2025 AICPA Engage Conference Floor Roundup – The Accounting Technology Lab Podcast – July 2025

Brian Tankersley, CPA, and Randy Johnston, take you on a tour of the 2025 AICPA Engage Conference tradeshow floor. Held in June in Las Vegas, the event is one of the largest educational and networking events for accounting and tax professionals. Watch the video, listen to the audio, or read the transcript.

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Transcript (Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)

SPEAKERS

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  00:00

Randy, welcome to the accounting Technology Lab, sponsored by CPA practice advisor. With your hosts, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley,

Randy Johnston  00:11

welcome to the accounting Technology Lab. I’m your host. Randy Johnston, with Brian Tankersley, we’re coming to you live from Las Vegas at AICPA. Engage now. Brian and I today will actually produce a cryptocurrency and technology update together. So we’re recording this early in the morning before we start, but we thought we’d give you a progress report on what we’ve learned at engage so far. Now, editor Isaac obanion has been roaming the floor. See, I actually did a video interview for him yesterday, but we’ve started the week with the CPA practice advisors, accounting leaders, Think Tank Symposium on Sunday, June 8. We’ve recorded two other episodes for you on that topic. We encourage you to listen to those. But besides all the many insights, and we haven’t even talked about three or four more topics that were discussed in that meeting. We then have met with associates in meetings over Sunday night through Monday and so forth. Of course, the opening keynotes with Mark Koziol as his first presentation as CEO, was interesting the economic insights that came Gary Cohn, for example, from IBM, talked about quantum computing. Setting up today’s presentation beautifully for us. And of course, we spent time with a long term friend of ours. We won’t disclose since we didn’t ask him for this session, but I can tell you just over and over and over again, I’ve learned something new, but probably the biggest insight to start with is the vendor flow show floor is back with a vengeance. A couple of 100 vendors on the floor, by my count, only two are hosting services and pretty much everything else seems to be some sort of an AI service in 1040 work paper alone filed, who just took 17 million you know, Larry and his team were on The floor, talked to the Solomon folks talk to the black or folks talk to the new abacus folks who have a k1 product out of New York, so many, many things like that. But then also the tax research products are on the floor, Blue Jay and hatch, GPT, Portal, products like trust and I can just keep going and going. The goal is not to tell you about any individual vendor. We do that in other technology labs, but to give you a sense that something is up and it’s big, but the attitude and comfort level and the word that I’ve settled on for this week is unsettled. So I’ve settled on unsettled Brian, and you have observed a little bit of this too, but give our in our users, sorry, our listeners, a little bit insight on what users are experiencing, and what they’re telling us here at the show, well,

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  03:26

we all know something big is going to happen with AI, but we don’t know what it is. And it’s everybody is talking about it and talking about agentic AI, and they’re talking about new technologies. I think generally, there is more investment in new software and new applications today than there has been at any other time I can think of in the accounting profession in my lifetime, or at least one that I’ve experienced up close, you know. And again, I’ve been watching accounting technology pretty heavily for about the last 25 years, but in particular for the last 20 and I will just say that, you know, I’m sure that there was a lot pre y, 2k there were other boom periods, but there are so many startups and they are going at, they’re going at so many different problems in so many inventive ways. It is a great time to be be alive and be working in the world of accounting technology.

Randy Johnston  04:33

Well, one of the thought leaders that I had discussion with at the invited thought leaders reception by the AICPA. She basically said, there’s so many vendors on the floor, I don’t even know their names. And she’s and she said, you probably how many did you not know? And I said, Well, I’m fortunate. I think I’ve talked to most, and I do recognize the names, and I know most of the people at the college. But he’s, which is part of what we try to do for you in the accounting Technology Lab. But she said, I think I know less than a third out there. Now, the bigs were there, and they had big names there, so Walters, Kluwer, you know, the top people in tax were, you know, in the booth. I mean, we’re talking the big dogs were in the house, and it was fast. Was

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  05:25

there, and it doesn’t get much higher than Kathy Rowe and Walters fluor,

Randy Johnston  05:29

that’s right. And you know, Gus from Iris, the CEO is here. And Brian and I have talked to you about that in the past, where, you know, we had not seen Gus at this point. But Mike samadis, who many of you know from his cch day, who’s, you know, on the case we’re board,

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  05:48

is Dave wild from Thomson, Reuters, that did Sure. Prep is here, you know, it’s, you know, Jeff ramlich is here. I mean, it’s, you know, from Validus. I mean,

Randy Johnston  06:01

it’s, this is the real deal.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  06:05

This is, this is the gathering of the rock stars. And so it’s, it’s in true, this is one of the I can get more done in 30 minutes on that show floor than I can get done in in a month of calling people trying to set up appointments from

