Aligning with AI: Lisa Simpson on how to overcome sense of overwhelm

Lisa Simpson, CPA, CGMA, vice president–Firm Services at the AICPA, discusses the evolution of AICPA Town Hall, key takeaways from Town Hall’s six years of programming, and how practitioners can navigate rapid change driven by AI.

She shares insights on managing “a sense of overwhelm” related to AI and highlights resources that can help firms adapt, including the AICPA and CIMA AI resource hub.

The episode also includes a segment on the latest Economic Outlook Survey results and what they signal about business sentiment, inflation, and hiring.

Other resources related to the topics:

• The CPA.com AI resource page, which includes a vendor evaluation framework.
• The Town Hall landing page, which includes a registration button.
• The full Economic Outlook Survey results for the second quarter.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• Lisa Simpson’s recap of topics at the recent PCPS Executive Committee meeting.
• How AICPA Town Hall has evolved to deliver news, analysis, and practice management insights.
• The common comment that Simpson jokingly says she gets about Town Hall.
• Why many CPAs feel a sense of overwhelm about AI and how to begin addressing it.
• Resources, including the AICPA AI hub and CPA.com tools, that can support firm decision-making.
• What recent Economic Outlook Survey results reveal about inflation concerns and hiring plans.

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 repeat guest Lisa Simpson. She is vice president–Firm Services at the AICPA. You’ve seen her on Town Hall. You’ve heard her before on this podcast. We’re happy to have her back, and you’ll hear that conversation right after this brief sponsor message.

[Sponsor message]

Amato: Welcome back to the show. As I said, Lisa Simpson is our guest. Lisa, first, thank you for being back on. How are you doing today?

Lisa Simpson: I’m great. It’s been a wonderful but busy week, and I’m always excited to get to talk to you, Neil, on the JofA podcast.

Amato: Well, thanks. Yeah, you mentioned a busy week. At the time of our recording, May 15, you’ve just convened the PCPS Executive Committee at the AICPA’s Durham (N.C.) office for a couple of days. First, for people who don’t know, what is PCPS?

Simpson: It’s always a great question. We were just having a conversation this week about, “What does PCPS stand for?” And I really don’t even get into the description of what it actually means. It’s, “What is PCPS?”

PCPS is a firm practice management resource center. We provide resources for firm leaders who are really looking to set the course of their future of the firm using some very practical, hands-on toolkits that we develop with some of the profession-leading consultants.

We have resources that can help firm leaders define their strategy, look at how they’re implementing technology, think about their client service offerings. One of my most important toolkits is around governance: How are decisions made in the firm? And then again, just a lot of other topics that are really top of mind in how to run a practice today.

Amato: That’s great. Yeah, so the Private Companies Practice Section Executive Committee meeting, what would you say was the big topic or big two topics of their discussions this week?

Simpson: Honestly, Neil, it was all gen AI for two days. Every time we would talk about how did busy season go, gen AI would come into play. What are you going to do differently? Gen AI would come into play.

It was just AI throughout the entire course of the two-day meeting, which is interesting and exciting.

Amato: Yeah, it definitely is. There’s a lot changing, a lot of challenges, but also a lot of opportunities. We’ll come back to that AI topic in just a bit. You know, it’s all AI all the time, but there are some other things I want to ask you about.

For starters, Town Hall. I want you to kind of look back, but also look ahead. What are your reflections on Town Hall’s growth as it’s now celebrating more than six years of delivering information that CPAs need to know in an entertaining format?

Simpson: I appreciate that you think we’re entertaining. That’s really one of my goals.

When we started Town Hall in April of 2020, we wanted to deliver the latest and best news that we could on issues impacting the profession. At that time, it was around business relief programs that were being rolled out like the Paycheck Protection Program, employee retention credits, and those kinds of things.

But our guiding principle has always been what is the latest, most important news, and what is our analysis of that news that we need to be sharing with the profession?

My personal approach is that if you’re going to have to listen to me for an hour, I want you to have some fun while we do it. So over the course of the last six years, we’ve kind of created a standing agenda.

We’ll start with what’s going on in the profession or what’s going on in DC. So, what are the regulatory issues that are out there that could impact the profession? And some of them might seem a little tangential, but we try to create that cohesion around what this means for you, either as a practitioner or if you are in finance, leading an organization, what do you need to know?

Then we’ll talk about what the latest technical updates are. It’s primarily tax-focused because that’s where most of the fast-moving changes are. And again, if you think about the past six years with COVID, business relief, and then last year, the tax legislation that came out, we’ve had a lot to keep us busy in that technical arena.

