Accounting
Board members need more audit and finance skills
Audit and finance skills are heavily in demand for corporate board members, according to a recent survey.
“It was tied actually with cybersecurity as a skill set, and then just behind technology implementation and industry specialization, as well as corporate strategy,” said Amy Rojik, national managing principal for corporate governance of BDO USA. “I think this reflects several things that are important to public companies, in particular the heightened focus of stakeholders, especially regulators and investors, on the need for high-quality and reliable financial information and disclosures to aid in investment decisions. We all know that regulators are heavily pushing for transparency and disclosures across the board, and in particular with respect to financial accounting and reporting disclosures, along with important oversight responsibilities, particularly in increasing risk areas like cybersecurity where breaches can really have a material impact on a company’s financial condition.”
Photo: Richard Falco
The survey asked the board members what they believe are the greatest near-team opportunities for generative AI, and 11% cited finance and accounting.
“Anecdotally, the top three board education continuing education topics that we get asked to provide to the board are generative AI, cybersecurity and enterprise risk management,” said Rojik. “Those by far are the most requested things that, especially with the audit committee, we’re seeing as a topic of conversation that they want to dive deeper into. I find that very encouraging because it’s across the board.”
Some 17% of the survey respondents indicated that advancing the use of emerging technology is a top strategic priority, while lagging implementation of emerging technology (27%) is a top-cited risk. At the same time, a slight majority of directors (51%) indicated they plan to increase investment in emerging technology, while 41% intend to increase investment in cybersecurity, data privacy and governance over the next year.
Generative AI has become a governance focus, with directors pursuing use cases and working to mitigate a wide array of risks. Approximately one third of directors (31%) selected customer experience (16%) or product/service development (15%) as the greatest opportunity for generative AI.
Rojik pointed to a recent
“It’s probably more at the forefront, where we’re probably on the audit side preparing more administrative documents or initial drafts of memos and presentations and researching internal accounting and auditing guidance,” she said. “Preparers may be doing something similar, maybe summarizing accounting standards and interpretations, and benchmarking company information. And then some are even using generative AI to assist in the performance of less complex and repetitive processes, such as preparing account recs or identifying reconciling items. I think the potential investments that companies are looking forward to are summarizing accounting policy and legal documents, evaluating completeness of audit documentation against relevant documentation requirements, performing risk assessment procedures and scoping the audit.”
But data privacy and security remain important factors, she added. Firms need to be careful about client information being loaded into a generative AI-enabled tool, who is allowed to use those types of tools on the audit, what level of staff, and where the supervision is in those models.
“There’s still, fortunately for all of us, a very high human element of supervision and review to make sure this is all making sense and that we understand what’s going into these models that we’re exploring and what’s coming out has integrity,” said Rojik. “We have a long way to go on both sides of that, from an audit perspective and from a financial reporting perspective. I would say with confidence every audit firm is looking at how to do that, but they’re also looking at it from a lens of how the regulators are going to monitor, enforce and regulate that. There’s more to come in that space certainly, but that’s a huge area to keep an eye on for boards.”
The survey also included data on committee allocation for audit, and found 57% of the public company board respondents have an audit committee and serve on it, while 43% have an audit committee and do not serve on it, and 0% do not have an audit committee.
The audit committee and others are confronting risks from technology and the economy.
“Organizations are really considering where they should be allocating risks, especially emerging risks, and so we’re taking a look at their traditional board structures in terms of the committee allocations,” said Rojik. “Is the audit committee the right committee to put all these emerging risks in? Should there be special committees of the board, or should there be separate committees? Several of our clients have recently instituted separate technology committees, or technology innovation committees. Some, especially financial institutions of a certain size, are required to have risk committees. The most important thing boards can be doing, though, is looking at how they’re putting together that allocation through their charters and other documents that hold them accountable, and then looking at how regulators are viewing the required disclosures.”
Big Four firm PwC announced new agentic AI capacities, including a model that proactively identifies areas of value leakage and acts inside the tools teams already use to fix them itself.
The new solution,
The software, which is supported by PwC’s recently released
The system connects directly into ERP environments, continuously monitors key metrics, and acts inside the tools teams already use. For example, a supply chain agent might detect rising shipping costs and automatically reroute deliveries to reduce spend. Finance agents can spot and correct billing errors before they reach the customer. Clients typically see measurable efficiency gains in the first quarter, with continued improvements over time as the system learns and adapts.
“Too many transformations still rely on one-off pilots and stale data, stretching the gap from insight to impact and suffocating ROI,” said Saurabh Sarbaliya, PwC’s principal for enterprise strategy and value. “Agent Powered Performance flips the economics by distilling PwC’s industry transformation playbooks into AI agents that turn static insights into compounding gains, without rebooting each time.”