Randy Johnston  06:18

home. So, you know, again, we’re not necessarily suggesting or trying to encourage that you should, you know, attend, but we know that if you’re trying to do things via video meetings, that’s just not the same as pressing the flesh in these events. And we recognize it’s time intensive and expensive, but repeatedly and I think, almost without exception, Brian, everyone that I’ve talked to, it’s not like the pandemic frenzy, when everybody was just glad to get out of the house. This is everybody’s here. They know things are happening. They know they have to be here to learn about it. And they the most common phrase that I’ve heard is it’s not the same as sitting in a Zoom meeting, as being in this meeting. You know, one of the thought leaders that we met on Sunday walked up to me last night on the show floor on Monday, and he said, Boy, that time you spent with me, with us over lunch, just chit chatting. He said, you know, and then again, I’m gonna try to be self congratulating here. He said, You know, some serious stuff. He said, I thought I was well informed, but wow. And I said, Well, you know, I just like coming and learning from people like you, because I’ve already learned a bunch of things from you. And he went on then as to why he was glad he’d made the trip just for the Sunday meeting for the think tank symposium, but he’d already gotten enough benefit from Sunday and Monday to justify the whole trip, and I’ve heard that repeatedly this year, too, and there are just little nuances that are said. It’s just the little nuggets that you can take away. So you know, our goal when we do the accounting technology lab with you, is to give you a nugget to take away. Now, if we start going down the vendors, if you will, we can talk about the providers to the profession, and I believe that we’ll be able to give you additional insights on this offering, this person and so forth, and what they’re thinking about. But again, we want to honor the non disclosures. We do have some of those in force, but we also want to give you enough that you can maneuver. And we know that listening to attendees like you as listeners. One in particular that has attended here for some time said, you know, I couldn’t find your session in the app. When is it? And he said, every year I walk away from your session with two or three things that I want action, because you’ve been pretty good at calling them, right? Well, those type of conversations, you know, happen, but I started walking away, and he runs after me, literally, and says, I’ve got this specific problem with my estate and trust clients. Do you have a solution? And I and I said, Yeah, just a minute, I think so. And I gave him that solution, and he said, Are they here on the show floor? And I said, No, not to my knowledge, and I had walked the whole floor, but he found a tool that he could add to his tech stack, and that’s really what I’m trying to say with this rant. There are tools that you need, but fewer tools are better than more tools, but we want you to have the right tools to satisfy your client needs so much like Mark Koziol said last night, Hey, I said I’m not pontificating here. I’ve pontificated.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  09:57

Oh, come on now. But I would say that. Yeah, I think that, I think that it’s, it’s interesting watching the shift, you know, we’ve seen a number of generational shifts where people announce their retirements and they, you know, they, they decide that they’re changing, you know. You know, we have people that are just, they’re striking out on their own after long relationships with with organizations. And it’s, it’s always interesting having those conversations with people about what they’re doing and why and and things, because this profession is, is not going anywhere. I mean, we’re well, we’re going places, but this profession is going to be around for a very, very long time, and it I feel very almost the same way I did at the beginning of my career, when I saw how computerization was going to change accounting and how when we went to paperless, that was going to have a huge impact, and then when we moved to audit workflow automation, that was going to have a huge impact. You know, you can see these things coming, and it’s very interesting to to be able to talk to the people that are making things happen in those spaces, and to understand their why and to understand the why behind the products. Because, you know, the the thing I would say here is there are more products in here than there have ever been. And so the problem is, it’s not about getting getting a product, okay? It’s about getting the right product that works for you and the way you work. Okay, you know, I I say many times when we’re, when we’re talking about accounting technology, it’s, it’s very much like dating, you know, if you want to, if you want to date, you know, the beautiful cheerleader, that’s great, but you got to understand that you’re going to spend a lot of time at the gym and a lot of time, a lot of time at high school football games for the rest of your life, as long as you’re with that person, okay? And if that’s not what makes you happy, then maybe that’s not the right person for you, you know? And that’s the hard part about these things is that this, this process of dating that we do to to figure out, you know, what we like, what we don’t like, about people and things like that. I think the accounting technology space is very opaque in many ways. And what Randy and I are trying to try to do in the in the accounting technology lab is we try to to kind of give you some insight into what those whys that we learn are related to the products and related to the solutions, and what the thinking is from these, these really, really smart people that are out here, out here in the accounting profession, because you know, it’s, it is a scary time right now. There is a lot of change in the air. And, you know, we, we have to, we have to adapt to it, because the only constant, really, is change.

