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The accounting and finance profession is in the middle of a reckoning, and this time it is not driven by regulation, recession, or scandal. It is driven by the convergence of artificial intelligence, exponential data growth, demographic change, and a global rethinking of what a finance professional is actually for.
Key Points
Rise2040 is the AICPA and CIMA's most ambitious foresight initiative to date. From June 2025 through January 2026, the organizations facilitated structured Future Forums across 25 countries with more than 6,000 participants — CPAs, CGMA professionals, CFOs, controllers, firm leaders, educators, and emerging professionals. The goal was not to produce a report. The goal was to build a repeatable foresight capability that could help the profession stop reacting to the future and start shaping it.
What emerged was not panic. It was clarity — and a surprisingly consistent set of convictions about what matters, what must change, and what must never change.
Rise2040 did not start with a conclusion. It started with a question that futurist Daniel Burrus posed to the initiative's leadership: "In an uncertain world, what are we certain about?"
That framing is important because it reflects the methodology that underpins everything in this report. The AICPA and CIMA didn't commission a trend analysis or a consultant's forecast. They built a global structured foresight system grounded in Burrus's Anticipatory Organization framework — a discipline that distinguishes between Hard Trends and Soft Trends.
Hard Trends are future facts. They will happen regardless of what organizations choose to do. Computing power will increase. AI will grow more capable. Data will proliferate. Populations will age. Regulation will respond to innovation. These are not predictions. They are the floor. Once you identify them, Burrus argues, the fog lifts: "When you are certain about something, you have the confidence to make a bold move. When you are uncertain, you hesitate, you defer, you commission another study."
Soft Trends, by contrast, are likely but not certain. They represent areas where strategic choice can still influence outcomes. The profession's business model is a Soft Trend. The pace of AI adoption within firms is a Soft Trend. The depth of the talent pipeline is a Soft Trend. These are the areas where deliberate action matters most.
By anchoring all 95 Future Forums in this framework, the initiative created a shared global language. Sessions moved beyond speculation into anticipatory leadership — translating Hard Trends into specific opportunities, and connecting those opportunities to decisions the profession could make now.
The architecture also included a significant technology component. Rise2040 leveraged a secure Microsoft Azure-based AI and Copilot platform developed by the AICPA and CIMA's internal AI team to analyze large volumes of qualitative input across geographies and career stages. AI was used to identify patterns, surface novel insights, and mitigate bias in synthesis — not to replace human judgment, but to augment it at scale. The synthesized outputs were then validated by a global advisory board and reviewed independently by data science professionals.
The result is not one organization's perspective on 2040. It is the distilled intelligence of the profession itself.
The raw numbers from Rise2040 tell their own story. Ninety-five Future Forums were held. Ninety facilitators were trained using a comprehensive global guide and standardized toolkit to ensure consistency across sessions. Eleven executive committee forums were convened. Three global webcasts reached participants beyond the in-person forums. Total participation exceeded 6,263 professionals from 25 countries.
Each forum followed a consistent structure: Review, Reframe, Reimagine, Reflect. Digital polling technology was used throughout to ensure every participant had a voice — not just the most senior, the most extroverted, or the most geographically proximate. The structured polling data, combined with open-ended responses, created a rich, analyzable dataset that enabled statistical pattern recognition alongside narrative synthesis.
The consistency of what emerged across such diverse contexts is one of the initiative's most telling findings. An early-career CPA in Canada and a senior CGMA professional in Malaysia, meeting in a virtual breakout room for the first time, disagreed on timelines. They agreed on direction. And when asked what would not change, they said the same word at the same time: trust.
That scene, as the report notes, "repeated in hundreds of conversations." It is not anecdote. It is signal.
Rise2040's dataset revealed five distinct, non-overlapping drivers that will shape the finance and accounting profession between now and 2040. Each is grounded in Hard Trends — the future facts that will arrive whether or not the profession is ready — and Soft Trends that remain open to strategic influence.