Agent Powered Performance is platform-agnostic and built on an open architecture so it can work across different LLMs based on client preferences and task-specific needs. It works with major enterprise platforms including Oracle, SAP, Workday and Guidewire.
Agent OS Model Context Protocol
PwC also
By integrating this standard, agent systems registered as MCP servers can be used by any authorized AI agent. This reduces redundant integration work and the overhead of writing custom logic for each new use case. By standardizing how agents invoke tools and handle responses, MCP also simplifies the interface between agents and enterprise systems, which will serve to reduce development time, lower testing complexity, and cut deployment risk. Finally, any interaction between an agent and an MCP server is authenticated, authorized and logged, and access policies are enforced at the protocol level, which means that compliance and control are native to the system—not layered on after the fact.
This means that agents are no longer siloed. Instead, they can operate as part of a coordinated, governed system that can grow as needs evolve, as MCP support provides the interface to external tools and systems. This enables organizations to move beyond isolated pilots toward integrated systems where agents don’t just reason, but act inside real business workflows. It marks a shift from experimentation to adoption, from isolated tools to scalable, governed intelligence.
Research Composer
Finally, a PwC spokesperson said the firm has also launched a new internal tool for its professionals called Research Composer, a patent-pending AI research agent embedded in the firm’s ChatPwC suite, designed to accelerate insight generation by combining web data with PwC-uploaded content.
Professionals will use the Research Composer to produce in-depth, citation-backed reports for either the firm or its clients. The solution is intended to enhance the quality of client work by equipping teams with research and strategic analysis capabilities.
The AI agent prompts users through a step-by-step research workflow, allowing them to shape how reports are packaged—tailoring the output to meet strategic needs. For example, a manager in advisory services might use Research Composer to evaluate white space opportunities across industries or geographies, drawing from internal reports and up-to-date market data.
Eide Bailly, a Top 25 Firm based in Fargo, North Dakota, is growing its presence in the Pacific Northwest by adding Traner Smith, based in Edmonds, Washington, effective June 2, 2025.
Traner Smith’s team includes two partners and 16 staff members and specializes in tax compliance and advisory services. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Eide Bailly ranked No. 19 on
Eide Bailly already has offices in Seattle, but hopes to grow further in the Pacific Northwest. “We’re pleased to welcome the talented team at Traner Smith to Eide Bailly,” said Eide Bailly managing partner and CEO Jeremy Hauk in a statement Monday. “Their expertise with high-net-worth individuals, real estate and privately held businesses aligns well with our strengths, and their client-centric approach is a perfect cultural fit. Having an office in Edmonds, Washington, is a great complement to our existing presence in Seattle. Together, we’re poised to deliver even greater value to families and businesses in the Seattle metro area.”
“Joining Eide Bailly is a natural next step for us — it provides access to deeper technical resources in areas like state and local tax, national tax, succession planning and international tax while allowing us to continue the personalized service our clients value,” said Kevin Smith, a partner at Traner Smith, in a statement.
“With this expanded support and platform, we’re excited to grow our reach, elevate what we do best, and help more clients than ever before,” said Shane Summer, another partner at Traner Smith, in a statement.
Eide Bailly has announced several other mergers in recent weeks. Earlier this month, it added
In 2023, Eide Bailly added
Top 100 firm
“We began working with Knuula in Spring 2024 to streamline our engagement letter process,” said Don Murphy, Managing Member of BMSS. “It quickly became clear that Knuula was not only a strong solution for us, but also an ideal partner in advancing industry-wide automation.”
While the specific terms of the deal were not disclosed, a spokesperson with Knuula said that, after this investment, BMSS and a collection of 21 of their partners now own 13% of the company. The investment represents not some passive revenue deal but an active collaboration between the two companies, with the spokesperson saying they will be working closely together on things like product development, new features, improvements, and networking.
The deal comes about a year after Knuula integrated with QuickFee, a receivables management platform for professional service providers, which allowed users to have engagement letters directly connecting to their QuickFee billing platform, tying the execution of the letter directly to the billing process.
“We’ve long sought to partner with a firm focused on strategic innovation in the accounting space,” said Jamie Peebles, founder of Knuula. “To develop a perfect solution for large firms, it is ideal to have a partner that is willing to work closely together and iterate quickly. This requires constant feedback between our two teams. The IT team from BMSS worked with our development team constantly and helped us iterate rapidly. We also had consistent input from partners, manager, and administrative staff to help us make valuable changes to Knuula. BMSS was a perfect partner for us.”
PwC AI agent acts proactively to preserve value
Eide Bailly merges in Traner Smith
BMSS announces investment, collaboration with Knuula
New 2023 K-1 instructions stir the CAMT pot for partnerships and corporations
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