Randy Johnston  13:17

Yeah. So two observations for you, our friends and listeners. First, one of my favorite repeated phrases of the event so far is, you know, that hosted cloud computing thing not a big deal. Cloud computing was just kind of a myth, and that was so fascinating to hear because, you know, for a while it was cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, everything. And now people are looking back and saying, you know, cloud was important, but not that important in the long arc of time. That was kind of an interesting and multiple people, unprompted, said that to me second I watched an attendee, a practitioner like you, who was talking to a vendor saying, you know, what do you do? Well, we do multi entity, you know, general ledger accounting. And the person said, Well, yeah, I don’t think I need that. And the vendor said, Well, you know, it, what it does is, you know, allows multiple businesses to be consolidated, enrolled. I mean, so good explanation, better than what I just did. And the person said, Yeah, we don’t do any of that. And the person who was obviously the partner, said, You know, I kind of think you do? And you watched the person who was doing the accounting say, oh, yeah, maybe I do in that situation. And it was he got even worse, because, unfortunately, the person was using QuickBooks Desktop and

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  14:55

which in no way, shape or form does multi entity accounting. Yeah. And no, in no nation, does it do multi entity. There is no inner company. There is, you know, it is multi entity. Like I am an exotic dancer. I mean it, it, they’re just not. There’s no part of it that’s the same.

Randy Johnston  15:17

And I was watching the vendor being very polite saying, Well, you know, we think that you may have some needs like that. And of course, the partner saying, Oh yeah, we definitely do. And the person still saying, Well, I don’t understand, but they did at least gather the information and walk away. And I’m hopeful that that person will come back because I was standing there trying to bite my tongue because it’s like, no, no, you don’t get it this, it’s going to solve exactly what you just said. Your problem was that can’t be solved on the platform you’re using. But, you know, I

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  15:51

I just, I will say that this is a significant challenge for many people in the accounting profession, is to remain teachable. You know, I think the I think we’re so used to, you know, one of the one of the characteristics I’ve seen of many accounting professionals that holds them up in advisory is that they don’t want to go into a meeting where they don’t know the right answer walking in, okay. And the thing I would say is, if you’re going into a meeting and you already know the outcome of meeting. Why are you having the meeting? If you’re not going to listen? You know, I think it’s I think it’s instructive that I think we have to acknowledge that we are all teachers and learners, and we have to make sure we remain teachable in things, and we don’t get so set in our ways that we, you know, that we just like this person did ignore, you know, ignore this because they thought they knew what they were going to do, and they weren’t willing to consider a new solution for that because they were comfortable. I think we’ve got to all understand that we we have to remain teachable, and we have to understand that sometimes a nugget like that one you were talking about, I remember being there with you when it happened, and sometimes a nugget will fall out of the sky, and we have to consider it and make ourselves and take a chance and see if it will do this and be willing to learn and willing to also teach at the same time. And I think it’s, you know, I think the biggest problem for the accounting profession is we like this stability. And, you know, I think the thing I love about coming to events like this is that I get to talk to a lot of interesting people doing interesting things, making a huge difference in the profession. And I get to understand the why, instead of just the what and the how much okay and, and the why makes it much easier for me to really get the whole picture, I think, and, and again, that requires us to talk to people and see what they’re thinking and, and, you know, sometimes it’s a complete bust, but sometimes something magic happens, and, and, and something, any a solution, is out here that solves all kinds of problems. But I’m not thinking about it because they didn’t have a huge ad in accounting today.

Randy Johnston  18:31

Yeah. Well, one other observation, not that many years ago, many of the vendors were financial reporting tools. And you know, as Cass was expanding, and you and I are tracking not dozens, but over 100 financial reporting tools, and there are very few financial reporting tools on the floor. You know, I was just thinking about the trends where we had dozens and dozens of financial reporting tools on the floor five, six years ago. There’s only a very few this time. So those type of things you have to, you know, step back and say, Huh. Wonder what’s going on and why that’s the case. But you know, our job is to kind of get you to think, Huh, why is that the case? So Brian, any other parting thoughts here on what we’ve seen so far with this year’s AICPA engage.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  19:25

Well, the profession is changing, and the environment we work in is changing, and you know, it’s not going to be the same in 10 or 15 years, okay, but it’s always been different. What you know when we go through a generation of time like that, and so we have to, we have to, you know, we have to take time to learn where things are going and learn what the opportunities are so that we can effectively lead our firms, our crew. Rears our profession forward, and we have to remain teachable and to again be able to handle the, you know, the onslaught of change that’s coming, because it is going to go faster and become more and more merciless as time goes on. And if we don’t have the background, and we don’t have the foundation, we’re not going to we’re we’re going to be left behind. And so we have to keep reinforcing that foundation so that so that our house survives.

Randy Johnston  20:36

Well, a fascinating show that we’re attending. We hope you’ve got a couple of insights from it, and we’ll see you again as you listen in on another accounting Technology Lab. All the best to you. Good day.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  20:51 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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