Baker Tilly and Fieldguide Expand AI Audit Automation Services

Baker Tilly and Fieldguide are expanding their joint AI audit automation capabilities as the global advisory firm scales its use of Fieldguide’s agentic AI platform across assurance and advisory engagements. The expanded collaboration comes as Baker Tilly, fresh off a record $6.8 billion revenue year and a transformative merger with Moss Adams, deepens its investment in technology to address a structural talent shortage that industry leaders have described as existential. Baker Tilly and Fieldguide are part of a broader wave of alliances between established accounting networks and venture-backed technology providers racing to close a widening capacity gap in the profession.

Fieldguide, launched in 2020 by former CPA Jin Chang and co-founder Chris Szymansky, has built an AI-native platform that automates engagement workflows from planning and evidence collection through to testing, reporting and client collaboration. The San Francisco-based company raised $75 million in a Series C round led by the growth equity group at Goldman Sachs Alternatives in February 2026, with participation from Geodesic Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, 8VC and Thomson Reuters. That round brought total funding to $125 million and valued the business at approximately $700 million. The company says its platform is now used by half of the top 100 US accounting firms, a client list that includes KPMG, RSM, Grant Thornton, BDO, Forvis Mazars and Baker Tilly. Fieldguide operates in a crowded vendor landscape that includes competitors such as DataSnipper and MindBridge, but its end-to-end engagement model and early mover advantage in agentic AI have helped it secure a foothold among the profession’s largest operators.

The platform’s core offering centres on what Fieldguide calls “Field Agents,” autonomous software agents that handle evidence review, completeness checks and bulk recurring tasks. The company estimates these agents can execute roughly 70% of testing procedures on a given engagement, though that figure has not been independently verified. The agents surface exceptions and anomalies so that human professionals can focus on judgement and strategic analysis. Chang has framed the technology not as a replacement for auditors but as a structural answer to a profession haemorrhaging talent. CPA exam candidates are at a 17-year low in the United States, according to data cited by Fieldguide, and industry projections suggest as many as 75% of today’s certified public accountants will retire within the next decade. The company has pointed to an existing capacity shortfall of approximately 125 million hours, equivalent to what it values at more than $25 billion in unmet demand.

“With AI embedded in critical accounting and audit processes, trust and transparency will become non-negotiable. Firms will implement strict AI-use policies, client disclosures and bias monitoring.”

Micheal Herman, Chief Digital Officer, Baker Tilly

Baker Tilly International reported record global revenue of $6.8 billion for the fiscal year ended 31 December 2025, up 21.3% on the prior year. The network operates across more than 700 offices in 145 territories with over 50,000 professionals. Its North American operations grew by 37.5% in 2025, driven in large part by the June 2025 merger with Moss Adams, which created the sixth-largest CPA firm in the United States. Baker Tilly and Fieldguide together reflect a strategy that pairs institutional reach with purpose-built technology, targeting the mid-market segment where staffing pressures are often most acute and where firms lack the budgets to build proprietary AI systems from scratch.

That mid-market positioning matters because the competitive landscape is moving fast. The Big Four have committed enormous resources to AI-powered audit. PwC has forecast complete end-to-end AI integration across the audit cycle within 2026 and developed Agent OS, a modular AI operating system with governance and compliance built into its architecture. KPMG launched Workbench in mid-2025, a multi-agent platform designed to mirror how a human audit team operates. EY has trained more than 55,000 employees in AI-related capabilities. The scale of the shift is visible in hiring patterns: according to an analysis by the Financial Times, the Big Four collectively advertised more AI-related job postings than traditional auditing positions in 2025, with nearly 7% of listings requiring AI expertise compared with under 3% for auditing roles. A 2025 Stanford study found hiring for junior accounting roles dropped 16% over roughly two years, a trend firms have described openly as a structural move toward smaller, more senior, more advisory-oriented teams.

Baker Tilly and Fieldguide are betting that mid-market firms do not need to replicate the Big Four’s approach to compete. Fieldguide’s model offers a single platform that unifies planning, client collaboration, testing and reporting rather than requiring firms to assemble multiple point solutions. Baker Tilly and Fieldguide have positioned the platform as an engagement team member rather than a standalone tool, a distinction that carries weight in regulated environments where audit quality and explainability face increasing scrutiny. The EU AI Act, taking effect in 2026, explicitly classifies audit AI as high risk, mandating documented human oversight and operator competency. Baker Tilly’s own internal audit practice has published guidance urging organisations to operationalise AI review protocols immediately, citing data showing that 64% of companies now expect their auditors to assess AI use in financial reporting.

Goldman Sachs, the lead investor in Fieldguide’s latest round, framed the opportunity as a workflow redesign problem rather than a tooling upgrade. Harris Pollack, a vice president in the firm’s growth equity division, said the future of audit and advisory depends on how effectively firms combine human judgement with AI-driven execution. Chang, for his part, told Fortune that the talent crisis facing the CPA industry is “only getting worse” and that he would describe it as existential. He said adoption of agentic AI features has been especially rapid over the past year across Fieldguide’s customer base, with agents now running in production on live engagements.

For Baker Tilly and Fieldguide, the wager is that speed and integration will prove decisive at a moment when the profession’s workforce constraints leave little room for delay. Fieldguide’s own projections put the capacity gap at roughly 600 million hours of unmet demand by 2030, a shortfall the company values at more than $230 billion annually. Whether that number holds up to scrutiny or not, the direction is clear, and the firms that close even a fraction of that gap first stand to reshape the economics of the profession.