Beyond Accounting Bitesize

So much of AI governance focuses on control: policies, the right model, no shadow AI. But to govern is to oversee direction as well as control, and the risk we tend to neglect is the risk of not using AI.
In part 2 of AI & Accountants 2026, Jannie Wentzel, partner and chief operating officer at Cential, unpacks:
•     The three areas of AI risk: using it, external threats from others who use it, and not using it
•     How his roughly 20-person firm uses AI agents to deliver a risk assessment with about half the team he once needed
•     Trend analysis across years of financial statements: a day or more of work, now about 20 minutes of his time with an AI agent
•     Why smaller organizations may have the edge: they're more nimble, and integration hurdles are fast disappearing
•     Why IT alone shouldn't drive AI governance, and how involving strategy and operations enables innovation while still controlling AI risk
•     Why AI isn't necessarily a separate risk: it shapes how almost every risk is managed, for better, for worse, or both
Essential listening for any leader whose AI governance has been all control, no direction.
Brought to you by CAW Network USA.

Almost every finance department — 97% — now reports some form of AI in use. Only 6% of finance leaders describe their AI adoption as mature or enterprise-wide. Adoption is racing ahead; maturity is not.
In this opening episode of our 4-part series, AI & Accountants 2026 — drawn from our online webinar — host David Powell introduces your speakers: Campbell Robertson, founder of Boxwood Strategy Group and a former global data and AI practice leader at IBM; Jannie Wentzel, chartered accountant, and partner and chief operating officer at Cential; Chris Easton, CEO of Applied Logic and a past president of CAW Network USA; and panel moderator Nancy Chakabuda, our Vice President.
First up, Campbell unpacks:
•     Assistant versus agent: once AI acts instead of answering, the control point moves, and often nobody has said where
•     Month-end close: 40–60% close-cycle compression in vendor benchmarks — but the bottleneck was a dirty chart of accounts, not the model
•     Exception handling: the agent found anomalies nobody had time to look for, and an efficiency project became a disclosure question overnight
•     Why each client project started as a productivity project and ended as a controls project
•     Four questions to ask your own firm on Monday, starting with an inventory that includes shadow AI
Essential listening for any finance leader whose team uses AI but can't yet prove what it saves or costs.
Brought to you by CAW Network USA.

In 2023, our speakers predicted AI wouldn't really impact the profession until 2035. In 2024, they said 2030. In 2025, 2027. The reality? It's happening now.
In part 3 of AI & Accountants 2026, Chris Easton, CEO of Applied Logic, unpacks:
•     New Gemini and Claude models almost monthly, and his engineers about three times more productive with AI in their workflow
•     Why vertical AI is the only defensible place for app builders while hyperscalers spend billions on the models
•     How Jannie Wentzel's idea became Ketelo, an AI platform for governance, risk and compliance — kicked off late January, minimum viable product by April, customer deployment in May, launched in August
•     Why the AI model is a small part of the build — the infrastructure around it supports governance, grounding AI in your data and keeping decisions auditable
•     AI agents guiding third-party risk processes of as many as 200 tasks, and MCP servers that plug AI into your ERP or Gmail
•     From reactive to proactive risk: continuous control monitoring, and the interest-rate signal that should have flagged trouble at Silicon Valley Bank a year before it collapsed
Essential listening for accountants seeking the niche where AI is an opportunity, not a threat.
Brought to you by CAW Network USA.

Ninety percent of our webinar audience said new hires will need AI and data analytics skills. Two panelists challenged the data analytics part: AI agents can do that. The real skill is knowing how to ask the right questions.
In part 4 of AI & Accountants 2026, moderated by Nancy Chakabuda, Vice President of CAW Network USA, the panel unpacks:
•     Campbell Robertson on knowledge workers becoming intuition workers, and how rewarding "token maxing" left some Silicon Valley organizations paying more for AI than for the person they'd have hired
•     Chris Easton on building an agent to control the agents, and splitting third-party risk management into around 200 tasks with known token costs
•     Jannie Wentzel on why a general model gives general answers, and turning your follow-up questions into a reusable prompt
•     Why change management is the hard part: "50 roadblocks" to connecting AI to SAP, and shadow AI when staff aren't trained
•     Closing advice: Campbell on "cognitive impact" and a human fallback if AI fails at month-end, Jannie on "don't be afraid," and Chris on defining the opportunity
Essential listening for accountants putting AI to work without losing control. That's a wrap on the series — watch the full webinar at cawnetworkusa.com.
Brought to you by CAW Network USA.

AI is already inside the finance function — writing the code finance teams couldn't write themselves, doubling personal productivity, and compressing years of experience into moments. But leverage cuts both ways.
In part 4 of The Evolving Role of the CFO, the full panel unpacks:
•     Matthew Williams on unlocking non-ledger data with warehouses, Power Query and AI-written SQL — and why the narrative must never outrun the data
•     Bambo Bamgbose on the double-edged sword in government contracting: cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and AI-drafted bids that miss the compliance quirks only experience catches
•     Nikita Klassen on doubled efficiency — and the fear of not bringing the team along, as research tasks that once developed juniors get answered in seconds
•     David Wray on over-reliance: why the graduating generation could leapfrog today's leaders, and why the real job now is teaching people how to think and to form expectations for the data
•     The new specialisms — data engineers and analytics experts — reshaping the finance function the CFO relies on
Essential listening for leaders working out how to capture AI's upside without losing judgment — or the next generation.
Brought to you by CAW Network USA in partnership with IESBA and Fordham University.