The BDO Alliance USA EVOLVE conference brought 2,100 attendees to the Fontainebleau Las Vegas this May. It is the largest annual gathering of the BDO Alliance community, which now spans 250 firms across 718 locations. For Count, it was three days of conversations with the exact group we exist to serve: managing partners and CEOs of middle-market and Top 300 accounting firms trying to figure out the next ten years.

Tony Cord, Count’s Head of Corporate Development, was on the floor. Below is what he heard, what surprised him, and what we think it means.

The keynote that set the frame

The opening keynote came from Christopher Kauffman, a Partner at venture firm General Catalyst, who focuses on later-stage enterprise and AI investments. His framing: the profession sits at the intersection of human intelligence and artificial intelligence, and the firms that thrive in the next decade will be the ones that figure out how to combine them rather than choose between them.

That framing landed because General Catalyst is putting money behind it. Earlier this year the firm put $75 million into Accrual, an AI-native platform built for accounting firms that unifies tax preparation and review workflows. Marc Bhargava, the GC managing director on the deal, made the case plainly: accounting is one of the largest professional services markets in the world, and its core workflows have remained largely unchanged for decades. That is the gap firms are now being asked to close.

What partners were asking about

The topics that kept coming up:

• Profitable growth. Not just top-line growth. How to add revenue that drops to the bottom line at acceptable margins.
• Culture. What it takes to build a firm people actually want to join and stay at.
• Outcomes-based pricing. Moving away from billable hours toward value pricing tied to client results.
• AI. Where to start, what to buy, what to build, how to govern it.
• Independence versus partnering with a strategic partner for capital. The single biggest strategic question in the room.
• Aligning incentives between long-term client success and long-term firm success.
• Leadership development, reskilling, and upskilling. How to grow the next generation of partners while also retraining current staff to work alongside new technology.
• Becoming a magnet for talent in a profession where the talent pipeline is shrinking faster than demand.

What surprised us

The shift in awareness around capital.

A year or two ago, the capital question was something firms could put off. Today, nearly every firm leader Tony spoke with understands that competing in the new M&A environment is difficult without access to capital. The reason is structural: PE-backed platforms are setting the deal terms. As of early 2026, almost half of the top 30 CPA firms have some form of private equity investment or alternative practice structure. The International Federation of Accountants counts more than 1,000 firms globally involved in PE transactions over the past decade, with each direct investment now triggering an average of 7.6 follow-on acquisitions.

In practice, this means partners weighing acquisitions are increasingly running into PE-backed bidders with deeper pockets and faster decision-making. Some sellers still prefer an independent buyer for cultural reasons or skepticism about PE’s three-to-five-year hold periods. But the awareness Tony picked up on is real: capital access is now part of the M&A conversation in a way it was not a few years ago. That is what managing partners are taking back to their boards.

Why the AI and capital questions are the same question

The AI investments firms need to make are not small. BDO USA itself launched a $1 billion AI strategy last year, and the technology vendors filling the EVOLVE exhibit hall are pricing accordingly. The Cherry Bekaert report identifies the same dynamic from the investor side: sponsors are consolidating fragmented sectors and using AI plus smaller acquisitions to build larger, more technology-enabled firms.

For a Top 300 or middle-market firm, the capital question and the AI question start to overlap. Investing in the technology, reskilling staff to use it, and growing through acquisition all draw from the same balance sheet. Firms that can fund all three from operations have one set of options. Firms that cannot are looking at outside capital, a slower pace, or a narrower focus on which of the three to prioritize.

A note on Wayne Berson

We want to call out the BDO community’s outgoing CEO, Wayne Berson, who announced his retirement effective June 30, 2026 and will be succeeded by Matthew Becker. Berson has served four consecutive terms as CEO since 2012, which is unprecedented at a firm of BDO’s size. Under his leadership BDO USA grew from $618 million in revenue to roughly $3 billion, transitioned to an ESOP structure, and built one of the largest accounting alliances in the country. The conversations Count had at EVOLVE happen because Berson and his team built the platform where they happen. We salute Wayne for his friendship, emphasis on people, and leadership commitment to growth and opportunity,

What we are watching

The exhibit floor was full of technology vendors selling less manual work, more advisory capacity, faster turnaround. The harder question, and the one we did not hear good answers to, is how firms are supposed to evaluate all of them, pick the right ones, and get staff trained on them while still running a business. That is the gap we are paying attention to heading into the second half of the year.

We will be back at EVOLVE 2027.