)
)
Accounting Education in the Age of AI with Josh Cavalier
The 2025 National Registry Summit was held September 16-17 in Anaheim, CA, and featured speakers who covered a range of topics surrounding leadership, learning and development. During the conference, Keynote Speaker Josh Cavalier spoke to attendees about artificial intelligence (AI) and ‘Accounting Education in the Age of AI.’
When recommending how to integrate AI into workflow and processes, Cavalier suggested that AI is best used for impacting the ‘mundane’ tasks like automation, analysis and so forth. But, even when assigning mundane tasks to AI, Cavalier encouraged human-AI collaboration for the most successful and efficient output. He reminds attendees to “never ship the first output,” meaning that review and revision should always be a part of AI implementation, and no first product should be final. Cavalier emphasized how AI functions through pattern recognition – not ‘thinking’ – so it is critical to build in a layer of human review when using AI.
Cavalier touched on the impacts AI has on young professionals and their development in the workplace. He warned attendees how improper reliance on AI can take away job opportunities from young people trying to start their careers. Cavalier also explained how assigning certain novice tasks to AI instead of entrusting a young professional hinders their ability to grow and build skillsets. He told attendees that a good way to bridge this gap is through mentorship and coaching juniors in the workplace.
To demonstrate how advanced AI has become, Cavalier showed attendees the different ways it can be used through tools like Google Gemini. He generated an image using Gemini through a simple prompt, created a song, scripted an animated video and more, all to demonstrate the types of multimodal AI available at the public’s fingertips.
Lastly, Cavalier asked attendees to share how they have scaled and implemented AI at their companies and organizations. A few shared that they use AI tools for learning and development, to power chatbots, to transcribe and summarize emails and meetings, to create to-do lists and more. After hearing from attendees, Cavalier reminded them of the ethical responsibility that comes with AI use and encouraged them to always return to the human collaboration element.