AI, succession, the talent pipeline, and defining ‘unapologetic’ ambition

Sponsored by Thomson Reuters

This week’s podcast guest is Kimberly Ellison-Taylor, CPA/CITP, CGMA, the CEO of KET Solutions and former AICPA and Association of International Certified Professional Accountants chair. Ellison-Taylor joined the show from the National Association of Corporate Directors 2025 Summit earlier this week, where AI was the main topic of conversation.

What else are corporate boards discussing? And how is the accounting profession faring on certain aspects of growing the talent pipeline? Ellison-Taylor has answers, along with a look ahead to AICPA events in November and December.

Resources:

Global Women’s Leadership Summit (Nov. 10–12, Nashville, Tenn.)

Digital CPA Conference (Dec. 7–10, National Harbor, Md.)

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• The priorities and top concerns of corporate boards, starting with AI.
• How the accounting profession and firms in particular are doing when it comes to “looking inward.”
• Why Ellison-Taylor says that ambition can be defined different ways by different people.
• More about her comment that “at some point, we all will be digital CPAs.”

Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:

— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Neil Amato at Neil.Amato@aicpa-cima.com.

Transcript

Neil Amato: Welcome back to the Journal of Accountancy podcast. This is Neil Amato with the JofA. I’m joined by a repeat guest on the show. Coming up is that conversation with Kimberly Ellison-Taylor. You’ll hear it right after this brief sponsor message.

[Sponsor message]

Amato: Kimberly, welcome to the podcast. We’re glad to have you back. You’ve been attending the National Association of Corporate Directors 2025 Summit. To lead off, how are corporate directors, corporate boards viewing AI?

Kimberly Ellison-Taylor: I love all of that. Thank you, Neil, for having me back. It’s always a pleasure. Well, let me tell you, first of all, I’m excited that I’m here with so many CPAs. I’ve seen so many of our members, and I’m always so excited when I see them. Know that we are here at the National Association of Corporate Directors conference, and we are also learning about AI. We recognize as board directors our responsibility to be looking around corners and to stay current on strategy and emerging risk in the environments that we’re in.

We have been in sessions talking about AI governance, AI strategy, talking about how we manage the risk of AI and certainly how we can partner more effectively inside the organization with the leaders as they tackle the day-to-day responsibilities, and we are charged with the responsibility for oversight.

Amato: We’ll get to some of those other topics, but I’m just curious. Would you say AI is almost like the most popular topic there?

Ellison-Taylor: I would definitely say AI and then leadership succession. Between those two topics, I think — oh my gosh, it’s hard to say. Because as soon as I said that, Neil, then I thought about geopolitical, economic uncertainty. We’re talking about the tariffs. We’re talking about talent. It’s a lot of good things going on here. But, back to your point, is AI a topic of discussion and probably the most predominant one? Yes.

Amato: Yeah.

Ellison-Taylor: It is.

Amato: Would you say that things in the realm of corporate boards, directors — it just seems like there’s a lot of things moving faster, and there’s more of them than maybe there were three or four years ago.

Ellison-Taylor: I think the scale, the breadth, the acceleration of the topics definitely have been increasing with speed and change, 100%. But I will say the topics that we’re charged with are the usual suspects, and those are the things that I just said. They go into buckets of people, process, regulations, compliance, how do we achieve competitive advantage? What do we do in order to have more effective decisions?

We ask better questions. As a board director, we are asking questions that probe. We’re asking uncomfortable questions, tough questions. We’re also asking constructive challenge questions because we want to make sure that we’re doing our responsibility, which is to oversee strategy, risk, performance, and also the top leadership of the organization.

Amato: Yeah, I mean, you can definitely say that uncertainty has been a thing for a while. But under that bucket are all these new things that maybe we haven’t been thinking about, which is right now a government shutdown, the past few months tariffs. Yeah, it is that type of thing.

Tell me about this stat and its effect on governance and strategy. The exit from the labor force of older workers in the next five years or so is going to create a gap of about 6 million workers, given fewer available replacements from the younger generations. From a board standpoint, a talent management standpoint, what issues is that going to present for companies, and how can they combat it?

Ellison-Taylor: Well, what issue will it present is certainly around as we talk about artificial intelligence and emerging technology in general. We need to inform the systems, so that we have the machines learn, and what are they learning if they don’t have historical contexts? I do believe that disruption and competitive advantage both start with imagination. Yes, on one hand, we want, “Why did we do it this way? When did we do it this way?”