And then we’ll talk about some practice management topics, which is where I really love to get in and talk to practitioners about what they’re doing differently within their firms to adapt to a changing landscape. Again, technology — if we talk about AI and what that’s doing within firm practices — changing business structures, changing talent models. You know, in the height of the pandemic, we saw a big talent crunch. Now, six years later, we see a lightening of that talent crunch, but there are still talent challenges.

So we talk practice management, and then we always like to get in a little technology or practice service line information. So, we spend a lot of time talking about the growth in advisory, particularly around client advisory services. We talk cybersecurity. So all kinds of fun topics that we try to make digestible in a 12- to 15-minute segment to give you what you need to know right now.

Amato: And I think one of the things you do is you do a great job managing all the numerous acronyms. I mean, we haven’t mentioned them all, but PPP and ERC and BOI and OBBBA and CAS — you just mentioned client advisory services. You keep it all straight and you deliver it in a way that, as I said, is entertaining for the viewer.

For you, I want to know, is it easier to be on a panel at a big conference such as ENGAGE or to be in the studio doing Town Hall?

Simpson: That’s a great question. When I’m in the studio, I’ve got our amazing technical production team supporting me, so I know nothing’s going to go wrong from a technical standpoint. And it’s really all about do I say the right words, which I don’t often — I mean, which I have been known to mess up.

But, I also love being on panels because I love the opportunity to really get into different perspectives and to think about how technology could impact, let’s say, audit versus tax versus advisory. So you can bring in different perspectives if you’re on a panel and you’ve got plenty of time.

I love them both. I’ll just say that, personally, AICPA Town Hall has been just so humbling and rewarding. It’s given me an opportunity to connect with so many of our members. And the biggest compliment I can get when I’m in the field is if someone walks up and says, “Lisa, I feel like I know you because I’ve seen you on Town Hall.”

I want folks to know that we’re people who really care, and hopefully I can bring that in to the way I approach Town Hall.

Amato: Yeah, I think that comes through. And you mentioned that connection with people you meet. Is there any one common question they ask you more than anything else about, hey, I saw you on Town Hall — how do you do that? Or what do they ask?

Simpson: Neil, the most common comment I get when people meet me in real life is, “Oh wow, you’re really short. You seem so much bigger on TV.” And I just always say, “I carry myself tall.”

But no, I think they’re mostly just appreciative of the community that we’ve built around Town Hall. And they do ask me how much time do you spend on it, and that varies.

A quick shoutout to Melanie Lauridsen, who I know is a frequent guest on Town Hall. She’s doing all of the heavy lifting around those tax technical updates, which has allowed me to become more of an adviser to the overall Town Hall flow and to talk about practice management from a broad profession perspective.

So I love it. It’s an honor, and I really do appreciate when folks come up and say hello.

Amato: Another one of those acronyms that has crept into pretty much every Town Hall is AI. Let’s go back to that for a second. Are there some resources that you’d like to point people to, whether they’re PCPS-specific or general?

Simpson: A great question. One of the consistent points that we heard during the executive committee meeting this week was just how you can quickly have a sense of overwhelm because there are so many new AI tools with big splashes being made every week, and it’s kind of hard to know where to start. And I think that’s valid.

So yes, we have some wonderful resources. And I’ll start by calling out an AICPA resource hub that’s totally focused on AI. It helps you look at what are the particular things to think about from things like an ethics standpoint.

So we’ve got AI and ethics, we’ve got AI and tax, we’ve got AI and audit. And so it’s a good resource for kind of thinking about the impact of AI on the different service lines and professional responsibilities.

CPA.com has done some great work on producing thought leadership around where AI is actually impacting how we provide services. And one of the things that I think is just great is they’ve created a vendor due-diligence checklist.

A lot of times a vendor might say, yeah, we’ve got AI built in, but this checklist helps you ask deeper questions and get into what do you mean by AI. Is it really just that you’re using more advanced OCR technology, or are you really using large language models? What’s on your product road map?

And really helping you ask deeper questions as you’re thinking about what vendor you should choose for an AI product.

Amato: Thank you for those AI resources. We will be sure to include links in the show notes. I said we’re recording in mid-May. This episode is slated to air before ENGAGE, where there will be a live Town Hall on the Monday of ENGAGE. Lisa, what do you look forward to about ENGAGE in general, and is there anything in particular about this year’s event, the 10th, that excites you?

Simpson: What I love about ENGAGE is how it brings so many aspects of the profession into one place. And, I get a chance to see a lot of practitioners that this might be the one time of year I get to see them. But the breadth of conversations that you can have — you can get your tax technical, you can get your A&A technical, you can get practice management, you can get technology.

You can get all that technical training, and then you can go wander the exhibit halls and really get into what the developments are out there that can help enable your practice to grow in whatever way you want. So I love the people, I love the energy, I love the exhibit hall.

