Hey, party people. Welcome to the first full work week of September. Here’s a little news to get your week started.
ICYMI: California CPA pathways bill heads to Governor Newsom’s desk:
A California bill (AB 1175) which creates an alternative path to getting a certified public accountant license, is headed to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk after the state’s Senate passed it on Tuesday, according to a social media post made by the California Board of Accountancy which also said the governor now has 30 days to sign the bill into law.
CBA’s post:
BIG AB 1175 UPDATE! 🎉
— California Board of Accountancy (@CBANews) September 2, 2025
AB 1175 was passed by the Senate today! It is now on the Governor's desk. The Governor has 30 days to sign the bill into law. 🖊️ Keep following along as we track this final step towards enhancing CPA licensure requirements and modernizing mobility. pic.twitter.com/Qgpd7Znvxm
Grant Thornton Advisors is spending $1 billion “to arm the multinational workforce across its platform with powerful AI tools and technology,” according to a press release. For now, that powerful tool is Copilot.
Grant Thornton Advisors is currently putting its investment into action by providing the more than 13,500 platform professionals in 60 multinational offices with access to Microsoft 365 Copilot. The rollout complements an earlier pilot project that saw Grant Thornton Advisors provide Microsoft’s AI tool to a 400-person cohort of professionals — generating significant productivity gains. It expects to see broader benefits when all of the platform’s professionals, regardless of role, integrate Microsoft 365 Copilot into their Grant Thornton data sources and Microsoft apps.
“This isn’t just about investing in AI and technology, it’s about investing in our people,” said Jim Peko, CEO of Grant Thornton Advisors LLC. “We’re giving every professional across our multinational platform — from Chicago to Dubai — the kinds of tools they need to work smarter, faster and in keeping with their individual styles. The result is something that is uniquely Grant Thornton: People who are empowered do their best work so clients benefit from the quality and results they need.”
Grant Thornton’s private equity overlords had this to say:
According to Andre Moura and Nikhil Devulapalli, managing directors at New Mountain Capital: “We are proud to support this major AI investment as Grant Thornton Advisors builds out one of the strongest technology-enabled platforms in the accounting profession. Grant Thornton is leading the market in developing and deploying AI technologies for the benefit of its clients, and we intend to continue supporting these types of investments.”
Speaking of AI, Wall Street Journal has published this: How the AI Boom Is Leaving Consultants Behind. TLDR: Consulting firms don’t know any more about AI than the rest of us except unlike us, they’re charging millions of dollars to pretend they do.
Consulting firms over the past three years have wagered billions on the hope they would play an essential role in the AI boom, helping the world’s largest corporations transform themselves with the new technology.
Done right, it could prove to be a boon for an industry already hurting from macroeconomic pressures and layoffs. Collectively, firms made billions of dollars in artificial-intelligence-related commitments and put out aggressive campaigns designed to capitalize on corporate FOMO, or fear of missing out. “Nobody makes AI work for your business like PwC,” said one PricewaterhouseCoopers ad. Their slogan: “We don’t just bring promises. We bring results.”
In the early days their pitch seemed to be working. But then reality set in.
Clients quickly encountered a mismatch between the pitch and what consultants could actually deliver. They found that consultants, who often had no more expertise on AI than they did internally, struggled to deploy use cases that created real business value.
WSJ went deep on this one. Deep and painful: “I can’t tell you how many times I heard, ‘Man, they came in, they charged us $20 million and what I feel like we got was a very long report on where AI is going without any real practical application,’” said Pat Petitti, CEO of Catalant, a platform for freelance consultants.
Australian Financial Review writes about KPMG’s new head of consulting:
KPMG Australia has appointed chief financial officer Brad Miller as the new head of its consulting division, replacing senior partner Paul Howes.
Miller, who will begin in the role in October, has been a partner at the firm for almost a decade and previously led its middle market advisory business.
That’s interesting and all but I’d like to call your attention to this bit:
The consulting overhaul, which started last year, aims to have just half of KPMG’s consulting work performed by local advisers by 2026, with the rest carried out by service centres in Australia and overseas, or by automation.
KPMG’s consulting revenue is down 20%, having fallen from $915 million to $749 million AUD.
A 32-year-old accountant across the pond is going to jail for an unsophisticated Covid relief scam in which he used his position at a firm in Exeter to divert Covid job retention money he wasn’t entitled to from clients’ accounts to his own. £150,000 ($203k USD), to be exact.
He spent the money on drugs, gambling and debts.
In October 2021, HMRC discovered that details of an Exeter company were being used to commit fraud.
An investigation revealed Jee had been exploiting his trusted position to get the details of the accountancy firm’s clients. He then diverted the money from the government schemes to his own bank accounts.
“He had arranged for payments to be made into bank accounts that did not match the client company,” said the prosecutor.
A couple of OGs in Atlanta got a nice little article written about them and their firm as their firm, Bennett Thrasher, turns 45 years old:
Rick Bennett and Ken Thrasher were accountants working at Price Waterhouse in Atlanta, when each found themselves wanting something different from what they had in corporate life.
“We wanted to raise our families in Atlanta,” Bennett said. Price Waterhouse was “transferring people from where they lived to other places, to try to, I guess, populate other places with new ideas. But we didn’t want to do that.”
Tech Radar says that KPMG apparently penned a 100-page prompt to build an agentic TaxBot:
By 2024, the Australian arm of KPMG initiated projects to build specialized agents. Among them was the so-called TaxBot, a tool designed to prepare tax advice.
Munnelly explained that development began by gathering partner-written advice that had been “stored all over the place,” often scattered on laptops.
That information, combined with Australia’s tax code, was placed into a RAG model to produce automated drafts. TaxBot, however, was not trivial to construct.
According to Munnelly, its creation required a 100-page prompt, drafted over months by a dedicated team, and ultimately fed into Workbench.
That’s it for this brief news brief. If you’ve seen a story we should know about, have a tip, or just want to yap about something related to the art of counting numbers you may email, text, or tweet any time. Have a good week!