AI is not a coming disruption. It is a current reality, and one that is still wildly unevenly adopted. Polling data from the global webcasts showed that 58% of participants identified with the "Explorer" stage — beginning to investigate AI applications. Only 10.58% are "Scalers" who have successfully implemented AI and are expanding. Just 1.04% describe themselves as "Optimizers" with advanced AI capabilities enterprise-wide.
This distribution is significant. It suggests that most finance and accounting organizations are still operating primarily in curiosity mode, meaning the window for competitive positioning remains open — but not indefinitely.
Participants consistently described AI as an amplifier of judgment, not a replacement for it. The specific future they described is one where automation and AI agents handle structured, rules-based, repeatable work in the background, while human professionals carry accountability for oversight, outcomes, and final approvals. As the report puts it: "Even entry-level accountants of 2040 will lead AI bots capable of superhuman processing."
The implication for AI literacy is direct. Participants framed it as "mission-critical leadership competency" — not a nice-to-have skill for technically inclined staff, but a baseline expectation for every professional in the field.
The identity shift described by Rise2040 participants is fundamental, not cosmetic. Participants did not describe themselves as bookkeepers, tax preparers, or auditors. They described themselves as strategic advisers, dot-connectors, technology-forward professionals, and ethical stewards.
The report frames this as a shift from "Historian: Recording and reporting on past events" to "Strategist: Shaping future outcomes." From "Compliance enforcer: Checking boxes" to "Anticipatory adviser: Identifying opportunities and pre-solving problems with stakeholders." From "Information reporter: Delivering data" to "Insight and trust leader: Ensuring data integrity, interpreting data's meaning, and enabling confident decision-making."
This transformation is happening in parallel with, and made possible by, the automation of compliance work. As routine tasks are increasingly handled by intelligent systems, the expectation is shifting — from technical execution toward strategic guidance, scenario planning, AI oversight, and data translation. The professionals in Rise2040 were not mourning this shift. They saw it as an opportunity to do more of what they described as the profession's actual value: judgment, insight, relationships, and trust.
The question each organization must answer is whether its business model, service offerings, fee structures, and talent development systems reflect this shift or still optimize for the model being automated.
The talent challenge described in Rise2040 is not primarily about finding enough technically skilled people. It is about redefining what "skilled" means and ensuring the profession remains attractive to the next generation of professionals.
Participants identified maintaining the profession's attractiveness, managing changing workforce expectations, staying competitive on compensation, and redesigning mentorship and development as the key pressures in this driver area.
The professional described for 2040 blends technical rigor, technological fluency, and human discernment. Organizations that are still optimizing for yesterday's model — hiring for technical execution, developing people toward expertise in structured tasks that AI will absorb, and rewarding tenure over insight — are building a talent bench for a profession that is disappearing.
The challenge of intergenerational stewardship also surfaced consistently. Participants expressed a strong sense of responsibility to leave the profession stronger than they found it, and to actively prepare the next generation for a world that looks substantially different from the one that shaped senior professionals.
Regulatory evolution is a Hard Trend. Innovation triggers regulatory response — this is not speculation, it is a pattern. As AI, blockchain, digital transactions, and real-time reporting reshape the operating environment, regulators will follow, and the profession will be at the center of both the change and the oversight.
Rise2040 participants saw this as an opportunity, not just an obligation. Trust is the profession's core credential, and extending that credential into new domains — data auditing, AI output verification, ESG assurance, digital transaction authentication — represents an entirely new category of value.
The central paradox the report articulates is this: the more capable AI becomes, the more valuable human trust becomes. AI can hallucinate. It can produce authoritative-looking outputs that are wrong. Voices can be cloned. In a world saturated with AI-generated content, the ability to say "a credentialed, accountable human reviewed this" becomes a meaningful differentiator. The profession does not need to build trust from scratch. It sits on it. The challenge is extending it deliberately into the domains that are emerging.
The social contract between the profession and the public is shifting alongside everything else. Capital markets protection and public stewardship remain core identity markers, but the environments in which those functions are performed are growing more complex, more data-intensive, and more globally interconnected.
