Who Teaches the Next Generation When AI Does the Work? - Muhammad Yammout

To me, what sets people apart is what were you doing while you were earning those A's? Were you just taking classes and studying and just that? Did you have a part-time job? Were you leading any clubs? 'Cause I think what's gonna be important is the ability to task switch. (upbeat music) - Hi, welcome, Muhammad. It's very nice to meet you again. I just have a disclaimer. You and I worked at EY together during my time there. We also went to school together and we took account and management, cost-accounting, sorry, together as well. How are you doing today? - I'm great, man, and I will say I remember seeing you for the first time in cost-accounting. You walked in with like three or four of your boys. You guys were all like business honors. And as soon as you walked in, the guy next to me turns over and he's like, well, the curve is ruined. I was like, what are you talking about? He's like all four or five of those guys sitting in that row are gonna get actual A's in the class. And I was pissed, right? 'Cause this was like a long class. I was like, was it a through? No, I don't think that was one of the three hour courses, but it was a long course, 'cause just cost-accounting is. - Yes, not a problem. - It was only three exams in the entire class after the tournament you grade, right? And even the professor said I have to fail 20% of you. - He was a hard-core professor, man. Just like starting the course day one, 20% are gonna fail, sorry. - Yeah, because the school has to maintain its ranking. - Yeah, yeah. - And that was how they, yeah. - That was crazy to me, but ever since then, I don't think we took too many other classes together outside of cost-accounting, but yeah, I was always happy to see that back in college, 'cause if I get like a 85% in this course, I'll get my A and I can move on. - No, but it's been good. So before jumping to your time as a textbook, I wanna ask, I saw that you're a poetry mentor. How do you get involved in poetry? What's the backstory behind that aspect? - That's a throwback, man, damn. I actually forgot that I have that on my LinkedIn still. - Yeah. - So when I was younger, God, I think 17, 18, I did a lot of writing and I did a lot of spoken words. I would go to open mics, I would perform at events, fundraising events in the community in Southern California and Northern California, that sort of thing. And for me growing up, I sort of just grew up in kind of a rough neighborhood and there was a really strong culture around hip hop and I never really wanted to be a rapper, but expressing yourself in clever ways and trying to pass on mistakes and lessons you've learned during your short time here on this planet was something that I felt like started to come naturally to me so I started writing, I think, my junior year of high school. And it helped me get through so much that there was this website that popped up out of nowhere. I think it was poetry, something.org. I'll have to go back to my LinkedIn profiles and so long. But this profile pops up and they say, "Hey, we're looking for poetry mentors." Basically, we're looking for people to help coach young poets through their own writing journey, comment on various poems that are posted on the, it's like a social media platform for posting poetry basically. - Yeah, so then you became a mentor as well, working with the youth on it? - That's right. I was a youth myself, but working with a lot of young folks. Most of them I think were like in high school. And this organization was a nonprofit and they, I think, did a lot of outreach to sort of like poor neighborhoods and so I could relate to that. And I could see kind of where the journey for a lot of these people go or not where it goes, but where they're coming from and hopefully where they're going. And yeah, it was a few hours a week or you know, volunteer my time and just talk to people about their poetry, and every now and then you get something that kind of hits or cuts like real deep and you have really good conversations with people. And I hate like really, really small talk, right? Like just kind of making conversation to make conversation. I like to talk about things. And so it was just for me at least, it felt like a natural fit, okay. So then how does a poet get like, have an interest in taxation? How does that like, is I know you picked accounting, what made you pick accounting in college? Like did was that all just a plan? - No, so I started off as a philosophy major. - Okay. - I took a few classes in philosophy, and then one day I was doing sales at the time. So I didn't go from high school directly into college, like a lot of people I worked with. What I did instead was I took like a year off and I did sales. So it was hardcore business to business, cold calling. I sold coupons, paper, toner, printers, whatever, right? - Yeah. - And there was one day where I was in my first semester Cypress Community College, and this person asked me who I was selling something to, asked me what my major was. And I said, philosophy. And she goes, what are you gonna do to make money? And then I was like, that's a good question. I figured I would teach her something like that. And she's like, well, then you better basically get ready to be poor and broke for 12 years of your life while you go for your PhD and pray and hope for a job somewhere. - Yeah. - And so after that conversation, I decided to look into some of the business classes. I took my first accounting class, accounting 101, whatever it was. And man, this professor was a state auditor for California and she was hardcore like, she'd be teaching us stuff and she'd say, if you don't get this concept, then it was like, you know, debit credit type stuff. You don't get this concept, you can't be an accountant. You should just pick a new major, go into marketing or something. And I was like, geez, right? I got to get great in the class. I figured I'd know how to do it. And then she was like, by the way, I make a lot of money. I was like, well, I want to make a lot of money too. So I ended up in an accounting. - So you did? So was this when you were at Cypress, you picked up your accounting courses and then transferred to Cal State Fullerton? - Yeah, that's right. - So when you moved there, you probably saw that accounting recruiting is a very like competitive process. How did you adjust to that coming? Because most students come in as freshmen or sophomore and if people are hearing like, okay, if I transfer, how did you like integrate yourself directly? Because you had multiple internships and that's a very testing to do. So how did you go about that process? - So to your first question, how did I integrate very poorly? The first recruiting season, I didn't even know what my resume should look like. I think at the time was like super big font. It was like maybe three pages long or something crazy like that. And I did have some decent experience at that time