Karbon has served as a single source of truth for accounting firms. Kai is Karbon’s truth teller.
Kai’s understanding of the firm is built from three sources of context:
The firm’s data in Karbon. Emails, tasks, client records, workflows, billing, time, and other practice information give Kai a deep foundation of how a specific accounting practice operates. Data flowing through Karbon’s 100+ integrations. Information from the systems that firms already use will give Kai additional context as it broadens its knowledge base.
New context created through ongoing activity. Tools like Karbon’s AI notetaker will turn client meetings into structured summaries, action items, and follow-ups, which keep Kai up-to-speed with real-time information. Accounting professionals can talk to Kai in plain language, much like they would a colleague. When they ask, “What work is overdue this week?”, “Which jobs are over budget?”, or “What needs my attention today?” Kai can answer in seconds using live firm data.
But Kai can do more than answer questions. When a professional asks Kai to take action, it can execute multi-step work such as workpaper creation or timesheet review. Kai helps flip the script for accountants. Instead of having to feed context into an AI tool before it can deliver useful results, accountants can draw from existing (and evolving) firm knowledge to surface key information and keep workflows moving. But Kai is both informative and actionable, and that’s why safeguards exist to keep professionals in control.
Automation with accountants in control
Kai is designed with human-in-the-loop control built in. When its AI agents are asked to take action, professionals can approve, edit, or reject outputs and ensure no actions are taken without human sign-off. Further, Kai operates within a firm’s existing security and permission settings.
For a profession built on accuracy, judgment, and trust, human oversight is an essential part of meaningful AI innovation. Karbon’s client trust research found that clients are comfortable with automation, but want humans involved in the decisions that matter most: 61% want the trusted advisor role to remain fully human-led, while 58% say the same of crisis management.
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Kaseload
Every tax and accounting engagement begins with the same unglamorous step: getting the right documents from the client. Firms send a PDF organizer or a generic checklist, clients reply with photos of the wrong year’s 1099, a partial brokerage statement, or nothing at all, and staff spend the busiest weeks of the year playing email tag. The preparer discovers what is missing only when they open the file to start work. Garbage in, garbage out, and the garbage arrives in March.
Kaseload changes that. Kaseload is an AI intake agent for professional services firms, specializing in tax and accounting. It does four things that existing client portals do not.
- It builds a personalized intake for every client. Instead of one organizer for everyone, Kaseload reads the client’s prior-year return, or the firm’s own existing intake form, and generates a checklist specific to that household or business: the Fidelity and Schwab 1099s they actually hold, the Chase business account statements, the K-1 from the partnership they joined last year, and nothing they do not need. A client sees a short, relevant list rather than a forty-page form, which is why they finish it.
- It checks every upload the moment it arrives. When a client uploads a document, Kaseload’s verifier reads it and compares it against what the checklist item asked for. A 2024 statement uploaded into a 2025 slot, a summary page instead of the full statement, or a blank second page is caught on the spot and the client is told, in plain language, what to send instead. Documents that belong somewhere else are routed to the right item, and anything the agent is unsure about goes to the firm for a human decision rather than being guessed. The result is that a preparer opens a file that is already complete and correct, instead of discovering the gaps themselves.
- It chases after clients’ missing documents so staff do not have to. Kaseload tracks what each client still owes and sends reminders on a schedule, written by the agent for that client’s situation, until the checklist is complete. A firm can launch intake for hundreds of clients in one bulk campaign, then watch progress on a single dashboard that surfaces the clients who need a person’s attention and leaves the rest alone. When a client is done, the firm downloads the organized document set in one archive, ready for their tax software.
- Clients work through a secure, branded portal with no account to create, reached by a personal link, with an AI assistant that answers their questions about what a document is and where to find it. Staff work in a dashboard organized by client and engagement, with status computed from the actual record of what has been requested, received, verified, and chased.
Kaseload works alongside Drake, CCH Axcess, ProConnect, Canopy, or whatever the firm already runs, and can be adopted one new client at a time, so there is no migration project and no retraining of existing clients. Second, pricing is per client, with no platform subscription, so a solo practitioner and a firm with two thousand returns each pay in proportion to what they use.
The ROI is clear. Intake is often a huge unbillable time sink, and it is the step most firms staff with their most expensive people doing their least valuable work: reading emails, opening attachments, and asking for the same document a third time. Kaseload moves that work to an agent that does it instantly, at upload time, for every client at once. A firm that previously spent forty to sixty minutes per return on collection and follow-up gets that time back for preparation and advisory work, and shortens the calendar from engagement letter to a preparable file. The quality case is just as concrete: errors caught at intake cost seconds, and errors caught at review or after filing cost hours and client trust.
Kaseload was built by a small team from the ground up for this problem, with a full audit trail, tenant isolation, and the ability to deploy on premises for firms that require it. It is in use with early-adopter firms now, and the platform is designed to extend to bookkeeping, legal, and other document-heavy practices where the intake problem is identical.
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2026 Award Nominees
| AICPA & CIMA Josi AI AICPA & CIMA Rise Navigator Ask Feather AI AuditDashboard BILL W-9 Agent CCH Axcess Intellilgence Crunchafi Lease Accounting DNL Deep Neuron Lab AI Checklist & AI Numbers Ember Agents HubSync Halo Intuit Accountant Suite JAX (Just Ask Xero) | Drake Practice Essentials Holistiplan RepWorks Tax Rep Network ScanSnap iX2500 SoftwareClarity by Boomer Consulting Tabs Agents TaxDome TaxNoticePilot TaxScribe Pro Asset Manager Thomson Reuters CoCounsel Tax & Audit Value Insights.AI WageProof for CPAs |
Nominations for the 2027 Innovation Awards will open in summer 2027.
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