Participants consistently described the professional of 2040 as someone who provides stability when regulation shifts, perspective when markets fluctuate, discernment when technology accelerates, and assurance when data expands. Not someone who records what happened, but someone who helps organizations navigate what is happening and anticipate what comes next.
Across every region, every format, every exercise in Rise2040, one word appeared more than any other: trust.
When asked what would not change by 2040, participants gave consistent answers: trust, integrity, quality, accuracy, human wisdom, critical thinking, relationship building, and accountability. The profession's permission to operate has always rested on trust. Rise2040 reaffirms that foundation and makes a more specific argument: in an AI-saturated world, trust does not depreciate. It appreciates.
The paradox Burrus articulated in three global webcasts is worth stating directly: "In the disinformation age, what I need is something I can trust." AI can generate erroneous outputs with authoritative formatting. It can create synthetic voices, fabricated documents, and plausible-looking analyses that are wrong. In that environment, the credentials of a human professional who has accepted accountability for an output are not just valuable. It is increasingly scarce.
The report also introduces a distinction that has operational implications: "There is no such thing as artificial wisdom." Intelligence and wisdom are not the same thing. Wisdom is knowing when the data is telling you the wrong story. Wisdom is understanding what a client needs but has not articulated. Wisdom is the ethical judgment to say no when the numbers say yes. AI does not possess this. The profession does.
The four anchors that Rise2040 participants identified as the profession's litmus test are trust, integrity, quality, and accuracy. The argument is that every new technology, service model, or delivery approach the profession considers should be tested against these four anchors.
One theme surfaced with striking consistency across Rise2040 sessions: the most significant threat to the profession's future relevance is not AI, not regulatory change, and not competition from adjacent industries. It is the profession's own resistance to change.
The term "SALY" — Same As Last Year — was cited repeatedly as a cultural pattern that is actively slowing transformation. Participants described institutional rigidity, deeply embedded ways of working, and outdated reward systems as more immediate constraints than any external disruption.
The report frames this honestly: "This is not a capability issue. It is a behavioral one."
Rise2040's Transformation Distribution Curve describes three groups within the profession. Leaders are anticipating Hard Trends and actively building toward the future. Fast followers recognize the need for transformation and are beginning to move, but often remain anchored in familiar patterns. The at-risk group continues to rely on past success as a predictor of future relevance, underestimating the speed and scale of change.
Crucially, the data shows that 80% of transformation success is driven by people, not technology. That 80% breaks down as follows: mindset (39%), success skills (24%), and leadership (17%). Organizations that lead the transformation are not necessarily the ones with the best technology. They are the ones with the greatest willingness to act — and the most deliberate approach to building a culture that can learn, adapt, and evolve.
Dismantling cultural inertia, the report argues, requires more than acknowledging it. It requires "intentional disruption of legacy habits" — challenging assumptions about how work gets done, redefining what is measured and rewarded, and creating room for experimentation before certainty is complete.
Outlook data from participants reflects cautious optimism despite this diagnosis: 24% described themselves as very optimistic about the profession's future, 56% as optimistic, 15% as neutral, and only 5% as pessimistic.
Rise2040 participants identified four categories of capability that will define professional relevance in 2040. Notably, the defining capabilities are not primarily technical.
These are the capabilities AI cannot replicate and that constitute sustainable competitive advantage. They include communication that creates movement rather than just delivering information, storytelling that translates complexity into narratives that drive decisions, collaboration that goes beyond transactional obligation, active trust-building rather than passive assumption of trust, emotional intelligence, and strategic listening — the ability to understand what clients and stakeholders need, including needs they have not explicitly articulated.
Critical thinking is the essential human filter for AI-generated outputs. Ethical reasoning is the capacity to navigate the moral complexity posed by AI and automation. Strategic advisory and consulting means moving upstream from recording the past to prescribing the future. An anticipatory mindset means identifying Hard Trends and using them to pre-solve problems before they become crises. Systems thinking means seeing how decisions ripple through complex organizations.
Transformation leadership means fundamentally rethinking roles, services, and value creation — not just managing change, but driving it. Innovation means applying systematic frameworks to create new value rather than imitating existing practice. Learning agility means being genuinely comfortable with continuous learning, unlearning, and relearning in an environment of perpetual technological change.