because I was doing bookkeeping internships at a small like EA firm. I might have been doing personal income tax at like H&R block for maybe two or three seasons at that point. And so I had decent experience, but I just wasn't polished. I didn't quite understand how competitive this landscape was. In fact, I didn't even really like know what big four was at the time. I just showed up with a major in accounting. And so the first season, obviously no one even interviewed me except for one firm named Markham. And the recruiter there, I guess, just actually took a moment to read through my resume and they ended up giving me an internship for the following or they ended up giving me an internship that summer. And it was an audit actually. And what was cool about it is that process sort of taught me what it meant to try and go through this massive recruiting engine that all the firms run at these campuses. And so I started to understand that I need to polish up the resume, right? Show up to these recruiting events, get to know people, things like that. - Okay, so how was that experience at Markham? Now you're doing your full internship. What were you doing there in the meantime? Like how, and then how did that help you propel yourself to the big four? - Markham was good. They have a really, I think tight culture there. The partners were all just super polished, very, very smart executives. And the group of people that I worked with there were incredible too. Super friendly, outgoing, all smart, very hardworking. And a lot of it was just like mentorship. I mean, you know how the internships go, right? Most of it is just like show up. We'll pay you to have fun for a few weeks. - Yeah. - I did a little bit of audit work for sure. Some work papers, you know, tying out TVs, making sure they're foot, stuff like that. Most of it was, you know, just the typical like give the intern something to do. But it taught me, I think a couple of important lessons, like for sure it taught me, or it opened my eyes at least to how important it was to polish my resume to think long term in particular about where do I want to end up? 'Cause at that point, I started to understand that there's levels to accounting, right? Public accounting. And actually that internship is where I decided I would shoot for big four. - Okay. And did you have like a full-time job while throwing hand for Marco? - I did. - I did, yeah. - So that's like, that's taking a risk, right? That's a guaranteed job with something like, I don't know what I'm gonna do. - Yeah, so I took the, so I didn't take the job at Marco and I was honest with him about it. Although everybody at the time was saying, like just take it. And if you get the job at somewhere else, tell them you got a better opportunity or whatever the case was. But I didn't want to do that. So I told them that, I think I'm gonna get an internship at EY, 'cause I'd been going through rounds during that same period. And I don't want to accept this offer prematurely blah, blah, blah. They were, they said they were let down, best of luck, that sort of thing. But yeah, I almost felt stupid after turning it down, 'cause I was like, I should have just probably accepted it. - Yeah. - But yeah, it worked out. - I saw, you did that. But before joining EY, you were an optimal tax relief and working on controversy and tax audit relief. So what made you want to do that experience before like joining over there on where you're ending up now? What was the reason behind that process? - So not a great job. reason, but it was basically I needed money. And I needed, you know, to help support the families, support myself. And I had, so the way I got hired at Optima was my sister work there in HR. And it was a sort of smaller firm than it is today. It was still pretty big in the tax controversy space. And I was finishing up my summer internship at Y in San Jose. And I emailed a recruiter there to say, Hey, I need a job. And so they first hired me doing just tax prep. Because I had, you know, a few years of experience at this point, right? We're doing tax prep. And eventually I earned my role data license and then got transferred into their audit controversy. And that team was really fun. It was just three of us each handling, like, man, hundreds of audits at any given point in time. And the necessity for like pushing to get my role data in license, to pushing Optima tax relief to give me that role of more than just a tax repair was basically driven by I needed to pay for my wedding. And I had no way of paying for my wedding because, you know, weddings are expensive, right? So I was living at home at the time. And I was like, I need to figure out a way to pay for what I think. Yeah. Yeah. So decided I'd go for the enrolled agent and funny enough, dude, like, EY starting salary, everybody kind of knows is not not that great. I started in 2019 on the Bay Area. I took a $30,000 pay cut to go work at EY and God, that hurt, man, because I had worked my ass or I'd work so hard to get, I was only making like 90 grand at often tax relief. But for me, no college degree, whatever, at the time, like paid for the wedding, you know, that took a $30,000 was it was Optima commission base? Partly, yeah, at the time, at the time, it was. So it wasn't like am I selling? It was more like you had to close audits, right? And it was actually a really, I think, smart incentive program that they had at the time, because there's just a, you know, millions of people are getting audited. Yeah. And some audits are a lot easier to close than others, because you just sort of know, like, you claim their income tax credit, you don't have a kid, right? Like claim child tax credit, you don't have a kid. You got a return of 14,000, but you made 10. Like, what? How does that work? Right? Yeah. And then there are others where, like, I had a, a fair, a licensed therapist, funds, as a client. And she was being audited because she spent 30 grand on a trip to Peru to study with shamans. And I was like, looking at this and I'm like, this doesn't make any sense. And as you probably know, right? This is like kind of a fun fact. Like 162 cuts any way you wanted to, as long as you can prove it's ordinary and necessary. Yeah. Business expense are good to go. So I said, show me ads, flyers, anything that you have saying you're a shaman. We took that to the IRS agent. And that agent, Adam was pissed to see that advertisement advertising herself as a shaman. Yeah. But, but it was like, some of these you would close quickly. Some of them would remain open for a couple of months. And so you got paid a salary plus, you know, based on production. So that's basically a lot. A very unique client skill set you take in before you even begin your job in public accounting, right? Because in public accounting, you don't really necessarily start talking to the clients until you're a few years in. And even then somebody controlled the environment you're talking with them. And here you get to