29 Predictions: How AI Will Devalue the Finance Credentials You Worked So Hard to Earn
In recent editions of The Statement newsletter, I’ve shared how I believe the structure of management consulting, public accounting, and investment banking firms is about to change dramatically. Most notably, it’s going to upend the status quo of billable hours (shifting instead to value-based billing). But it’s also going to reconfigure how many junior staff will be necessary to support project work as well as what they’ll likely be doing.
In this series, I want to go deeper — much deeper — across the larger domain of finance, education, credentials, and the many tools we use every day. I’m often thinking about the future, unforeseen disruption, and where I envision markets moving.
I’ve identified 29 elements I want to examine, organized across five categories:
- Finance Credentials
- University-Level Finance Education
- Online Education and Corporate Training
- The FP&A Software Market
- Finance Roles and Responsibilities
I’m going to be direct and sometimes contrarian. Some of what I share may be uncomfortable. Some may even be frightening as it predicts a complete upheaval of parts of our profession and even society at-large. That’s intentional — not for provocation’s sake, but because I think honest examination of where this is heading is more valuable than reassurance that everything will be stable.
Before We Begin: Two Questions Worth Sitting With
I want to prime your thinking before we dive in. Not with data or a provocative statistic, but with two rhetorical questions I keep returning to, and asking, myself:
1. How likely is it that these predictions will come true?
and…
2. If they do — when?
The first question matters more to me. It shapes how we think about our careers, our positioning, and what skills will remain valuable.
The second question is much harder to answer because it depends on forces none of us fully control: government policy, university funding, labor markets, geopolitics, regulation, and the pace of AI adoption itself. Few people can time the markets. But for value-investors, they care less about timing the short-term anomalies and instead focus more on long-term trends.
What I can say is this: I don’t think many of these predictions are far-fetched. In fact, I suspect a surprising number of them eventually become reality. And if they do, the implications for our work, our world, and our society will be enormous.
This Isn't a Race
One more thing before we get into it.
I know many of you are feeling the pressure of this moment. I’m not exaggerating when I say I get emails and direct messages weekly from total strangers, LinkedIn followers, and subscribers to my newsletter who aren’t sure what to do, worried that if they don’t learn fast enough they’ll fall behind.
My response is always the same: frankly, we’re all behind.
This space changed dramatically in late 2025 when Anthropic released its skills framework, and even those of us working hardest to keep current are only a few months ahead of where most people are. That’s the honest truth.
But this isn’t a race. The goalposts are always moving. All I encourage you to do is keep learning — and keep doing what it means to be a human in an AI-enabled finance and accounting profession.
And with that, I’ll start where the stakes feel most personal to me: the credentials many of us spent years earning.
Predictions #1–3: The CPA, CFA, and the Coming Credential Crisis
Disclaimer: The following views and opinions are my own and do not reflect the views or opinions of any professional organizations or enterprises I work/partner with.
Prediction #1: The CPA and CFA Lose Meaningful Market Value Within the Next Decade
This prediction is bound to make people uncomfortable, so let me be precise about what I’m actually saying and where I’m saying it from.
I hold more than half a dozen professional credentials: CPA, CFF, CFE, CIRA, AM, CGMA, and CSP, among others. Most were earned during the first decade of my career, a concentrated period when I was positioned as an expert witness for financial matters (ie. litigation, valuation, fraud investigation, and insolvency).
Credentials matter enormously for credibility in that context. When you’re writing authoritative reports, or providing expert testimony, iron-clad credentials uphold that credibility. They also required substantial coursework, training, and skills development. To me, the greatest benefit was what I learned and could apply directly to my work.
But credentials also serve another purpose: signaling.
Most of us would rather go into surgery with a board-certified surgeon than one who failed his exams. We’d rather fly on a plane with a licensed pilot than someone who taught herself on the Microsoft Flight Simulator computer game.
The CPA curriculum covers real and important ground. The design of the exam isn’t just to make it hard to achieve. It’s to signal to the public, and employers, that a candidate who passes the exam possesses, at least, the minimal standard of professional competence. And it has evolved substantially since I earned mine twenty years ago. The CFA curriculum arguably covers even more breadth
But I believe the signaling power of these credentials — their ability to reliably communicate competence and readiness — will weaken significantly in the AI era.
