Roughly 4,000 people attended AICPA Engage at the Aria Resort & Casino in Las Vegas last week. We can only speak from the perspectives of six of them.
Truss’ team flew in from every corner of the country to immerse ourselves in the biggest business convention any of us had ever experienced. Whether we were the cofounder of the company or the content specialist six days into the job, we did our best to soak it all in and have as many enriching conversations as we could.
Throughout those conversations, we started seeing some common threads. And in an industry that’s rapidly evolving, not to mention the world at large, this week served as a reminder that the goals everyone at the event were trying to achieve have largely held in place.
How the event was presented to us
Truss was only attending Engage as a company for the second time, and nearly everyone present was a newbie. But the messaging and overall tone of the event still struck a note that most of us figured to be novel in the 10-year history of Engage.
Tax Transformation. The AI-Era Practice. The Path Forward. These phrases were everywhere, from the banners, to the keynote handouts, to the whitepapers outlining the AICPA’s proposed framework for navigating the artificial intelligence revolution.
The story of an entire profession trying to reinvent itself on the fly is a compelling one, and that narrative absolutely persists beyond the walls of a cavernous Las Vegas convention center. The tax practice, much like the rest of the world, is indeed evolving.
But the thousands of accountants at the conference also had to head back to their desks at the end of the week and get back to running their firms, so we knew the story would primarily be told through their eyes. And as we listened to their thoughts throughout the week, the word “transformation” wasn’t necessarily front-of-mind when it came to the problems those folks wanted to solve.
What we were hearing at the booth
Truss had a humble outpost at Engage, a single table and two chairs packed into a booth of about 25 square feet. At the front of the room, directly between our setup and the door, lay the department store-like lots for Wolters Kluwer and Thomson Reuters, replete with decorative support beams, LED display screens, padded floors, and even industrial espresso machines.
We were all the way at the opposite corner of the hall from the stage where tech demonstrations were happening, and we weren’t even on the same floor as the keynote addresses. So we weren’t hearing much grand discussion of a transforming industry. The conversations kept flowing back to the same place accountants have always lived: those pesky documents.
The problems still persist. Unsigned engagement letters, organizers getting ignored, clients turning up in late March to say, “Wow, I guess tax season is here, huh?” A dinner guest we had one night put things as bluntly as possible: “If your documents aren’t in a month early, you’re getting an extension.” Or at least, that’s what he wished he could say to those folks.
People were telling us that they knew they had to get with the times when it came to automation. But not because they were hoping for a transformative experience. Because they needed to get those documents in sooner to take stress out of the lives of the people at the firm. And to some degree, because clients were hesitating more than ever to send in those documents, whether it was because AI was affecting their lives or something totally different.
That was where we saw what actually excited people about Truss: the pragmatism and functionality. Customers wanted to arm their firms with a tool that could simplify their tech stack and handle intake, workpapers, prep, and delivery in a seamless workflow.
And above all, the idea of widespread client adoption was turning heads, because clients don’t care how transformative their tools to upload those documents are; they just care that it’s easy.
What we learned and why it mattered
As we retreated to our corners of the map, we came to our conclusion: the profession has the right idea when it comes to where things are going, but the reality of the coming “transformation” isn’t as glamorous as some might think.
The AICPA’s most recent whitepapers described technology as “capacity creation.” In other words, automating a routine allows a firm’s best people to do higher-value work. We agree, but we think it’s important to clarify what’s clogging up that routine and restricting capacity.
For most firms we talked to, tax research and the returns themselves aren’t creating the biggest headaches. It’s the front of the workflow: Intake, document collection, and setting the ball in motion to prep and deliver the return. It’s weeks of client-chasing that quietly consumes more and more time on calendars from the bottom of the organizational flowchart to the top.
Document collection might seem like an unglamorous problem to solve, but smart firms are positioning it as a strategic one. The workflow has to be cleaned up for true transformation to occur, and firms aren’t suddenly going to be able to make their clients passionate about any sort of tax-related software.
The messy, inherently human parts of the workflow will still exist as long as real people with the instinct to procrastinate are on the other end of the line. There’s an opportunity at hand to optimize the parts of the tax process firms can control, and Truss wants to be here to guide people through their optimization process.
Closing thoughts
Out of the 4,000 people, we know we can only speak for six. But all six of us returned home with the same conclusion: The goals are the same, even if the domain is rapidly changing. Firms still want their people to be free to do higher-value work. Accountants still want to stop chasing their clients. And clients won’t care about AI innovation in software development solely for innovation’s sake.
We were struck by how real and grounded the conversations were. The future of tax may indeed by the sweeping innovation we read on the signage, but it should also be steeped in practicality. If the documents get in quicker and move seamlessly through prep and delivery, then there’s time to keep restructuring the process innovative way.
Leaving Las Vegas, we felt as though the oldest and most exhausting problem in the accounting profession is still the most important one to solve. We’re glad we’re the ones who get to solve it.