know them really personally. So then you begin at EY and you start your career in the Bay instead of SoulCal. Any particular reason? Yeah. So the recurring theme here is like, I really believe that life just sort of happens and you make the best of whatever you're given. Yeah. How I ended up in the Bay is I was in an interview for the internship with Irvine office. Yeah. And there's one partner who I know, I know well today, she was interviewing me and she goes, what kind of industries are you interested in? Like, what kind of clients do you want to work? So I started naming, you know, technology at the time I was really big into like renewable energy and so forth. And she kind of takes a step back and she's like, why are you applying to my office in Irvine? Yeah. And dude, I thought I bombed the internship. Like, I thought it was over. And so she's like, well, we have different offices and I'm like, why'd you apply to this one? Like, she made me answer the question. And I was like, look, lady, this was the one that was available on the Cal State floor. And I'm like, I don't know what to tell you, right? And so after that interview, I guess they liked me and they connected with the recruiter up in the Bay Area. She called me same day, scheduled my flight, my interview date, hotel, all that stuff. And yeah, that's how I ended up there. So what were you doing? Did you start off an international tax? Or were you the DSG Martin doing GCR or all of that? Yeah, I was DSG. I started off DSG. But during the internship, I made some interesting connections with the international group. And I sort of like knew that I wanted to go that route. Yeah. It just seemed like one of the more challenging aspects of what we do. And so when I first started, like, no one would give me work, no one had work or whatever the case is. And I just kept bugging the crap out of like three or four people at international tax until one day they pulled me into a project. And it was basically sit on this call with EY India and our client and take detailed notes. And those are like the best notes I've ever taken in my life. Yeah. And so from there, they just started to give me a whole bunch more work. And and I started getting to transactions and stuff like that. I did, you know, I did my share of taking in time on GCR provisions. Well, I'm surprised because TCGA was at that time. We started at the same time, right? Prior to college, TCGA was booming. And they, like, international tax had so much work coming in 1965 and trying to figure out, like, beat situations before the rights came in. And then the temperats are already changing all the time. Where was your role in all of this? Non-existent. So my, my counselor at the time was in R&D, like on the R&D credit side. And so he started to give me a lot of that work. But eventually I was like, I don't really want to do this long term. I want to do international. And so what's really interesting is like the, the role I think of as staff today and in the future is going to have to evolve and change, especially with, you know, platforms like Bizarra, for example, where you can do heavy technical research. And the platform will help guide you to something that is going to resemble a better answer. But at the time, and we see this a lot in like the pillar two space, yeah, the work just needs to get done. And so I, I can't go to a staff today and say, analyze this issue from a pillar two standpoint because they have no starting basis. Correct. And then if they don't also have any AI skill set, they're just kind of like, I don't even know what to do. Right. And so at the time, it was like everybody was hyper focused in particular on like 965, right? I think we joined or restarted the year after, right after 965 was the big problem. And so there was a lot of like work that people had already done. They knew who they wanted to work with for these issues. And I just wasn't one of them. Okay. I sort of hung around for a bit. But then I initially got my start in international attacks with that EY India call and then a couple IP transactions. Okay. So you're doing a lot of like inbound. This is when the big shift is happening around the world, but all these foreign jurisdictions are bringing IP on shore where you like stack where you started to create a niche for yourself is knowing issues without the on shore. I think so. I sort of think about my niche is more broad where like I just, I can grind. I think you can too, right? It's something that not a lot of people are willing to do, right? It's sort of like a work ethic where if people feel like they can trust you to get a job done no matter what that job is, the doors just kind of start to fly open. And for me, the first like few months at EY was more like just trying to demonstrate to people that I'm someone you can rely on. And from that, it wasn't like a technical area that I think I developed, you know, a strong skillset. And in particular, it was more like people know I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that this project goes smoothly. And then the doors and the opportunities just kind of start to open from there. Well, you're also the god sending out like the prime sublimels and tracking all the building. Yes. Yep. I know my PSM's well. Yeah. So perfect. So now you go from there and now you're back over here and then you made manager at EY. And you also if that wasn't enough work, you decided to get like a tax alarm at Royola. What was the reason behind that? You're like, and I'm curious about that because I thought about the same thing. And I said, there's nothing more that school could teach me that I could not learn at EY. I wanted to like know your rationale. Regretful. Because that's what I learned as well during the program. What was really interesting is like making manager and then kind of simultaneously being a senior and then a manager in this LLM program. Yeah. I had always actually wanted to go to law school. Not always, but like throughout my internship at EY, I was developing this idea about going to law school. And every lawyer I talked to was like, you're dumb, don't do that. You're just going to waste a bunch of time and money and you're going to come back and get the job that they're going to offer you today. And so I ended up not going to law school and starting at EY. But me and my sister are first in our family to go to college. And so for me, it was just always sort of a goal to get some sort of master's degree. And that's sort of where or how I ended up at at Royola. But it was a great program. I really do think it was a great program. Funny, funny fact actually is in my two partnership classes. I guess in law school, it's like a big deal to get like the highest score in the class and like it goes on your resume and stuff. So I earned that designation for the two partnership courses I took and I don't do anything with partnerships. I don't touch them. I try not to and I'm just like, I don't such a waste, you know, it