In many professions, especially those built around standardized examinations, the signal is much of the value. The designation tells employers and clients: this person passed a rigorous test that proves a baseline of knowledge and authority. It’s a proxy for competence when you can’t directly observe it.
Now that AI can reliably perform at or above the testing threshold, the exam itself becomes less meaningful as a filter of professional competence. The issue is that the economic value, and merit, of a credential depends on what it signals to the market.
Historically, passing difficult exams signaled scarce technical capability and disciplined mastery of complex material. But when AI can both help candidates acquire that knowledge and perform increasing portions of the technical work itself, the signaling power of the credential weakens. When OpenAI released ChatGPT years ago, many of us chuckled at its promise to be an excellent test-taker. In the first year of its release, ChatGPT lacked this ability. But now years later, these large-language models can pass with higher rates and lightning-fast speed.
Employers may still value credentials, but increasingly as a baseline qualification rather than a durable competitive advantage. The credential still gets you in the room for an interview, but it stops answering the more important question employers and clients actually care about:
“Can this person exercise good judgment and do high-integrity work in complex, ambiguous situations?”
That creates a vacuum the market will eventually need to solve.
My guess is we move toward more competency-based evaluation: demonstrated outcomes, applied judgment, collaborative problem-solving, and scenario-based assessment rather than purely exam-based qualification.
But that transition will be uncomfortable, both for institutions built around credentialing models and for professionals who assumed those credentials would remain durable career assets indefinitely.
According to the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA), the average age of a CPA exam candidate is 29 years old. While many sit for the exam shortly after graduating college in their early 20s, a significant number of candidates delay the exam, pushing the average age closer to 30.
This delay may be better aligned with more subjective, competency-based examinations, allowing candidates to gain 5-10 years of experience before sitting for the exam. But it continues to beg the question…
What becomes the new value of the CPA?
Prediction #2: AI Will Upend the Corporate Finance Training Industry
Most corporate L&D programs have been selling roughly the same products for decades: multi-day workshops, on-demand videos, standardized curricula with an instructor talking at you, and completion certificates that look good in a performance review but are forgotten by a Manager/Director the following month.
That model worked for a long time because there wasn’t a better option. Few organizations, aside from those with massive L&D budgets, have their own in-house L&D structures. If you wanted your finance team to learn a topic, you hired an expert to teach it.
AI fundamentally changes that equation.
Today, an analyst can receive personalized explanations, adaptive coaching, customized examples, and unlimited follow-up support instantly — often with more relevance than a generalized workshop designed for hundreds of attendees.
I know this for two reasons:
- Two colleagues of mine have incorporated AI-enabled, customized and adaptive learning into their own platforms.
- I’ve begun incorporating into mine with AI chatbots training on my content.
This completely changes the value proposition of traditional training.
The programs and training that survive won’t simply be the ones that deliver information efficiently. Because now AI will be able to commoditize information delivery far better and faster than most training companies can manually create it.
So this leads us in a completely new direction. The survivors will deliver what AI genuinely cannot:
- Peer accountability
- Expert judgment on case-specific situations
- Real practitioner insight
- Community and professional relationships
- Applied feedback on real-world work
That’s a fundamentally different product than a recorded video sold at scale or a standardized curriculum delivered by subcontractors. Most existing providers — especially those carrying heavy operational overhead built around legacy content models — may struggle to adapt.
Prediction #3: Financial Training Companies That Endure Will Be in the Trust Business, Not the Content Business
When I think about the future of finance education, I keep coming back to the same contrarian realization: content was never the real product. Transformation was.
When someone enrolled in a course or purchased a training program, they weren’t simply buying information (well…some were). No, they were buying confidence that the instructor understood something valuable, that the student did not, and that the instructor could help the student apply it effectively.
Credentials, employer prestige, and reputation amplified that trust.
AI doesn’t change what people fundamentally want. People still want to get better at their jobs. They still want to make sense of complex financial concepts. They still want to feel confident in their work, and be at or above the competence of their peers.
What changes is the delivery mechanism. As AI-generated content becomes abundant — and eventually close to free — trust becomes more valuable, not less.
The finance education companies that endure will likely be those with:
- Genuine practitioner credibility
- A distinctive point of view
- Real-world operating experience
- Strong communities
- Long-term reputational trust
Not simply those producing the highest volume of AI-assisted content or synthetic video.
In a world soon-to-be flooded with AI-generated information, human trust may become one of the last durable competitive advantages.
