What I Took Away from Catalyst

Yesterday, Fieldguide hosted Catalyst, the leading industry conference for building the agentic firm. The room included more than 150 senior leaders from the top firms in the profession, including 2 of the top 4, 5 of the top 10, and 25 of the top 50. These are the firms that set the standard for everyone else, and they spent the day telling each other the truth about how they are figuring out what comes next as they build the agentic firm.

“Figuring it out.” I heard that phrase all day, in sessions and hallways and over lunch. Partners with thirty years in this profession used it. So did practice leads just getting started. I echoed that phrase in my closing remarks. It makes sense: AI is moving faster and faster. We built Catalyst so the people leading this transformation could compare notes in the same room.

Here are the insights that stood out to me from Catalyst, which will help everyone figure out faster the path to building the agentic firm:

• The CPA talent shortage is actually a massive opportunity. The 400 million-hour backlog of unstaffed work represents tremendous upside for firms that redesign their operating model to augment practitioners with agents. Fieldguide’s research shows that firms with strong AI strategies are 3-4 times more likely to be growing revenue.
• There’s a clear roadmap to capture the upside. The AI Maturity Framework (https://info.fieldguide.io/ai-maturity-framework) is a step-by-step guide to building the agentic firm. This roadmap is validated by the leading firms in the industry who have already climbed the curve and have begun to capture the upside.
• The window to act is closing, so the big bets need to happen this year. Otherwise, the firms who have already made their bets and the ones making them now will be too far ahead to catch. Control the transformation, or it controls you.
• Who you choose to build with matters even more than what you buy. Firms need to nail their AI transformation, and the choice of partner can make or break that transformation. Firms should seek partners that offer solutions that cover the whole engagement, can operate autonomously with oversight, can adapt to a firm’s procedures and methodology, and innovate at high velocity.

What also struck me was how little the uncertainty slowed anyone down. I want to expand on this point, because it’s so important. Partner after partner walked through decisions they had already made: which service line to move first, how roles change when agents take on more of the execution, how to frame the benefits of AI augmenting the work for a client or an inspector. Nobody claimed to have a perfect, final answer, but at a minimum, everyone had something already running, and many firms had already embraced agents across the engagement lifecycle.

To everyone who was there: thank you for the candor. It's harder to stand up and talk about what you are still working out than about what you have already perfected. Every person who did it made the next person a little braver about their own next step. This profession has never lacked for smart people. What it has sometimes lacked is permission to say out loud how hard the work in front of us is. Yesterday, the firms leading this profession gave each other that permission.

Amid the rapid changes in the industry, what I saw yesterday was a group of leaders making the bold bets to transform their firms, and to say so in front of their peers. That is what we built Catalyst for, and it's why I already can't wait for next year.