was a good, it was a good idea. experience. Would I recommend it today? No, because I think a lot of the stuff you're you're learning is better learned on the job. And then all right. So you did that. But I think it's like also, did you think here's where my background comes in, like an international taxi work with majority of lawyers come from like very good schools have like a really good case understanding about like how the law is built. And then we have to bring in the number aspect from an accounting background. Do you think that helped bridge the gap off like that technical skill set you had between the lawyer and the accounting mindset? I think it may be in part what I think more than anything what it taught me is how to think like a lawyer because we there are some really great professors that I would you know sit into lectures with and just kind of hear it like it's like you know when you're a staff one staff two and you hear really good managers speak or you are really technically strong partner or senior manager talk about a very challenging issue. The way that they talk about the issue is more so like in the context of the law itself in the context of regulations if they're really good I think they'll get into tax policy right because to me that's one of the you know tax exists for economic reasons. And so if you understand the economic incentive that the government is working towards driving like with city we want you to bring your assets back into the US right. And in that sort of frame in that context you can understand how the rules are intended to work almost intuitively. And so for sure I think in part it helped what I would say is I also spent a lot of time drafting redrafting tax opinions for some really really smart people. And going through the tax opinion writing process, doing the research, reading the court cases, God trying to figure out how those freaking footnotes citations should should look. Yeah. Pain of my existence man. I like it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jazz me totally like I wish we had AI back then so I could just run everything for it and say like site this stuff for me. Right. Yeah. So okay. So you did that. And now you're a senior manager at EY. I want to talk about that process because up until manager it's a very linear path like you two two years senior three years. I'm sorry two years staff three years senior and you make manager in five. That's like the standard path. And then from there it's up to on a business case by business case basis. You get to senior manager. How will staff journey like for you and what would those conversations like as you build for your senior manager promo? Yeah man. It was so I thought my manager three years was the hardest year I'd have as a professional because it was a very long year for what it's we'll get into this I'm sure but for what it's worth the senior manager one year is even more challenging. It is I think sort of in public or with any sort of high growth role where you end up is nothing gets easier. Everything just gets a little bit easier for you. Right like this this things I would stress me out as a senior I can fall asleep thinking about today right because I'm sick I just really not that big of a day all wake up. Solve it in 10 minutes and we'll move on. But going into my so my manager three year I had started to talk to the partners about wanting and expecting to be promoted to senior manager. Primarily because I wasn't working any under senior under any other senior managers at the time I was working directly with partners on every single engagement basically being the senior manager on all my accounts and that kind of makes things a little bit easier for you know promotion business case but it definitely doesn't you know mean it's a shoe and and so the response I got back was like we still sort of have to demonstrate that you're not just a good manager you have to demonstrate that you're such a good manager you should be a senior manager. And so I think what really kicked me over the line was this very massive advisory engagement for a publicly traded client that involved restructuring IP and it was it was not just restructuring IP it had to do with you know there it touched almost every aspect of what we do day to day so we had sub C we had ITT had sorry we had federal income tax we had international tax we had partnership taxation we had transfer pricing and there was so much involved and I was basically the point person for the better half of that whole year year and a half or so for this massive engagement corralling various teams understanding and raising technical issues not just in my own domain but like in the sub K domain sorry the partnership domain in the the federal income tax domain the pillar two domain and what that translated to was a lot of folks at our UI national firm basically being willing to give me outstanding reviews across the board like this last you know my my review cycle leading up to the senior manager promotion was I think probably the best set of reviews I've ever received and it was a hard kind of sucked journey to get there but it taught me a lot and it's I think just a process of like continuing to grow right trying to find ways to continue to like differentiate yourself for manager to senior manager and that now even more so as a senior manager okay so we said like how's so how's day one at senior manager or year one harder than like a year one that manages like what's the expectation now it's obviously like you've demonstrated you have the technical skill set to get through it but what are the other variables that are now coming into play I think the biggest difference and I think you've probably experienced this too right because you left the wise manager and when you go from when you're a senior for example and you're like I'm a pretty damn good senior yeah I I deserve to be promoted manager you think you're already doing the role and then you get promoted and it's like as soon as the promotion is is effective expectations of you just yeah skyrocket they're like wait a second I thought I was already doing all this stuff so I think for me that like the biggest the biggest difference is once you once you get the title of senior manager a lot of partners just sort of say you got this and they're they're just sort of hands-off and it sounds like not a big deal at first because we're just like well I've been sort of already dealing with the clients I've been dealing with the technical issues with national yeah but the big thing that changes is the level of trust and so every single deliverable every single decision is something that now I have to own and the level of you know sort of like incremental stress that comes with when a client says hey Mo is is this going to be a problem for us right is is corporate alternative minimum tax an issue now does this kill the project and I say no everybody on the call including other executives at the client are