Rise2040: From Future Trends to Strategic Planning

The finance and accounting profession is undergoing extraordinary transformation. Generative AI, emerging technologies, workforce shifts, regulatory change, geopolitical volatility, and evolving business models are converging, creating both complexity and opportunity. Rise2040: From Future Trends to Transformation combines insights from the global Rise2040 initiative with an interactive exploration of the forces reshaping finance and accounting today. Through Future Forums held across 30 countries and engaging more than 8,600 professionals, Rise2040 is gathering diverse perspectives to help the profession explore, challenge, and shape what comes next. These insights are helping inform strategic priorities, future investments, and how AICPA and CIMA supports members, firms, and organizations worldwide. Rise2040 is not intended to predict a single future. Using Futurist Daniel Burrus’s concepts of Hard Trends, Soft Trends, and future opportunities, participants will look beyond the immediate horizon and explore the implications of change for talent, technology, leadership, and value creation. Emerging themes point to a profession in which trust, judgment, insight, and strategic business partnership become increasingly valuable as routine work is automated. This highly participative session brings those global insights into the organization. Through facilitated discussion, digital polling, and real-time exercises, participants will explore how transformation is affecting their own roles, capabilities, and readiness for the future. The result is a two-way exchange: participants gain access to global research, trends, and frameworks, while the organization gains direct insight into the perspectives, readiness, and emerging capability needs of its finance and accounting workforce. Following the session, leadership will receive a customized Transformation & Workforce Sentiment Report highlighting key themes, readiness indicators, areas of concern, and emerging development needs, along with a curriculum planning consultation with an experienced learning consultant. These insights are designed to help inform the organization’s 2027 and 2028 finance and accounting upskilling objectives, talent priorities, and learning strategy.