North Carolina is the latest state making legislative moves in hopes of expanding the pipeline of licensed accountants. 

A new Accounting Workforce Development Act (SB321) was filed in the North Carolina General Assembly, offering an additional pathway to CPA licensure. The bill, backed by the North Carolina Association of CPAs, would allow CPA candidates to become licensed with a bachelor’s degree in accounting, two years of relevant work experience and successful completion of the Uniform CPA Exam. 

“North Carolina businesses, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations depend on a strong pipeline of CPAs to support financial operations, ensure compliance, and uphold fiscal accountability,” said NCACPA CEO Mark Soticheck in a statement Wednesday. “With the increasing demand for CPAs and the declining number of new entrants to the profession, this legislation provides an innovative workforce solution that meets industry needs while maintaining the rigor and integrity of the CPA profession.”

The American Institute of CPAs estimates 75% of CPAs currently in public accounting firms will retire within the next 15 years, spurring moves to develop policies that encourage new talent to enter the profession. The Accounting Workforce Development Act seeks to modernize CPA licensure by providing an additional experience-based pathway, so North Carolina can stay competitive in attracting and retaining accounting talent. 

 “This bill provides an alternative, not a replacement,” said Robert Broome, NCACPA’s vice president of advocacy and outreach, in a statement. “It creates a licensure option that values both education and real-world experience, making the profession more accessible while upholding the rigorous standards that define CPAs.”

Other states have also been making moves to streamline the licensure process. Both Ohio and Virginia have recently approved changes, and other parts of the country are looking to provide alternatives to the traditional 150-credit-hour rule for CPA licensure, including Minnesota and Florida. Last week, leaders of six state CPA societies in California, Florida, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas co-authored an article in an effort to clear up misconceptions about the 150-hour rule and the proposed alternatives.

To preserve mobility of CPA licensing across state lines, the AICPA and the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy are asking for comments on their proposal for an additional pathway to CPA licensure through changes in the Uniform Accountancy Act model legislation used in states. They proposed an alternative pathway to CPA licensure last month and UAA changes last September. 

MH CPA and Kenilworth Holdings have formed a joint venture called MH Kenilworth, an accounting firm focused on increasing client profitability.

MH CPA is based in Champaign, Illinois, and offers audit, tax, advisory and transaction services to 28 clients across the U.S. Kenilworth Holdings is headquartered in Chicago and operates an offshoring entity in India. Together, the joint venture will service firms with less than $10 million in revenue, offering offshoring, technology solutions, valuations, transfer pricing, M&A support, CFO services and business consulting, as well as audit, accounting and tax services.

“Companies become successful because they grow their revenue or lower their cost,” MH Kenilworth CEO Todd Shapiro, a former president and CEO of the Illinois CPA Society, told Accounting Today. “How are we [the profession] on a regular basis doing that? We don’t.”

“Show me a firm that became wildly successful because they had a clean audit, and I’ll show you a company that’s out of business,” he continued. “Now show me a company that’s become wildly successful because of your tax strategy, and again, I will show you a company that’s out of business.”

But what is the difference between this model and the firm being bought up by private equity?

“We don’t own them. They don’t own us,” Shapiro answered. “Typically, that’s not done — typically, there’s a connection between the two.”

The joint venture is mutually beneficial: Kenilworth gains a platform and an arsenal of contractable services, while MH CPA maintains its independence and grows deeper into or beyond its geographic footprint without spending its own funds. For example, if Kenilworth adds another firm, MH CPA would be the one to acquire it, Shapiro explained.

“Our firm has thrived by embracing innovation and forward-thinking strategies in the industry, and we look forward to bringing that same expertise and perspective to MH Kenilworth,” MH CPA CEO and managing partner Jeff Livesay said in a statement. “The joint venture offers an opportunity to enhance our capabilities through Kenilworth’s global talent resources and expanded services while strengthening and complementing MH CPA’s core competencies. We’re excited to build and expand the MH platform.”

“Staffing remains one of the most pressing issues facing accounting firms in the U.S. and globally,” John Wesley, a principal at Kenilworth Global Financial Advisors, said in a statement last week. “At Kenilworth Global Financial Advisors, we have built a successful model for providing high-quality, cost-effective staffing solutions and specialized services such as valuations, transfer pricing and technology solutions. Partnering with MH allows us to expand our U.S. presence while delivering greater value to firms across the country.”

Big Four firms EY and Deloitte, as well as accounting automation solutions provider Digits, all announced partnerships with technology company Nvidia, which has gone from a company known mainly for its video graphics cards to a major player in the AI space within just a few years. 

EY and Deloitte’s respective announcements both centered around the launch of their own agentic AI platforms built on Nvidia’s technology infrastructure, including its new Llama Nemotron family of open reasoning models, which is adapted from the Llama LLM initially developed by Meta but used widely since it leaked in 2023.

Nvidia said that, through training and refinement, Llama can more effectively perform multistep math, coding, reasoning and complex decision-making.

Deloitte’s Zora AI

Deloitte announced the release of its Zora AI by Deloitte platform Monday, which offers a suite of ready-to-deploy agents that are said to perceive, reason and act, autonomously executing complex business functions, serving as a way for clients to augment their workforce as well as boost their effectiveness. The three agents offered by the platform are Zora AI for Finance, Zora AI for Procurement and Zora AI for sales and marketing. 