like okay it's not an issue so if I get that wrong I'm in a world to pick okay because now you're owning the decision right you're depending on that so you're driving strategy for your clients now yeah that's right that's right okay and then does it also come with more expectations because you how does your background and sales come into this that's another big one yeah so so you're expected to sell I think I think you're one no one's like quite tracking whether or not you are actually selling but this past year I've been involved in more you know pitches than I've ever I ever have been some of them successful some of them not successful some of them I've led myself some of them I've supported a partner or another team a lot of times like in the pillar two space and the the selling aspect I think is interesting because it's one thing to just say I'm going to do this work but when you have to really sell why you should give this work to me to do what are my differentiators there's certain expectations that the clients will have if they hire you and there's a very fine line in my view between saying here's what I can offer and either delivering on what you've promised or over delivering and there's there's a very fine line between that and under delivering because you promised slightly too much when you end up on the the latter side of that line it's just a total failure to the clients when you when you end up on the other side of the line where you've either met every single promise you've given them it's sort of just like you did your job right you did what I hired you to do and so the key differentiator there is not over promising under delivering but also not over promising and always trying to over deliver okay if that makes sense interesting do you subscribe to like the saying that I always buttoned by it's like under promise and over deliver or do you think that's bad in some cases just on a plot I do I like that mind state yeah what I would what I've sort of experienced this past year and I'm still kind of learning is sometimes when a bit is competitive or if you're going up against a competitor right like with bizzara for example if there was a competitor out there you were both pitching a CPA firm on implementing your MC if you under promise the other firm may be over promising and if the client believes them if they trust them you may end up in a situation where you don't get the contract because you just didn't sell your product hard enough but then what happens on the backside of selling your product too hard is you can't deliver on what you said you would right yeah and so the the approach that I've at least sort of the approach that I'm kind of falling into for the way I like to handle these types of conversations is more of a balanced kind of in the middle where I'm just totally up front and honest with people here's what I think our technology can do here's what I think I can do this is the this is the timeline that we'll be able to do it in and if you hear something different from another firm let's talk about it and when clients feel like they can trust you to be honest with them in almost every instance they'll come back to me and be like well hey so and so said you know that they could do it for this fee or they could you know do it in this time frame and that's just another conversation you have right which is like are they gonna just charge you out of scope are they going are they thinking about this are they thinking about that so be more of like an advisor than a salesperson it's how I think so then as you've gone grown into these roles now you're managing different teams different projects you're managing on-show teams off-show teams national teams over there. - Did you, was there something that helped you develop that leadership mindset as you've gone through these? Are you ascribing to a specific leadership mindset? - Not one in particular. I did, like I do remember when I was much younger reading, you know, how to win friends and influence people. - Yeah. - And I read that book several times over throughout my life. And just every single one of those principles, I think is applicable almost everywhere. I think what people have different management styles, and my sort of style is like, I don't want to babysit. I don't want to have to follow up every other day. Yeah. And so I think when you build strong relationships with people, they want to work hard for you. And when you show that you're willing to go out of the way, out of your way to support them, they're willing to go out of their way to support you. And that's kind of the mindset I come from, right? Which is like, I'm not gonna ask you to do something. I would never do myself. And I'm not gonna ask you to do something. If I can't tell you or can't give you a path to success. - So like a very hands-off approach, but then are you also, do you think the imprint? I think one of the biggest things, I think we got lucky upon is that we had really good great mentors at UI. It's taught us a lot. They spent time teaching us those things from their experience that you couldn't get anywhere else. - Right. - If you are just starting off in public accounting, how do you set yourself up now, where you will be able to get those mentors right away, who will be able to teach you instead of just doing taking in time for someone? - Yeah, that's a great question, man, 'cause I think the industry is changing a lot. And part of me wants to say that it's all networking, but that's just such a, in my opinion, just such a cliche, right? Like everyone knows that you got a network, you got to get to know people. And so taking it a step beyond that, my perspective is, if you have a strong work ethic, I can teach you to do anything. And you can learn to do anything, because you're willing to put in the work to make that happen. And so I think just demonstrating on the front end of your career that you have a strong work ethic, you're willing to learn, you're willing to take guidance, 'cause a lot of times, I'm sure you've dealt with this, where you talk to a staff or a senior or even a peer, who's very clearly wrong about something. And they just don't wanna admit it, and they don't wanna take the feedback. Being willing to take that feedback and then implementing it, and showing the person who gave you the feedback that you have implemented it, incentivizes them to wanna do more for you, right? And I think that's where those strong and torment your relationships get to. - So then, now, you saying the industry keeps changing, what does the role, all the levels look like? Do you think people have moved up the chain one more? - And the super trying to. - Yeah, sorry, go ahead. - Yeah, so yeah, same thing, like people, the roles are moving upstream, and then responsibilities. Downstream work is going to AI to start. And now, do you think like when you're working with your offshore teams, are they also taking on more of a reviewer role? - So I think that we're