Build the agentic firm.

Catalyst opens with an evening crafted for connection with the leaders defining the next era of the profession. Join us on Magnolia Lawn at the Signia for live music, food, and drinks worth lingering over.

This is where Catalyst begins. New findings from The AI Native Firm Advantage — Fieldguide's independent research across 400 financial auditing and advisory leaders — show how large the performance gap has grown between active AI deployers and everyone else across profitability, capacity, talent retention, and client outcomes. The data also grounds the room in where the profession actually sits on the AI Maturity Framework, and how much closer most firms are to the next level than they realize. The hour closes with a major platform announcement, with AI agents live on screen showing what comes next. Everything at Catalyst builds from here.

Real firms. Real decisions. Real results. Firm leaders spanning audit and advisory at different stages of the AI Maturity Framework walk through the complete arc: where they started, what was hard, what changed, and the numbers that surprised them.

PCAOB inspection results show 39% of audits reviewed in 2024 contained deficiencies. The session reframes the quality conversation: away from how to get humans to perform better under pressure, toward how to engineer consistency into the workflow itself.

Mindy Milliet, Partner at Frazier & Deeter, shares how embedding AI agents into live PCI, SOC, and HITRUST engagements freed her team from manual bottlenecks and unlocked capacity for higher-value work, and what it takes to build a true Human + AI operating model in audit and advisory.

Join Kacee Johnson, Co-Founder of the AI Native Accounting Foundation, Danny Manimbo, Principal at Schellman, and Jin Chang, CEO and Co-Founder of Fieldguide, for a live recording of the AI Native Accounting Foundation Podcast — a candid conversation about what it actually means to run an AI-native practice, from the economics and pricing of engagements to the way client relationships and talent models are changing.

Most audit teams have added AI to their workflow. Almost none have redesigned their workflow around AI. The difference is the difference between a 10% efficiency gain and a 40% one.

Most low-quality SOC engagements don't blow up — they just quietly fail the user. With "fast and easy" providers pressuring margins and peer review tightening, quality and speed can feel like a forced choice. They aren't: when consistency is engineered into the engagement itself, AI raises the quality bar instead of threatening it. Attendees leave knowing which quality failures agents genuinely fix, which they can amplify, and what to change before their next SOC engagement.

Your clients are going to ask whether AI touched their work — and the firms that answer that question well are finding it lands better than they expected. This session covers the specific conversations audit and advisory partners are having with clients about AI-executed work: how to explain what agents actually do, how to address the accuracy and defensibility questions that naturally follow, and why the firms leading with transparency are turning client education into a competitive advantage.

Efficiency gains are the entry point of AI adoption, not the destination. AI makes entirely new services economically viable for the first time. We catalog what those services look like in practice.

When agents handle data ingestion, evidence matching, testing, and documentation, the senior manager and partner role does not disappear. It transforms. We examine what the review function looks like at Level 3 on the AMF.

The competitive dynamics of advisory are shifting in individual deal cycles. Clients are beginning to ask in RFPs whether firms use AI, how they use it, and what it means for the engagement team they will work with.

Every decision made today is a decision about what kind of firm you will be in five years. A direct, evidence-grounded argument for urgency — told through the firms in this room who are already climbing the curve.