The Future of the Profession

The big picture: The declining number of accounting graduates, geopolitical and economic uncertainty, and changing technology are all having a significant impact on our profession, our approach to delivering quality audits, and building trust in the capital markets.

Along with this, client and stakeholder expectations around topics like sustainability reporting, relevance of financial reporting to investors and data mining to help improve a company’s performance are evolving. We continue to innovate and transform how and what we audit to meet those expectations.

• Embracing AI responsibly and ethically: AI deployment is fundamentally about empowering people to do their best work with proper governance, accountability, safety measures and transparency. We’re putting these technologies into the hands of our people to increase productivity and refine risk assessment. At the same time, recent advances in the technology have reduced the cost of incorporating AI into businesses and shortened deployment timelines, creating a new risk landscape.

In a recent survey of 200+ financial reporting leaders, we attempted to better understand the pace of AI adoption among our clients. More than half were optimistic that AI will enhance productivity and lessen the burden on their employees, improve data accuracy, reliability and predictability, and increase visibility into end-to-end processes and controls. Financial reporting leaders also expressed significant concerns around data, including over privacy, accuracy, management, transparency and bias, as well as the pace of changing regulatory guidelines and data quality. Addressing these is paramount to increasing trust in our profession and in the capital markets.

KPMG's Trusted AI approach demonstrates our commitment to leading with our Values and aligning innovation and speed, with human judgement and oversight as we embrace AI in our own work.

• Auditing technology with technology: As business models are further enabled by even more complex technology, the need for assurance over those technologies, and trust in them, increases. KPMG’s Technology Assurance professionals are tasked with understanding both the regulatory requirements and business processes to provide assurance that technology controls and data integrity is maintained.

The integration of more than 1,100 technology assurance professionals into the Audit practice has allowed us to better leverage technology skills and expertise and upskill more of our people to integrate, use, implement, strategize, and deploy technology tools and testing techniques across increasingly complex control environments.

As technologies become more complex, the need for professionals who can perform highly sensitive analysis of technology environments and platforms also increases. We’ve developed a suite of solutions that enable our professionals to assess whether these technologies, including AI, ERP, cloud, blockchain and IoT, are being effectively implemented and monitored, and the appropriate controls are in place to enable trust.

• Maturing our approach to sustainability reporting. With proposed and final rules at the state, national and international level, ESG regulation could impact a majority of companies in 2024 and beyond. If 2023 was the year of ESG rulemaking, 2024 is set to be the year of ESG rule implementation. We’ve embedded our new global assurance manual into our secure workflow and launched an industry-leading learning experience platform to train our professionals on ESG concepts and frameworks. Importantly, as we bring multi-disciplinary solutions to clients to help them achieve their goals, we are doing the same as a firm. We've set an internal carbon price that is helping us to operationalize sustainable behavior, fund green investments, and account for our carbon impact – and our overall strategy roots itself in technology deployment, better monitoring and measurement, and identifying benefits of decarbonization.

The bottom line: The scope of financial reporting is expanding, so naturally, the audit is as well. At KPMG, we’re developing the technologies and talent to meet the moment and deliver a better audit experience.