trying to get there. And the reason I say that is like, in the world of accounting, law, whatever, people are very opposed to change. People are sort of like, they don't wanna see things, like we have acronyms that, you know, same as last year, right? Like, name another tech field or some other field where there's a whole sort of ideology built around doing the same thing you did last year. I think that's pretty unique to accounting, tax, and the sort of space. And so when AI was sort of first being introduced to us, at least, right, I think for me, that's like October and November of '25, there were so many promises made, right? AI is going to do our jobs, basically. And that promise hasn't yet been fulfilled, and I think we're so far from that, that people are sort of starting to wanna say, what's never gonna be able to do this? Or it's never gonna be able to do that. When a reality, it's the industry that isn't moving it forward fast enough, but the ability, the technology, for the most part, I think, it all exists today. And so what's happening, at least from my perspective, is there's a lot more that I can do today because I have AI, that I would otherwise have to rely on a manager, staff, senior, someone else to help me with. And our staff and our seniors, I think, still haven't really caught up to that fact, which is, you know, two years ago, my options were, do it myself, or try and teach someone how to do it. Today, if I can't find anybody with availability that I wouldn't work with, I can just ask AI to do it. I can spend the same 45 minutes drafting a prompt to Claude, chat GPT, whomever. And I can get the AI to write a whole section of an opinion for me. That is, I think, totally novel to 2026, at least in the tax space. And what I'm seeing is a lot more of the work getting pushed up instead of down, because we haven't fully figured out how to leverage AI and make sure that our staff and seniors are willing to do the work to, you know, learn the hard concepts. - So what happens there now? How does a staff learn at this point before you would teach it, right? And now you're trying to, like, push. You're trying to push for that? So how does, so how, do you think it's now more incumbent upon staff to learn? - Okay, I'll give you an example. My first research assignment was to understand if a client had for-dap income, right? And if they had for-dap and I had to write a question from a senior manager, they sent it to me. I was like, what is for-dap even mean? And then based on that, I had to, like, figure out, like, okay, if there's for-dap, let's write this memo. And I think it took one or two lines from it. And then we wrote, we wrote it entire thing, but I learned from it, right? On the way to start off. And I learned, like, from there, then I went into some part of guilty learned all of that stuff. Now, do you think that staff has more, they can just ask, co-pilot, which comes built in, like, hey, what are all of these items? I think they understand. Do you think there's more responsibility on staff to teach themselves stuff? - We'd like to get there. At least I'd like to get there, yeah. I think it's still, every time I kind of talk about this, whether it's, you know, with any wire, or within, you know, talking to peers or other firms, talking to you now, it's kind of shocking to me how little staff are using it. But in a way, maybe it's not, because if you think about, like, the way you use AI today for tax research or whatever it is, and same for me, we have that experience to leverage. So if, you know, I haven't seen hallucination for a very long time, but, you know, November, December, 2025, it wasn't totally uncommon to see, you know, hallucinations, right? Like, this section doesn't exist in this regulation or whatever. - Mm-hmm. - Today, that's a lot less common, but you and I have the experience and the knowledge to be able to sort of call BS when you read something that's an output from AI, and you can dig further into it, right? The staff and the seniors oftentimes don't, and I think the skills, like probably the biggest skill set that we're lacking, or at least I'm not seeing, is casing it down. You asked AI a question and gave you a response. Did you look up the citations that it gave you? Did you read the actual law itself, right? 'Cause it's really easy to just ask a question, get an answer and move forward with that. It's really hard, especially when you're very busy to ask a question, get an answer, and then do your diligence. It's that last piece that do your diligence that I think they're gonna have to learn how to do sooner rather than later. - Well, that's what the RSA is too, right? Because the responsibility sets with you and not with the AI model, and it's your name on the line. - I thought that was really interesting. And I actually learned about that through your LinkedIn post, by the way. I was on LinkedIn, I was like, wait, the IRS did what? - Yeah, it all is logical, and it makes sense. Like you almost kind of expect that to be the answer, but we don't really treat it like that, right? Or at least in practice, it's not often treated like that at the staff and like the senior, and oftentimes the manager level. - Well, I think before, it would take like a few years for the staff and the seniors to like shift on like, where they all stood on the different metrics on the KBR. I think now you can see that within the first busy season where everybody stands, because the base level now has to go up on like the expectations from them. Soon enough, AI is gonna be prepping your 1040s, 1065s, 1120s and 50% ones. So what's your differentiated then and how these surviving and industry going forward? So I think it's gonna collapse and bringing that in. - I totally agree with that. And I think there's, I'll add one more thing to it, which is I think there's going to be a very strong niche in the future centered solely around developing systems to do all this work and understanding the process so well to know when you should have a review or like a checkpoint between the AI and the human, right? We're seeing software developers already start to come out with, you know, tax projects that are doing that, but I think this industry is going to take it much further than that. I think we'll have to. And so I see probably, you know, in the next two years or so, there's probably going to be a whole group within each of, you know, the big four plus some others just centered around agents, agent workflows, but there's going to need to be some crossbreeding between the technical folks and the tax folks. And you're going to have a new sort of hybrid professional, which is understanding Python or whatever you need to write the scripts. - Not actually writing scripts, right? - Yeah, that's exactly it. There you go, tax engineer. - Yeah, that's actually an engineer. - That's interesting. Like, okay, so what, so then you've taken these Python courses, you've done the fortifications. How, how, like, well, what