AI literacy means working effectively with intelligent systems as collaborative partners. The polling data suggests most professionals are still in the explorer stage — this is the baseline that needs to move across the profession. Data analytics means working with complex datasets to generate predictive insights and ensure data quality. Technological fluency means understanding the current enterprise technology stack and the emerging technologies — blockchain, IoT, cybersecurity — that intersect with it.
Importantly, the report does not suggest that foundational knowledge of accounting and finance becomes irrelevant. It is repositioned. Deep understanding of audit, tax, financial reporting, and core accounting principles remains critical — not as the primary deliverable, but as the foundation for oversight, accountability, and trust. The professional who cannot evaluate whether an AI-generated analysis is technically sound cannot take accountability for it.
The vision that emerged from Rise2040 is not modest. It describes a profession that has stopped defining itself by what it counts and started defining itself by what it makes possible.
Participants across all 95 forums described consistent shifts. The professional of 2040 is a forward-looking strategic business partner, a dot-connector integrating finance, strategy, and technology, a translator of complexity, a supervisor of intelligent systems, and an ethical steward in a world saturated with disinformation.
The report synthesizes this into language that participants contributed in real time across multiple sessions:
"We turn complexity into clarity, and clarity into trust, in a world that never stands still."
"We anticipate what's next, master intelligent systems, and elevate human judgment, in order to shape standards, strategies, markets, and economies with trust and integrity."
The organizational structure participants envisioned also shifts. Flat organizations, in which AI levels the playing field and reduces the value of seniority as an information advantage, recurred. One Asia-Pacific participant described the future professional as someone who "blends accounting expertise with data science, strategic advising, and human-centered service delivery." A more senior participant noted that "so much of what we older folks would have contributed at a higher level is now redundant" — not as a complaint, but as an observation about how AI changes the contribution model across career stages.
Rise2040 does not pretend the path forward is clean. Several unresolved tensions surfaced consistently across sessions, and the report is explicit that these are not resolved, only named.
The most significant tension is between the present and the future. Many firms and professionals are currently operating in both simultaneously — maintaining traditional service models and expectations while reaching toward a more expansive advisory role. This creates conflict in how success is defined, how time is allocated, and how talent is developed.
The report's position on this tension is clear: "The future of the profession will not be defined by choosing one over the other, the present over the future, but by how effectively it integrates the strengths of each."
Other tensions participants identified include the pace of innovation versus prudence, short-term pressure versus long-term stewardship, and resistance to AI adoption versus the risk of falling behind organizations that are moving faster.
Rise2040 closes with specific guidance on activation — and this section is worth taking seriously, because foresight that does not move an organization forward is just reading.
The report suggests four immediate uses. The first is to use it as a strategic mirror: gather your leadership team, read the executive summary together, and ask where you are already aligned with this future, where you are exposed, and what you are hoping will change on its own.
The second is to pressure-test your existing strategic plan against Rise2040's findings. Does your plan reflect similar insights? Does it elevate judgment and strategy over routine and task execution? Does it account for AI-enabled efficiencies in workflow, talent strategy, technology investment, and client value proposition? Does it intentionally build trust for the future environment?
The third is to use it to rethink talent and capability development. The professional described in 2040 blends technical rigor, technological fluency, and human discernment. Small adjustments in curriculum, promotion criteria, and development priorities compound quickly — in either direction.
The fourth is to use it to surface resistance. Transformation does not stall because of a lack of intelligence. It stalls because of comfort. Using the Transformation Distribution Curve as a diagnostic, organizations can identify where they sit on the Leader-Fast Follower-At Risk spectrum and name the specific resistance patterns — fear of AI displacing roles, cultural inertia, attachment to legacy business models — that are slowing progress.
For individuals, the guidance is direct: anticipate where the profession is going and intentionally build the skills, mindset, and experiences that align with that future now. Don't wait for authority to lead. Operate in the space where expectations are shifting — from execution to insight, from task ownership to problem-solving.