We need the people who understand the scope of responsibility of a particular function. On the other hand, we need to reimagine how we’re doing it, so that we can maximize all of the benefits of artificial intelligence. When you bring those two things together, that’s the perfect environment because people are in place that know when the answer that the AI presents is wrong. We have to have professional skepticism around people, but we need that same professional skepticism around the systems as well. But in order to have professional skepticism, you’d have to have some notion of what the answer should be.

The people who know what the answer should be, if they leave the organization, we will definitely have some brain drain, and we have to figure out how do we convince them to stay if we can. Two, how do we start those processes of documenting and reimagining the process in general while they’re still on deck, so that we can be in a better place and also maximize the benefits of AI.

Amato: We talked about talent, obviously. Let’s bring it to just the accounting profession for a bit. CPA pipeline has been a topic we’ve talked about in the past. It’s a multipronged issue, I guess. There are several things at work, but one part is CPA firms having to look inward.

They can’t just say, hey, we have to go out and find more talent. They have to improve some aspects of their firms that will make them more desirable places to work. In your mind, I mean, we’ve been having this conversation for a year, maybe more, just me and you. Obviously, it’s been going on longer than that, but in your mind, how is the profession doing on this front?

Ellison-Taylor: I think we’ve had no choice. In some cases, we’ve expanded our notion of what an engagement team looks like. We’ve had to ask ourselves, do you really need this capability or knowledge set, and which capability do you need to be on the team? In some cases, firms have determined that maybe they didn’t need five CPAs. Maybe they needed someone who could think about processes, project manager, a technologist, a CPA, an accountant.

I think we’ve seen, as a result of not having CPAs available, I think we’ve seen multidisciplinary engagement teams and work groups working together on projects but coming together in I think a very powerful way because they’re looking at the challenge of the problem from different angles. I think they’ve had to do that.

In other cases, I think that firms have had to really look at themselves and say, would I want my kid to come here and work? Is this the best that we can do? I think that they’ve gotten really creative to achieve competitive advantage. And being creative means they didn’t have to outspend people. They didn’t have to be the largest brand name. But what they could do was be an environment where you could wear jeans to work Monday through Thursday, if you were in the office, but because you’re dressing for your day. If you didn’t have client meetings, then you were good, and we were fine with whatever you came to work in as long as it was appropriate, of course.

In other cases, it was location for your day. Work where you need to be in order to get the work done. Now, I think that was harder because, without the pandemic speeding us up on our thinking in that area, many of us would not even have branched out into work from home. But be that as it may, we know that people can do it. Now that we know that people can do it, the horse is out of the barn, so people expect some level of flexibility with location.

The other part of that, Neil, I think is having flexibility, even if you have a return-to-office policy, having flexibility, so that if I don’t feel well, I can stay home, or if I need to meet the bus or if I want to coach a team that you trust me to get the work done and that we’re focusing on outcomes and not focusing on hourly rates.

Now I know we’ve got a little more time in the profession before that fully becomes more commonplace. But I think firms have had to think about what they really needed to do to attract the best and brightest talent and not always use money as a factor. Because at the end of the day, money is great. But when I speak to young people, it’s not the most important factor in whether or not they’re going to stay at a firm.

Amato: That’s a really good point. Thank you for that. CPA pipeline obviously comes up in many of your presentations, and one of those upcoming presentations, maybe more career-oriented than true, let’s assess the pipeline, but it’s at the Global Women’s Leadership Summit in November in Nashville. It has for a partial title, “Unapologetically Ambitious.” What does that phrase mean to you?

Ellison-Taylor: It is going to be an amazing panel. It’s actually sponsored by Robert Half, and I’m delighted that I get to be on this panel with one of their executives. We’re going to be talking about, I think busting through the myth that the whole notion of being OK with being successful. It was hard for me even to get that out because as a little girl growing up in inner city of Baltimore, my mom would say, don’t brag on yourself. Let somebody else brag on you. You don’t have to say you’re doing a good job; let somebody else say you’re doing a good job.

What I learned as I grew up is that, yes, people like a level of humility and that you should be competent, but be humble. But at the same time, you do have to have a humble brag on your achievements, your accomplishments, because you have to be able to speak up and advocate for yourself, and you have to be able to articulate your value and what you would bring to a role or what you would bring to an organization.

Yes, it’s great that people would say, hey, you did a great job, and you don’t have to pat yourself on the back. But I think it’s OK to be ambitious about wanting to be the CEO, to be ambitious about wanting to be the managing partner, or to be ambitious with saying you want to be a partner in the firm. I think we should be OK with that. Sometimes when we share our dreams and ambitions with other people, they put us in a box because the dream or ambition that we share could be perceived as almost too big, or it’s improbable, or it’s unlikely. Why would you think that you could do that?