made you want to go interested first in Python? Were you always interested picking that skill set up? Or did you just said that, okay, I think there's where the profession is going. I'm like, my, my dashboard catch up. - That is basically the latter. So I was on a plane in November 25, flying back, flying back from some client meetings. And there was this question that had come up about a section three or a half years ago. one distribution for a Brazilian CFC, but the CFC was not actually making the distribution. It was just declaring it because Brazil's end of last year was implementing it with holding tax on dividends. Okay. And so if you declared the dividend before the law was enacted, you could get out of the withholding tax. Okay. And so a lot of companies were declaring massive dividends. And the question was from a US tax perspective, what happens? Okay. And I thought, you know, I was answering it the old fashioned way, right? And I was pulled up through a one, pulled up the regs, responded to the partner with national, you know, CC basically, you know, issue, conclusion analysis, right? Yeah. And the national partner responded with an attachment to a B&A and then a paragraph. And this partner doesn't know that they kind of set me on his path. But this partner is notorious for like five word responses to emails. Most of the time, let's get on a call or something like that. And I got this paragraph. And the first few words was, here's what Chad GPT said. Yeah. And I was like, what the hell is this guy doing? Like I just did all this research, whatever. And I was going through, you know, quote unquote, what Chad GPT said. And it said the same thing as me, except it got one or two better citations to like revenue rulings that were really on point. And I was just like, that sucks. Where is this profession going if my whole niche is around not doing tax compliance because it's going to get automated and I've been focusing so much on planning work, the advisory work because, you know, that's the hard stuff. And that's the stuff that's going to go last. What's my future role here, right? Yeah. And so I started Python, frankly, because Claude told me to, I was like, what's the most important language for AI and it's like, try Python. So I started down that path. But more so lately, I've been doing a lot of work on like personal projects for just like vibe coding, trying to figure out the right way to implement AI into different workflows stuff like that. Okay. So you've done that. Let's say you have a younger brother who's just in college right now, a freshman or a sophomore recruiting has changed too. I'm seeing like recruitment pipelines are like slowly didn't not a bigger need, but there's some people coming in. If you have a younger brother or sister who's like trying to go in that same path, what will you tell them right now, like how would you set yourself apart in recruitment? That's a hard question. And it's a it's a hard question because I mean we do interviews, right? When you're ready, why I'm sure you did interviews as well. And a lot of the students you get are oftentimes like top of their class, really smart, outgoing, whatever. Like were you just taking classes and studying and just that? Did you have a part time job? Because I think what's going to be important is the ability to task switch. Like, I mean, you probably know this better than me, but think about when you're working with AI to solve like two or three problems at one time, right? You're constantly task switching from each of those chats or whatever it is that you're using to engage. Yeah. And every single time you move from one task to another or you switch between them, it gets incrementally harder for your brain to keep up. And so if you're very successful at just hard focusing on one task at a time that doesn't vote well for this future professional that we're talking about, well, even before AI, because you probably juggle close to like 20 to 30 clients at one point, right? And you have to remember all the contacts when the email comes in and what do I remember? And you're on the clock because you build by the, you build every six minutes, right? Because that point one of that bill, the point one of the hour will be bill. You need to be like top of your game and then the client's going to push bad like, hey, why do you build too much or exactly, and you need to remember, so okay, agree on content switching pretty big, important stuff. How about, what about like initiatives they should be taking in terms of like delivering? Because now when I, here's my thing, when I sit across from someone interviewing them for a job role, I go like, should I hire you or can I have AI do your job or will AI be better at it? Can I create a workflow and a loop around it to like do that? All of that, your skill set that you require? That's where my mind is going. Yeah. I think that's where you're seeing a lot of companies reduce the amount of like junior associates right or, or, or staff, right? Like the need, the expected need is coming down. Yeah. And so I often, not during interviews because I don't, you know, I don't have that much parity wide to like say, we're going to fully implement AI and we're going to not hire a whole bunch of staff. Yeah. But when I think about it, and I'm doing the interviews myself, I'm thinking, would I prefer to work with chat GPT or Claude or this person? Because I don't like to anthropomorphize too much, but like chat GPT's kind of got its own personality. Claude sort of has its own personality. People obviously have their own personalities, right? And so when you think, when I think, at least I think about differentiating, I know that I don't want to do the same thing for the rest of my life. And in order for that to happen, I know that there needs to be a staff, a senior, a manager that eventually comes up and takes over some of the stuff that I'm doing so I can move on and do something else. And so I think there's always going to be a role for junior associates. The question is, are you someone that people want to work with? And to me, the biggest, you know, like the most impactful determining factor to that question is, can I rely on you? And not just, you know, I don't, I don't need you to know everything today. In fact, my expectation is you don't know anything when I hire you. But when I give you instruction, can I rely on you? Because if you're making mistakes that chat GPT won't, why would I keep working with? It's a really interesting perspective. One of my favorite questions I like to ask is, when you're done with tax, what's, what are you going to do with your life? What's that one thing you've been like? I've been putting it off one hobby, one life mission that you're like, once I'm done with all of this, I'm retired, I'm a partner that's solid pension coming in. What am I going to do with the rest of my life? I think I'm kind of a bit of a workaholic man. Like I definitely see my, like I want