Rise2040 was commissioned because the AICPA and CIMA recognized that the profession had reached the end of one era of strategic visioning — from the CPA Vision Project launched in 1997 through CPA Horizons 2025 — and needed to define the next one. The choice was not whether to have a future. It was whether to shape it or drift into it.
The report's final argument is that the profession is uniquely positioned for what is coming. It sits on an appreciating asset — trust — in a world that is generating more reasons to distrust what it sees and reads every day. It has the technical foundation to evaluate and oversee intelligent systems. It has the ethical framework to govern them responsibly.
What it needs to do with this position is act on it — before the window narrows.
"Going forward, you will either be the disrupter or the disrupted, more relevant or less relevant. This report gives you a choice." — Daniel Burrus
What is the AICPA and CIMA Rise2040 initiative? Rise2040 is a global foresight initiative facilitated by the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants (AICPA and CIMA) to help the finance and accounting profession anticipate and shape its future. From 2025 through early 2026, the initiative engaged more than 6,000 professionals across 25 countries in structured Future Forums designed to identify the Hard Trends shaping the profession and the opportunities they create.
What are the biggest trends shaping the accounting profession through 2040? Rise2040 identified five primary drivers: technology and data infrastructure (led by AI adoption), value model transformation (from compliance execution to strategic advisory), talent and workforce dynamics (attraction, development, and retention), regulatory and trust architecture (expanding governance and assurance domains), and market and societal expectations (growing demand for foresight and decision support).
Will AI replace accountants by 2040? Rise2040 participants consistently rejected this framing. The dominant view is that AI will automate structured, rules-based, repeatable work — freeing professionals to focus on strategic advisory, AI oversight, data translation, and complex decision support. The phrase used throughout is "Human in the Lead." Even entry-level professionals in 2040 are expected to supervise AI agents, not compete with them.
What skills will accounting professionals need by 2040? Four categories of critical capability emerged from Rise2040 research: human capabilities (communication, storytelling, emotional intelligence, trust-building), insight and judgment capabilities (critical thinking, ethical reasoning, strategic advisory, anticipatory mindset), leadership capabilities (transformation leadership, innovation, learning agility), and technical and AI fluency capabilities (AI literacy, data analytics, technological fluency). Foundational accounting knowledge remains important as the basis for oversight and accountability — it is repositioned, not replaced.
What is the biggest threat to the accounting profession's future? Rise2040 participants identified the profession's own cultural inertia as a greater threat than any external disruption, including AI. The "SALY" (Same As Last Year) mindset, legacy reward structures, and institutional resistance to change were cited more frequently than technology as barriers to transformation. The report states plainly: "This is not a capability issue. It is a behavioral one."
What does "Human in the Lead" mean in the context of Rise2040? "Human in the Lead" is the defining identity the profession described for 2040. It means that while AI agents handle structured, automated work in the background, human professionals retain accountability for outcomes, judgment, final approvals, and the relationships and trust that intelligent systems cannot provide. The concept reflects the principle that the future is not AI-first; it is human-first, with AI as a powerful amplifier.
How was Rise2040 research conducted? The initiative used Daniel Burrus's Anticipatory Organization framework to structure all 95 Future Forums across a standard four-part process: Review, Reframe, Reimagine, Reflect. Digital polling technology captured real-time input from all participants. A secure AI platform (Microsoft Azure-based) synthesized qualitative data at scale. A global advisory board validated findings, and independent data scientists reviewed the synthesized outputs for consistency and accuracy.
What should accounting firms do with Rise2040's findings? The report recommends four immediate actions: use it as a strategic mirror for honest leadership discussion, pressure-test your existing strategic plan against its findings, rethink talent and capability development toward the 2040 professional profile, and use it to surface and name the resistance patterns that are slowing transformation. The minimum viable step, as stated in the report, is to share it with your leadership team, identify one area where delay creates predictable risk, and run one controlled experiment within 90 days.
Rise2040 is a joint initiative of the AICPA and CIMA. Full research, tools, and activation resources are available at www.aicpa-cima.com.
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