In terms of what I’m most excited about for 2026 ENGAGE and the 10-year anniversary, I am thrilled that the entire event is basically kicking off with a live AICPA Town Hall in Dolby Theatre.

I’m telling everybody I’m the warmup act for Ryan Reynolds, who’s a keynote that comes after Town Hall. I’ve never, ever expected that I would be Ryan Reynolds’ warmup act, but I’m fully embracing it.

But I’m excited about the opportunity to really showcase how fun AICPA Town Hall can be and how we cover so much content in one [hour] — well, this one’s a little bit longer, 75 minutes, on this particular one.

Amato: Definitely something to be excited about. We will see you there. We look forward to it. Lisa Simpson, thank you for being on the JofA podcast.

Simpson: It’s always an honor.

Amato: Thanks again to Lisa Simpson for being on the podcast. The resources she mentioned will be in the show notes for this episode.

Our next segment is focusing on the quarterly economic sentiment of CPA executives in business and industry. The survey news published earlier today on journalofaccountancy.com, and here’s a discussion further analyzing those survey results.

I’m joined again by Ken Witt, associate director–Management Accounting Research and Development. Ken, we’re glad to have you on the podcast to discuss the Economic Outlook Survey, the results of which are publishing Thursday, June 4. Let’s get right to it. What’s the overall look at the results from this quarter?

Ken Witt: So I’d say that one of the things we’re seeing this quarter is what the economist at our recent CFO Conference referred to as tariff or policy fatigue.

What I mean by that is while optimism about the U.S. economy declined from 39% in Q1 to only 32% in Q2, and optimism about the global economy also declined from 23% to only 19%, the number who said they were optimistic about their own-company prospects improved another two points from 47% to 49%.

Those with expansion plans also continued above the 50% mark, with 54% saying they have plans to expand their business. And these expansion plans are also supported by increases in spending as well. So despite the news cycle, more than half of our respondents apparently have decided they need to get on with their businesses in spite of what’s going on in the overall environment.

Amato: Thank you for that rundown. Again, our survey of members in business and industry, mainly privately owned, smaller companies. What are the optimists and then also the pessimists citing as the reasons for their sentiment?

Witt: So what we’ve heard from those who are optimistic about the economy is strong underlying fundamentals, along with the expectation of resolution of all these geopolitical issues that we’re seeing in the news cycle.

Pessimists are more concerned about these issues currently dominating the airwaves — energy prices, continued inflation, and geopolitical uncertainty.

Amato: So recession and inflation — we’ve been tracking those for a while. What’s the sentiment on those two topics?

Witt: So yes, you’re right, Neil. We have been tracking both the likelihood of a recession and concern about inflation for a number of quarters. And the news on both of these indicators turned south this quarter. In terms of a recession, we now have 51% of our respondents telling us we are either already in a recession or headed in that direction, up from only 36% last quarter.

Similarly, those concerned about inflation, after declining to only 56% last quarter, jumped to 81% this quarter. Inflation also moved up to the No. 2 spot on our list of major challenges after slipping to No. 5 last quarter.

Amato: You mentioned challenges. That’s a regular question in the survey, the top challenges. Inflation is No. 2. What’s No. 1, and what are some of the other notable challenges this quarter?

Witt: So employee and benefit costs moved into the top spot, just inching out inflation, followed by materials, supplies, and equipment costs. Concern about domestic economic conditions and domestic political leadership also continued in the mix. Energy costs made a strong first appearance, and cybersecurity concerns, which returned to the top 10 last quarter, gained a spot in this quarter, moving from No. 9 to No. 8.

Amato: So you’ve got employee and benefit costs at the top spot, followed by inflation. Clearly, cost management is top of mind. Let’s shift now then to KPIs — revenue and profit and then also hiring and spending measures. What are those looking like?

Witt: Sure. What we’re seeing in terms of revenue growth is forecast for the next 12 months decreased three-tenths from 2.9% in Q1 to 2.6% in Q2. Profit expectations gave back some gains, too, from 1.6% in Q1 to 1.1% this quarter.

Sentiment on hiring was mostly in line with recent quarters, with just under a third of business executives — 28% this quarter — indicating they have too few employees. Of those needing employees, only 12% remain hesitant to hire, down from 17% in Q1, while 16% are planning to go ahead and hire, up from 14% in Q1. Those who said they had too many employees increased two points from 11% to 13%.

Amato: Thank you. That’s the KPI and hiring sentiment rundown. Ken, we’ve gone through these results quickly. Is there anything else you’d like to add in closing?

Witt: No, I don’t think so. I think as always, we’ll have to wait and see how things resolve themselves on the geopolitical front and see what happens with inflation as a result of the Hormuz Strait and energy prices, and we’ll see where we go from here.

Amato: Ken Witt, thank you very much.

Witt: Thank you, Neil.