to travel, stuff all the, you know, typical cliché stuff. But like what, I'm, I'm my happiest when I'm working on hard things. Okay. So what's one cause you're going to want to go on that like, because we talked to one VP of taxi said he wanted to start this financial literacy program in his home country and teach people all about us that and helps us get out of debt. So like what, what's for you that mean like driver motivation? What's your why? It's a tough question. Adam. Let me think about it for a second. I think it started in a poetry program again. Yeah. I could start that. To be honest, I haven't actually put a ton of thought into what I want to do with retirement. Like that I think is the honest. That's the genuine answer. Yeah. So why though is because eventually where I want to go is towards this sort of new professional that you and I have been kind of talking about, right, which is the tax engineer. To me, that's like one of the most interesting things in the world. And if you sort of scroll through LinkedIn, a lot of the job openings that you'll find don't talk a whole lot about that. But they're every now and then ones that do pop up. So like for example, open AI recently had a position where it was technology focused. They basically said your job is to be a domain expert and vibe code workflows. Python scripts to automate like legitimately automate, not just kind of the consulting speak, right? But legitimately operate or automate these repetitive tasks. You can't do that as just an engineer, right? You have to be a tax engineer to be able to accomplish something like that. That kind of technology to me is just so interesting that like if I wasn't doing the role I am right now or shoot even if that role existed today, I'd be trying to jump on it. Because I think that's the future and I want to be a part of it. You should read. Did you read the one case study they put out with Crete Alliance, the Tribe Holdings company where they worked open AI engineers went and sat with the accountants to automate tax complex. Yes. The forward deployed engineers, they spent like 30 million or something like that developing the software and what was really interesting to me is how vague the report was. They just kind of said like this is what we did and it was successful. Yeah. Exactly. Like how successful are we talking here like should I be going back to school or should I be you know liquidating my fire 1k and how successful are we talking? Yeah. So yeah. So it's interesting and I think that's going to be changing a lot more and more. If you see those, if you follow the tax professionals at these open AI LLM lab companies, they'd be posting about what they've been building from scratch. And these are people who have like no comment, no no tech background, but 20, 30 years of domain expertise and they can just talk to codex, talk to crowd code and build out these workflows. And like the initial setup short takes you a bit, but once you're there, it's just like talking. That's 100% true, man. And it's the weirdest thing in the world. I think it was Andre Caparthi posted on Twitter some time ago and he was like, turns out the most popular coding language in 26 is English. Yeah. Because we're all just sort of prompting codex or cloud code and so much is being kind of pumped out, right? Quick story for you. There's someone that was at EY in in national. His name is Jason. Yeah. I think you know Jason. Yeah. Yeah. He went to open AI. Yeah. He and I worked a lot together on various pillar two issues for time that he was here. And so when when he left to go to open AI, just kind of following his journey on LinkedIn and what have you, he posted, I think within his first week or something, right? He posted this web application that he built with codex. Yeah, basically you type in, you know, the the org structure and it just builds it out for you real quick And I'm looking at this tool and I'm thinking to myself like why the hell don't I have this as my day-to-day Tool set like with you why or these other, you know other firms because how often am I being approached by a client that says just a quick picture Yeah, so I'm gonna do can you help me think through this and then I spend an hour and a half or someone else spends an hour and a half Putting together something in PowerPoint. No, so that's so funny. Say this because I remember one of my times where I've worked I've worked all night through the night only a few times in my career, right and Where that happened where I worked 48 hours straight was when we had this big M&A transaction and we did not have an org chart And so I was sitting back like pitting together these PDFs putting them into like you know That's one software that we have to like put together the big org chart Yeah, I was doing a hundred and twenty entities and structuring them correctly My god, man, and I'm like if I had AI I could put this in Claude and be like hey extract it take out the Python's and now just push it in back again And it will take you like 15 minutes to do it. It's it's crazy Right it's crazy that like these types of tools don't exist because to me There's like there's so much low hanging fruit out there Yeah, I was just sort of complaining to some more technology folks the other day We have this pillar two engine other firms have their pillow two engines Yeah, as far as I know nobody's really built into those pillow two engines to facilitate compliance No one's really built in AI And I'm like sitting here and I'm waiting for this import something important new data for a new client I'm just kind of sitting here waiting for it to do this simple like stupid task basically And I was talking to someone on on a teams and I was like why can't I just drop this to an AI agent That's built into the software have the AI agent run the compute pull the report do a quick tie-out because I can already prompt co-pilot to do it in Excel Yeah, and then send me a notification when the tie-out works or when the tie-out is done for review Like that's the sort of super simple low-hanging fruit You know, I don't want to I'll use the word one or the phrase once human in the loop type of workflow that could start to bring the promise of AI into our industry But we didn't do it. Yeah, but I think there's a lot of reasons But I think the world is going to shift very fast very soon on this and one way or another how we all figured out how to work from home doing COVID we'll very soon figure out how to do AI workflows like this. Yeah, that's my prediction on it So I'm going to fly now. Yeah, but thank you so much for coming on We really enjoy this conversation and really enjoyed catching up since our time at EY I think you're going to be great Whatever you'll be next on you seen a magic career and onwards as you bring up and hopefully we keep in touch Absolutely, man. Thanks for having me. It was great catching up too, and we'll we'll have to stay in touch Okay, perfect sounds good man. All right. Take care