7.5 days—The average reduction in monthly close time among accountants using AI daily at 79 small and midsize firms.
– MIT Sloan
Amber Setter
SAN DIEGO, CALIF.
Amber is Chief Enlightenment Officer at Conscious Public Accountants, offering executive coaching, leadership development programs and restorative wellness experiences at her private estate in north San Diego. She has a bachelor’s in accounting from San Jose State, a master’s in leadership studies from the University of San Diego, and 20 years of industry experience in tax, campus recruiting and learning and development. She also was an internal coach at a Big Four firm.
Today she divides her time between coaching high-level leaders, leading teams through leadership development experiences, gardening and parenting a vibrant fifth-grader.
What does a typical day look like for you?
Mondays are for running my business: administration, planning, the detail-oriented work that keeps everything moving. Tuesday through Thursday, I’m fully present with clients. There’s a common misconception that coaches tell people what to do. In reality, my role is to create a safe space for others to connect to their deeper truths and then build meaningful action from there. That kind of work demands deep presence, active listening, genuine curiosity and a well-regulated nervous system. Fridays are devoted to creation. I’m putting the finishing touches on a book, developing new content for leadership programs and following ideas that I believe can call our professionals into something greater.
What keeps you coming back to your work?
I could be an executive coach in any industry. Why accounting? I don’t want to stay in a place because it is my comfort zone or because it feeds my ego. My work needs to honor my soul and enliven my spirit. I keep coming back because of the people and the challenge. Accountants are generally extraordinarily intellectual and genuinely oriented toward service. AI is going to reshape our lives in ways none of us can predict. The fight for human-centered leadership has never been more urgent and more purposeful.
What should people know about accounting?
Accountants are trusted with some of the most sensitive information in people’s lives, often with little training on psychological matters that show up. Transference, for example, is a well-documented phenomenon where a person unconsciously redirects emotions from past relationships onto a current one. With money involved, a client might relate to their adviser as a parent, without either party realizing it. Most of my clients haven’t encountered these concepts before working with me. Understanding them is transformative.
What do you hope for the future of the CPA profession?
As a coach, I love a magic wand question. So, I’ll answer it the way I’d ask it of a client. If I could create anything, what would it be? I’d invite a deeper conversation about private equity’s role in the profession. PE investment is designed for short-term returns, and that focus often works against the well-being of the people inside firms. Beyond structure and economics, I’d call on all of us to double down on relationship skills. We are in the business of relationships anchored in sensitive financial realities. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I’d hold mental health as a professional responsibility. We live in a society that is, frankly, under psychological siege and often doesn’t feel safe. The leaders who will endure are not simply the most technically skilled. They will be the ones who have done the inner work. Clients don’t just trust the numbers. They trust the person behind them.
Much of the conversation among organizations racing to embrace artificial intelligence has centered on speed, efficiency and productivity. Leaders invest heavily in AI tools and employees experiment with new workflows, while businesses look for ways to gain a new edge.
Yet the aspect of AI that organizations often overlook is the most important: people. Jennifer Harrity, adviser and author of the whitepaper, “The Human Cost of AI: Why the Empathy Gap is Breaking Organizational Culture,” challenged leaders in a recent CalCPA CEO Chat to think beyond the technical capabilities of AI and consider its human impact.
“People are turning out more work than they have their entire career,” Harrity said. “But that level of work is taking a toll.”
Accountants hailing from different generations have divided opinions on everything from AI, inflation, hybrid work to diversity, equity and inclusion—and other issues shaping the modern workplace, according to a new survey.
When people hear the phrase “innovation policy,” they usually think about government funding, intellectual property protections or investments in scientific research. Few think about accounting standards.
California will require all students to take a personal finance course to graduate high school, starting with the class of 2031, and teachers are already going beyond the classroom, bringing in speakers from local credit unions, Rotary clubs and businesses.
As good as AI is at cutting through large datasets quickly, its social abilities are limited. This creates an opportunity for accounting and finance professionals to focus on human relationships.
Spreadsheet Roots Daily Accrual
This alphabet you’re reading now owes its existence to ancient bookkeeping,
the earliest writing system. The Phoenician alphabet was invented around 1200 BC by merchants needing a faster, efficient way to track cargo, debts and trade deals.
Using 22 simple consonants, as vowels were apparently “nonessential,” these early accounting legends paved the foundation for the modern alphabet, and in the name of financial tracking.
So, the next time you’re labeling accounts or closing books, just remember, your own spreadsheets are some small part of a 3,000-year-old tradition.
Spreadsheet Roots
Daily Accrual
This alphabet you’re reading now owes its existence to ancient bookkeeping, the earliest writing system. The Phoenician alphabet was invented around 1200 BC by merchants needing a faster, efficient way to track cargo, debts and trade deals. Using 22 simple consonants, as vowels were apparently “nonessential,” these early accounting legends paved the foundation for the modern alphabet, and in the name of financial tracking.
So, the next time you’re labeling accounts or closing books, just remember, your own spreadsheets are some small part of a 3,000-year-old tradition.
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