Deloitte said the agents can source, extract and interpret real-time, multimodal data from structured and unstructured sources; run analytical and mathematical models to define related insights and trends; translate insights into easily consumed formats; provide scenario analysis and recommendations on business-critical decisions; and coordinate and perform a set of actions—in collaboration with other agents—to execute complex, nuanced workflows, from beginning to end, including transaction processing, anomaly detection and resolution, and self healing. 

“We are entering the autonomous enterprise era where agents can transform work and business models, ushering in entirely new ways of working,” said Deloitte US CEO Jason Girzadas in a statement. “Our vision with Zora AI is to assist our clients in their transition into this new era, where agents and employees interact to reinvent business processes and unlock new sources of business value, growth and innovation for their organizations.”

Deloitte itself is using Zora AI for Finance internally to streamline and automate its finance processes, including expense management. The expense management agents monitor expenses across payroll, facilities, sales and marketing, and employee time and expenses, enabling finance leaders to identify expense outliers, compare expenses against industry and competitor trends, and drill down into specific budgets. Deloitte estimates Zora AI will reduce its costs by 25% and increase its productivity by 40%. Deloitte plans to implement Zora AI for thousands of users by the end of 2025.

EY.ai Agentic Platform

EY also announced Monday the deployment of its own EY.ai Agentic Platform on the full Nvidia AI stack to respond to real-time events, adapt to regulatory changes and drive smarter financial and risk decisions across global operations. The EY.ai Agentic Platform will run across client clouds, on-premises, at the edge, and the Nvidia Cloud Provider ecosystem. Nvidia is holding a conference in San Jose this week.

The platform is, for now, primarily for internal use as part of EY’s “Client Zero” transformation, in which EY tests AI deployments to guide clients as an example of effective and responsible use of the technology. This initial deployment will integrate 150 AI agents supporting 80,000 EY professionals across data collection, document analysis and review, and income and indirect tax compliance. EY.ai risk agents will also work with risk professionals to deliver new AI-native services. The third-party risk management agent will enable clients to manage risk more comprehensively and increase productivity.

The platform overall supports EY’s Responsible AI Frameworks as well as Nvidia NeMo Guardrails and EY SafePrompt software to more effectively mitigate AI risk at the agent level. It also supports a framework for agent creation and orchestration, which will use Nvidia Blueprints, including AI-Q Blueprints, to operate across third-party agent platforms. These frameworks will, in turn, support a collection of “fit for purpose” models chosen and designed for agentic solutions, such as indirect tax, income tax compliance, financial crimes, regulatory compliance and financial reporting, and targeted sector solutions for finance, marketing, cyber resiliency and supply chain, all powered by client-specific reasoning models. The platform also has a Model Development Suite that lets users create custom, enterprise-ready AI reasoning models using NVIDIA AI Foundry.

“With the EY.ai Agentic Platform, we are moving fast to help the world’s largest organizations transform their enterprises and streamline increasingly complex compliance requirements, while enhancing productivity and operational excellence across our own businesses,” said EY global chair and CEO Janet Truncale. “In collaboration with NVIDIA, we’re harnessing the collective knowledge of 400,000 skilled professionals, and the broad spectrum of EY services, to help shape the future with confidence in a fast-moving, highly competitive global economy.”

Digits AGL on NVIDIA Triton

Finally, accounting automation and solutions provider Digits, on the same day, also announced that its own complete solution, centered around the recently-released Autonomous General Ledger, successfully developed and deployed vertical-specific large language models (LLMs), achieved using NVIDIA accelerated computing and NVIDIA Triton Inference Server, which is optimized for AI models.

Digits said that, through using this optimized inference server, they were able to increase the number of requests it can process (a metric generally referred to as “LLM throughput”) tenfold to create its verticalized application of Accounting AI. By “vertical,” Digits means the models, rather than having generalized training like ChatGPT or Claude, have been trained only on relevant, domain-specific information, which focuses outputs and reduces the possibility of inaccurate information. This reflects an overall move in the industry away from generic one-size-fits-all models, of which there are now many, toward specialized applications that deeply understand specific business domains. 

“You can think of LLMs as very generic,” said Digits CEO Jeff Seibert in an email. “They train on substantially the entire internet, and they have a broad base of horizontal knowledge, but they are not specialized in any specific field. We have combined the power of LLMs with over a dozen custom-trained models that specialize in double-entry accounting and the related workflows [specific to the accounting industry].”

When asked about the development process, he said Digits both fine-tuned publicly available LLMs to be more accurate for given tasks and spent five years training its own predictive models from the ground up on a proprietary data set of $825 billion worth of transactions. 

“You can think of Digits AGL as a symphony: we orchestrate over a dozen models together in production, most of which are completely unique and created from scratch in-house,” said Seibert. 

While Digits has been providing solutions since 2018, Seibert said this will be the first time the company is launching the full set of products, including the Automated General Ledger. 

“Previously, only pieces of Digits have been available (Reporting, Dashboards, Bill Pay and Invoicing), and this is the first time we are launching the full ledger — the AGL — to actually automate the bookkeeping,” he said. “After a year of intensive testing with hundreds of businesses via our full-service accounting offering, we’ve now launched it self-serve for small business owners and startup founders to automate their finances.”