Foundations First: Technology Takeaways from the Boomer Circle Summit

Technology conversations moved past excitement over artificial intelligence and into the discipline required to make AI work inside a firm at the 2026 Boomer Circle Summit. Speaker after speaker stressed that firms already have access to capable AI tools. Now, it’s time to do the hard work of building the governance, data and culture to use those tools well.

Clean data and clear ownership come before AI

Steve Perkins of Invicta Advisors opened his session, Data You Can Trust, by sharing that in years of consulting with CPA firms, he has yet to find one with a formally defined data owner or a documented governance program.

“AI amplifies whatever foundation already exists in a firm, for better or worse,” Perkins explained. He shared a three-layer framework:

1. Govern

2. Flow

3. Enable

He challenged attendees to assign accountable owners for core data domains such as client records, engagement setup and billing before automation enters the picture.

Perkins returned to this theme in his session IT Strategy Isn't an IT Problem, distinguishing a real technology strategy from a wish list. A strategy requires an honest diagnosis of what constrains growth right now. This guiding policy tells the firm what to pursue and what to decline. Coordinated action across departments beats scattered, department-by-department purchasing decisions.

Chris Rochford of Boomer Consulting extended the theme to risk in Security, Compliance & Controls in a Digital-First Firm. He encouraged leaders to replace the question “Is it secure?” with a set of questions:

• What is the firm trying to accomplish?

• What could go wrong?

• Who owns that decision?

Passing a compliance checklist, he noted, tells a firm little about the risks that matter most.

Moving from scattered pilots to a governed platform

Marc Staut of Boomer Consulting facilitated a session called From Pilot to Platform. He pointed out a pattern many attendees recognized: multiple AI tools purchased separately, isolated experiments running in individual departments and no single owner accountable for outcomes. Staut described four stages of AI maturity, from individual exploration through a fully AI-enabled firm and noted that most firms remain stuck in the first two. Firms capturing real value standardize their use cases, build governance that supports scale and tie every initiative to a measurable business result.

That governance conversation extended into agentic AI with tools that take multi-step action toward a goal, not just draft text for a person to revise. Staut described this as the shift from a tool you prompt to a teammate you supervise. He believes this is the defining change of 2026, but it requires clear escalation paths and human review before any agent takes on real work.

Gary Boomer picked up this thread in The Agentic Firm, reframing skills CPA firms already have. Segregation of duties, documentation and professional skepticism map directly onto the governance required by an agentic workforce. He shared his belief that the accounting profession is well positioned for this shift, built as it is on judgment, controls and accountability. The opportunity is to redesign service lines around what people do best and let agents handle the coordination work underneath.

Christopher Naviaux, CIO at Blue & Co., brought a practitioner's view to the same idea in AI Strategy for Firm Leaders. After putting AI tools in the hands of more than 600 team members, his firm found that broad access produced strong adoption when paired with an approved platform, a clear acceptable-use policy and role-based training. His takeaway for the room is that AI adoption inside a firm follows either a plan leadership designs or a pattern team members create on their own, so leadership needs to design it.

People still decide whether the technology pays off

A common thread running beneath every session is data governance, risk frameworks and platform strategy only pay off if people use them well. Staut said culture is the multiplier, pointing to mandatory training, visible leadership adoption and recognition for the teams that make new habits stick.

Jim Boomer's session, The AI Readiness Gap, brought these ideas together into action. Rather than producing another maturity score, Boomer sent attendees home with a personalized 90-day plan built around two priorities, a handful of concrete actions and one accountable owner for each. His closing point, that AI readiness comes from a series of intentional leadership decisions, made one at a time, summarized the day well.

What this means for your firm

The technology sessions at this year's Boomer Circle Summit highlight that competitive advantage in the accounting profession comes from disciplined execution. Every firm can buy an AI platform. Few will invest in the governance, process and culture work that makes those platforms trustworthy and genuinely useful to clients.

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