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Key highlights:

• • • Employer-driven curriculum design — The director of the accounting program at The University of Central Florida (UCF) consulted with 16 leading accounting practitioners to learn what AI skills employers need today from graduates.

    • Critical thinking milestones for students — UCF developed an AI competency framework delivered through a fictional theme park case study that was woven across tax, cost accounting, and financial accounting coursework.

    • Human skills as a competitive advantage — Recognizing that AI cannot replicate certain capabilities, UCF’s Dixon School introduced six to eight professional skills workshops (per academic year) covering topics such as relationship management, project management, agentic AI, and critical thinking to ensure that graduates bring irreplaceable human value to the profession.

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The accounting profession is at an inflection point as the level of generative AI (GenAI) already in the workflow continues to reshape how audits are conducted, data is analyzed, and decisions are made. Already, one-third of tax firms are already using GenAI in their work, with 14% specifically usingÌý, according to the ³ÉÈËVRÊÓƵ Institute’s recentÌý2026 AI in Professional Services Report.

For accounting educators, the question is becoming how fast and how boldly are they responding to marketplace needs by embedding advanced AI technology into their curriculum?

Building a curriculum the marketplace needs

Most schools benchmark themselves against peer schools, but , Director of the Dixon School of Accounting at the University of Central Florida (UCF) is starting with practitioners and employers to uncover what curriculum innovation is necessary to prepare his future graduates. In fact, when Dr. Thibodeau arrived at UCF two years ago, he made a deliberate decision to be innovative in his approach to inserting GenAI into the curriculum.

Instead of starting with the faculty, however, he consulted with employers who are hiring his graduates. Over a series of a few months, he led a team of 15 professors and lecturers who leveraged formal research interviews with 16 accounting practitioners, who were responsible for recruiting and hiring for their organizations. Dr. Thibodeau’s goal was to understand what employers are demanding for new accounting graduates.

What he heard led to creative changes within the curriculum. Through this consultation process, he learned employers need undergraduates in accounting who can think criticallyÌýthroughÌýAI output, interrogate it, challenge it, and ultimately exercise independent professional judgment about it.

From those conversations, Dr. Thibodeau and his team developed an AI competency framework which includes a “critical thinking milestone staircase” approach to measure progressive levels.

For example, Dr. Thibodeau says that one of the milestones is effective prompting. While this skill is a table-stakes capability, it is the foundation to learning how to query AI purposefully to get useful output.

Next — and perhaps the most critical skill — is the ability to transition from AI user to AI evaluator. At this stage, students learn to interrogate AI output, cross-reference it against authoritative sources, and recognize when a fluent-sounding answer is wrong. As Thibodeau notes, hallucinations are becoming less frequent as GenAI technology improves, but the risks of uncritically accepting AI output in a professional setting remain unacceptably high.

The next milestone is strategic GenAI problem-solving, which involves knowing what AI tools are best for which specific tasks and how to deploy GenAI within a larger professional workflow. “What’s going to give them the expertise to be that exceptional human-in-the-loop is to operate independently of the GenAI tool,” Dr. Thibodeau adds.

The delivery vehicle for this framework is a comprehensive case study that was built around a fictional theme park that spans across tax, cost accounting, and financial accounting coursework.

Building faculty support for curriculum innovation

The project required assembling a team of faculty members who were motivated by Dr. Thibideau’s vision to both insert innovation within the curriculum while offering meaningful impact and scholarship opportunities for his colleagues. To gain buy-in from his colleagues, Dr. Thibodeau emphasized their legacy with the chance to demonstrate with personal satisfaction that this creative approach will prepare students for the accounting profession’s future.

For faculty with scholarship requirements, he emphasized that this project could produce publications in top educational journals. Now, that vision is paying off. Of the five papers his colleagues produced, one has been accepted and the others are in various stages of the review process at the Journal of Accounting Education. There also will be six presentations from colleagues at the American Accounting Association’s Global Connect meeting this summer. As a byproduct, every faculty member involved also immersed themselves and improved their own skills in GenAI along the way.

Lessons for accounting programs

Dr. Thibodeau is candid about the current difficulty in assessing growth in critical thinking skills. In fact, the accounting department at UCF is experimenting and learning as they go. For example, an early attempt to use AI to grade students’ qualitative reasoning responses did not work well, and the current approach of using outcome-based indicators as a placeholder is imperfect, he acknowledges.

In spite of this, Dr. Thibodeau offers strong guidance for other accounting professors, which includes:

Keep studying how to teach developmental skills and evaluate judgment — Dr. Thibideau knows that this is a universal challenge at the moment at every university and for every organization that depends on the apprenticeship model. The routine tasks that built junior-level judgment organically are increasingly being absorbed by AI, and no one has figured out with certainty how to replace that developmental experience.

Require a CPA pathway — To close the gap on the technical side, the Dixon School has embedded a CPA review course directly into the master’s in accounting curriculum across all semesters to ensure students graduate with both the technical depth needed to challenge AI output and a clear path to passing the CPA exam.

Offer opportunities to develop skills that AI cannot replicate — On the human skills side, the school now runs six to eight professional skills workshops, which include relationship management, project management, agentic AI, and critical thinking. Indeed, these human skills were deemed necessary by the research done by the Dixon’s schools accounting practitioners, chiefly because AI cannot replicate these skills.

For other accounting programs watching from the sidelines, Dr. Thibodeau’s model offers a clear lesson on how to remain relevant in the age of AI. Indeed, proximity to practice is not optional. The schools that will produce the most sought-after graduates in the AI era will be the ones engaged in continuous, structured dialogue with the employers who hire them.

Further, curriculum innovation at this pace requires an institutional culture change that treats change as an opportunity rather than a threat. The curriculum must improve with it because continuous evolution is a baseline requirement. The schools that understand this now will produce the professionals who can best shape the AI-enabled future of the accounting profession.

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You can find out more about how tax firms are managing their AI technology here