AI agents are already inside your clients' HR and payroll stacks — processing exceptions, flagging anomalies, and answering employee questions without a human ever reviewing the output. For most organizations, nobody is watching. 

This session explores what happens when agentic AI moves from novelty to infrastructure — and what accounting and HR professionals need to do before that transition catches them off guard. We'll walk through real-world payroll scenarios where AI surfaces errors, prepares corrections, and routes approvals, and examine the governance questions those workflows raise: Who signed off? What changed? What's the audit trail? 

Attendees will leave with a practical lens for evaluating AI governance readiness inside any HCM environment — and a clearer sense of where the accountability gap lives and who owns it.

This session is geared toward CPA firm partners, managers, and CAS practice leaders and focuses on extending advisory services into coordinated wealth management. Participants will learn to identify the client triggers already sitting within their existing book, including liquidity events, concentrated wealth, estate planning gaps, and succession needs, while evaluating the tradeoffs between building this capability internally, referring it out, or co-sourcing with a dedicated partner. 

Special focus will be placed on the "5-year advantage" of planning well ahead of a business sale and on preserving advisory revenue that could otherwise disappear when a client's business changes hands.

A practical session on scaling from compliance work into advisory with AI-enabled workflows, without tripping the client-data rules that come with them (AICPA confidentiality, the FTC Safeguards Rule, California's all-party recording consent law, and IRC 7216). Attendees map where their firm sits on the CAS maturity spectrum, work through the three friction zones where AI meets client data, and leave with a completed action matrix and a 30-day plan.  

CAS firms have automated much of their client work, from tax prep and document collection to onboarding and engagement letters. Their own operations are a different story. Invoicing, collections, bill pay, the close, and business development still run on manual effort, and that time comes directly out of the firm's margin. This session examines where a typical firm's operating spend goes and highlights practical automation opportunities in accounting firms’ own accounts receivable, accounts payable and finance processes, with supporting examples from marketing and sales administration. Attendees will leave with a clearer view of where AI and automation can recover time and margin today, as well as the emerging capabilities that could reshape firm operations next.