This was Inscope's first year at BDO EVOLVE, and I didn't know quite what to expect. I'd been told it was different from other accounting conferences and that turned out to be true. It's less a conference and more a working session of firm leaders who are actively rethinking how their practices run. A few things stood out.
AI in accounting has stopped being theoretical.
For the last few years, AI in this profession has lived in slide decks. Think pieces about the future of work. Vendor demos that look great in a controlled environment. EVOLVE was the first conference I've been to where that wasn't the conversation. The conversation has moved to deployment. Not 'what could AI do,' but 'what did it do on the last engagement, and what did it actually save us.'
Chris Kauffman from General Catalyst gave the keynote on AI adoption in accounting, and his framing was clear. The profession is behind other industries, but the catch-up is fast. AI hallucinations are down and costs have dropped. The infrastructure is no longer the bottleneck. The willingness to redesign the work is.
He also named a handful of products that firms should be evaluating, and Inscope was on that list. The shoutout meant something because of who was hearing it, firm leaders actively scouting for what to deploy next. That's the audience that moves the profession.
The thread that ran through the rest of the conference was agentic AI: the move from tools that wait for prompts to systems that plan, execute, and verify across a workflow. This is where the next inflection happens, and the firms that get it are already building.
Agentic AI isn't just an efficiency gain. It's a retention strategy
The work that drives early-career professionals out of public accounting is the same work AI is best positioned to absorb. The keying. The tie-outs. The manual review. What's left is what young accountants actually want to be doing. Judgment. Client interaction. Advisory. The firms that figure out how to free up that work and put their early-career talent on it will have a meaningful retention advantage. The modern firm is AI-native by design. That's not a tech stack decision. It's a decision about what humans get to spend their time on.
The thread we kept hearing at the booth.
Most of our booth conversations came back to the same question, asked in different ways. There has to be a better way to produce financial statements. The auditors I talked to weren’t shopping for AI in the abstract. They were tired of how financial statement production currently works. The manual footing. The disclosure checks. The version control across reviewers. The reconciliation between the trial balance and the typed numbers in the document.
What I heard, again and again, was readiness. Real excitement about the idea that this part of the work could finally look different. Not “AI someday.”
I left EVOLVE more convinced than ever that we are at the start of something big. The infrastructure is ready. Accounting professionals want the change. The firms that move first will define the next decade of the profession. The rest will spend that decade catching up.
To the BDO Alliance team: thanks for having us. We’ll be back!