I think we’ve got to be careful about who we share our dreams with, and the energy that they in turn would give us back might not be as positive. But at the same time, we need to be like Teflon and be OK with speaking out our dreams and our vision and affirm and validate who we are and what we want to do, even if it take us a little bit longer, it takes us a little longer or even if it’s so big that we have to sit down and think in bite-size chunks of how do we get to that goal? I think that’s OK.

I think however you want to do it is OK. I think we have to define for ourselves what success looks like. No one else can define for you what success looks like, and no one can define for you what ambition looks like. Because ambition for you could be basically just getting to work and being OK with three to four years of staying in this position that you’re in. You don’t have to aspire every year to get a promotion. Sometimes we’re in seasons. But maybe you’re a person that wants to be a firecracker and every day and every year, you want to move to the next level. I think that’s OK, too. The unapologetic part of it is taking no prisoners as it relates to how you take care of yourself and how you perceive yourself.

Amato: Yeah, ambition does take on many forms for many people. But I do think it is important if you have goals, if you have dreams, the more you speak them, the more they can become real, I think. One other topic, one other conference, December, Digital CPA. Client advisory services and that topic, again, AI, are definitely going to be top of mind at that event. You teach emerging technologies to college students at Carnegie Mellon. On both of those fronts, client advisory services and AI, how often do you have to update your slides? Because these things are moving, as we said before, really, really fast.

Ellison-Taylor: They are moving at the speed of change for sure, Neil, and what’s even more daunting is that my students are executives. I teach in CMU’s Executive Education program.

Amato: I said college students. Obviously, they are beyond college. Sorry for that mistake.

Ellison-Taylor: Yes. No worries, but I tell you what. But you say students, and I just want to make the note that students can be someone who is 18 or someone who is 70 or even older, because we’re all in lifelong learning. I’m a student. I know you are a student. You’re constantly increasing and updating your craft. I would say I spend about three months or one class doing the research. Even then, by the time that they’re asking me for the deck, I’m like, wait, there’s something else I want to add because it’s still changing moment to moment. If you tried to use stale material, it would not resonate because these are individuals who are leaders in their respective roles.

Amato: That’s great. Do you want to say anything about client advisory services and how they’re changing? Obviously, that’ll be a theme of Digital CPA in December.

Ellison-Taylor: I’m really thrilled to have you asked that question because for the last couple of years, I’ve been one of the advisers for cpa.com’s Startup Accelerator. For 2025, in particular, I was able to help select and review the presentations of a number of really great solutions and services presented by, I think, leaders in our profession. They’re taking on, in some cases, some of our legacy incumbent, really, really strong players in the market today. Because they’re thinking about doing things differently and they’re thinking about how to leverage AI.

It was so amazing to see how artificial intelligence is working to solve real business problems, whether it’s in tax, whether it’s in accounting, whether it’s practice management. All of those individuals for 2025 that were selected will be at the Digital CPA Conference that will be taking place in Washington, D.C.

Now I’m really excited because it’s very close to where I live. Usually it’s in Denver, it’s in California or somewhere around the country. But this year it’s in Washington, D.C., and so each of those startups from 2025 will have a booth, and they will have lots of interaction and engagement to present their solution and service offering to the attendees.

The attendees are usually people standing at the intersection of technology and accounting. One of the things I especially appreciate is that that group is getting larger and larger, because although at one point, we might have been called digital CPAs, I fully believe that at some point, we all will be digital CPAs because the acumen that’s required in order to do our jobs requires technology knowledge. There’s no way to separate accounting and technology.

Those topics come together at Digital CPA, and there are any number of topics, but the exhibit hall and also the networking again, one, it’s a reunion, because I get to see a lot of people that I don’t usually see in one place. Two, it’s definitely an update of my knowledge base and whether it’s agentic AI or generative AI or use cases about AI. Even more importantly, I’m sure there will be topics on whether it’s blockchain and how it relates to [the internet of things] and how it relates to some form of AI, because these emerging technologies were on deck, and we were talking about them a couple of years ago. They’ve been baked into solutions.

It’ll be interesting to see, as new technology comes on deck, how those older — it’s weird to say older — but how those older or previous technologies we were talking about a couple of years ago, how they integrate and work together. So, it will be very interesting.

Amato: Yeah, it’ll be great for you to be, I guess, a home-state conference attendee for that event. We hope to catch up with you soon on the conference circuit somewhere down the road and appreciate you taking the time today to be on the JofA podcast. Thanks, Kimberly.