Earmark Podcast | Earn Free Accounting CPE
Oct 5, 2026 · 36 min · 9 segments
AI is taking on routine accounting work—but what should accountants do next? Blake Oliver talks with Mike DePrisco, CEO of the Institute of Management Accountants, about measuring AI’s payoff through…
Mike DePriscoGuestBlake OliverHostWhen I took my accounting coursework to get my CPA, there was a course called Managerial Accounting.
I was excited to get into that because I like the idea of doing controller work, doing CFO type work.
When I got into that class, what I found was that the class was almost entirely about cost accounting.
Old school cost accounting, right? Like we're in a factory and we're making widgets and we are allocating, you know, overhead, indirect, all this stuff to, like, figure out what's the cost to make our widget, you know, and then stuff like, OK, should we optimize this part of the production line? Like, how can we optimize it or whatever? That sort of thing.
Well, look, what you described is very much where management accounting had its roots and it's important work, no question about it.
But I think like most professions, it has evolved and has shifted as businesses have shifted and the needs of organizations and the competitive forces at play have changed and evolved.
And I think that When I talk to our practitioners and when we speak about the type of work that's being done, it's very much focused around strategic work.
How are you partnering with the business to unlock new business opportunities, to assess new markets, to determine whether new products and services have uh are meeting the demands of the customers that you're that you're aiming uh to to um to to um attract to your organization these this is the type of work that management accountants do they take data that comes out of whether it's ai machines or other types of erp systems and forecasting hubs that you might use and they interpret it and they helped other functions within the organization solve problems and make decisions about that data in terms of how it can help drive solving a problem for the organization, for the customer, driving value for the organization.
But the shift now to more business acumen, strategic focus, performance, risk, data analytics is where I think the role of management accounting continues to go.
And I think we'll only be accelerated, quite frankly, by new technology because a lot of the mundane tasks, if you will, Um, that whether you're in public accounting or in corporate, um, corporate accounting, um, a lot of the mundane tasks are going to be solved by or completed by technology.
So it really then changes the role of the individual accountant to one that leverages that information to help inform decisions in an organization.
When I took my accounting coursework to get my CPA, there was a course called Managerial Accounting.
I was excited to get into that because I like the idea of doing controller work, doing CFO type work.
When I got into that class, what I found was that the class was almost entirely about cost accounting.
Old school cost accounting, right? Like we're in a factory and we're making widgets and we are allocating, you know, overhead, indirect, all this stuff to, like, figure out what's the cost to make our widget, you know, and then stuff like, OK, should we optimize this part of the production line? Like, how can we optimize it or whatever? That sort of thing.
Well, look, what you described is very much where management accounting had its roots and it's important work, no question about it.
But I think like most professions, it has evolved and has shifted as businesses have shifted and the needs of organizations and the competitive forces at play have changed and evolved.
And I think that When I talk to our practitioners and when we speak about the type of work that's being done, it's very much focused around strategic work.
How are you partnering with the business to unlock new business opportunities, to assess new markets, to determine whether new products and services have uh are meeting the demands of the customers that you're that you're aiming uh to to um to to um attract to your organization these this is the type of work that management accountants do they take data that comes out of whether it's ai machines or other types of erp systems and forecasting hubs that you might use and they interpret it and they helped other functions within the organization solve problems and make decisions about that data in terms of how it can help drive solving a problem for the organization, for the customer, driving value for the organization.
But the shift now to more business acumen, strategic focus, performance, risk, data analytics is where I think the role of management accounting continues to go.
And I think we'll only be accelerated, quite frankly, by new technology because a lot of the mundane tasks, if you will, Um, that whether you're in public accounting or in corporate, um, corporate accounting, um, a lot of the mundane tasks are going to be solved by or completed by technology.
So it really then changes the role of the individual accountant to one that leverages that information to help inform decisions in an organization.
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