Every year I tell myself I'm going to sit through the sessions, rack up my CPE hours, and come home with a full notebook of takeaways. Every year the hallway pulls me in and I end up with maybe half the hours I planned for. Honestly? I've stopped apologizing for it.
The hallway is where the real conference happens. It's where auditors drop the professional polish and actually say what they're thinking. What they're worried about. What they're trying to figure out. And this year, the conversations were more energized than I've heard in a long time.
About 850 people showed up to the 2026 AICPA Employee Benefit Plans Conference. I didn't make it to every session I intended to, but I came away with a clear picture of where this profession is right now and where it's heading. Here are the five things that stood out to me.
If I heard the phrase "what's your take on AI?" once, I heard it a hundred times. Auditors aren't ignoring the topic. They're drowning in it. Inboxes full of vendor pitches promising 10-hour audits. LinkedIn feeds saturated with takes. And underneath all of it: genuine uncertainty about what to actually do.
The honest vibe in those hallway conversations wasn't excitement. It was more like a cautious curiosity mixed with a healthy dose of skepticism. Firms don't yet know how, when, where, or from whom to adopt AI into their EBP audit practice. That's a reasonable response to a noisy market.
What I noticed is that auditors are largely relying on vendors to teach them what AI means for their work. That's understandable. They're heads down serving clients. They don't have bandwidth to become AI experts on top of everything else. But it also creates risk, especially if there isn’t an experienced EBP auditor involved in evaluating how these tools fit into actual audit workflows. Does the vendor building this tool understand the importance of reperformance? Do they understand that every judgment needs to be documented? Do they understand how much audit methodology, knowledge transfer, and defensibility are baked into the way firms currently work?
The security concerns were real too, especially for firms without dedicated internal IT or security teams. They know the right questions to ask. They're just not always sure if the answers they're getting are actually sufficient.
And then there's the training question, which I think is the most important one: how will staff learn if they don't do it themselves?
Staff auditors develop judgments by wrestling with data. They start to feel something is off before they can even articulate why. They build professional skepticism by finding errors in data that looks clean. That muscle doesn't develop passively. If AI handles more of the data processing work, we need to be really intentional about how the next generation of auditors builds the skills their managers developed the hard way.
I believe there's a path forward. But we have to design it on purpose.
I've been coming to this conference long enough to recognize a number of faces in the room. This year that changed. I met a lot of people I hadn't seen before, and not because the conference grew significantly. The attendee profile shifted.
Historically this has been a conference for the 15+ years of experience crowd. Senior managers, partners, and the people who own the EBP practice at their firm. This year I ran into a noticeably younger cohort. More auditors with 5 to 10 years of experience than I can recall seeing before. And this was even with the conference committee disbanding the fundamentals track, which is the session track that would historically have drawn those earlier-career auditors.
I think that's meaningful. Firms are making a deliberate investment in their next tier of leadership. They're not just sending their partners anymore. And this group of auditors, who came up during a period of significant technology change, think differently about tools, workflow design, and adoption. They're asking different questions. They're not intimidated by technology conversations in the same way.
For years this conference had a rotation. The same speakers, talking through variations of the same content, and firms started to check out. When standards don't change dramatically year over year, it's easy for the sessions to feel like maintenance rather than inspiration.
That changed this year. I saw new names on the agenda, new perspectives from the stage, and a noticeably different energy in the rooms where those sessions happened.
Most of the people in that conference room are not from the Top 50 firms. They're from small to mid-size practices that make up the backbone of EBP auditing. And for too long, the speaker's lineup has skewed toward large-firm perspectives that don't always translate. Hearing from people who are actually living the same operational reality as the attendees hits differently.
If you've been thinking about submitting a speaker proposal, this is your sign. The AICPA is actively looking for new voices for next year's conference, and the experience you get from being on that stage, both the preparation and the conversations it opens afterward, is genuinely valuable for your career.
You can apply to speak here: AICPA EBP Speaker Submission.
I'd estimate roughly a quarter of attendees stepped foot in the vendor hall. Of the people I know well at the conference, most never went in. Some because they genuinely didn't have time. Some because they feel like it's not their decision to make. Some because the sheer volume of options feels overwhelming, and I think people may be missing out on more valuable conversations than they realize.
You don't have to be the partner who writes the check to benefit from understanding what's available. Knowing what's out there makes you more informed in internal conversations about workflow standardization, technology direction, and operational scalability. It makes you more credible when you do have a seat at the table. And it gives you a clearer picture of where the profession is heading.
The vendors in that room spend an enormous amount of time thinking about where the profession is heading in ways that most practitioners simply can't, because client work keeps moving. But the forward-thinking work they're doing is absolutely relevant to your practice, even if it doesn't hit your desk tomorrow.
You don't have to be the decision maker to be informed. And being informed is always worth your time.
The auditors who came up in the last five to ten years are technology-native in a way that changes how they approach their work. They have ideas. They see inefficiencies that have been normalized for so long that senior staff don't notice them anymore. They're willing to ask uncomfortable questions.
Firm leadership brings something equally critical to that equation: context. They understand realization rates. They've navigated the operational constraints that make some "obvious" improvements harder to implement than they look. They've built the institutional knowledge that takes years to develop.
Neither can succeed without the other's input. But right now, too many firms are keeping the technology conversation at the partner level. The people closest to the actual work aren't getting pulled into those discussions early enough.
What would it look like to involve your senior and manager-level staff in technology decisions from the start? Not just as end users who inherit whatever gets implemented, but as actual contributors to the evaluation? I think the firms that figure this out are going to move faster, adopt more thoughtfully, and retain the people who want to be part of building something.
It wasn't a single session. It was the shift in who showed up and what they were willing to say out loud.
Younger auditors at the conference. New speakers on stage. More honest conversations about what AI adoption looks like in practice, not the polished vendor pitch version of it. A profession that is clearly at an inflection point, and increasingly willing to acknowledge it.
The firms that engage with this moment, bring their full teams into the room, stay curious about the vendor landscape, and create space for new voices, will be the ones that look back on this period as the time they got ahead.
We saw this coming. Back in January, we laid out five predictions for where the EBP auditing industry was heading in 2026. This year’s conference validated nearly all of them.
