What's now.
What's next.

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.

For years, advisory growth meant one thing: more people. Then the math stopped working. Through detailed case studies from advisory practices that have deployed agentic AI across their workflows, we show how the economics of advisory delivery change when agents handle the procedural work.

The most common failure mode in AI transformation is not technology. It is people. Drawing on Fieldguide's Change Management framework, we map the eight roles that determine whether AI adoption accelerates or dies.

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.

The billable hour was never a measure of value. It was a measure of time. AI has created an alternative. We make the case that the shift from hours-based to value-based pricing is not a business model preference — it is the inevitable consequence of AI-native delivery.

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.