When we last spoke with Baker Tilly chief executive Eric Miles, the contract ink on its acquisition of Moss Adams was still drying and he was the CEO in waiting. A year-plus later, we caught up with Miles to hear what’s kept him busy since then, and what kind of strategic course leadership has laid out for the sixth-largest US accounting firm.
Baker Tilly’s “North Star” is adapting to the increasingly complex needs of the middle-market businesses it serves, Miles told us. Baker Tilly’s January Mid-Market Report, a survey of 500 business leaders at US companies with $200 million to $2 billion in revenue, found that technology adoption, tariffs, and tax and regulatory changes topped respondents’ lists of concerns.
“The nature of what [middle market firms are] dealing with…is getting far more complex, so they need a broader scope of advisory services, they need a deeper bench of specialists, they need a broader national or international reach,” Miles told CFO Brew.
Baker Tilly’s strategy for that involves further expansion and a healthy dose of technology investments, especially in artificial intelligence.
The AI opportunity. In 2024, Baker Tilly sold a stake in the firm to private equity firms Hellman & Friedman and Valeas Capital Partners. Partnering with PE “has been valuable to us in terms of the sophistication of our thinking, specifically around technology,” Miles said.
Hellman & Friedman partnered with Anthropic and other firms, including Blackstone and Goldman Sachs, to launch AI services firm Ode with Anthropic earlier this year. Baker Tilly is “one of the few portfolio companies that have been prioritized to work with this joint venture,” Miles told us.
“That’s helped us think through our strategy, specific technology at a degree we wouldn’t have done elsewhere,” he added.
Miles said there are a few ways Baker Tilly envisions harnessing AI. One is boosting the personal productivity of the firm’s employees. While that should translate into more efficient delivery of services, “we don’t expect those in and of themselves to have a material change in terms of P&L,” he said, adding it’s “just like table stakes.”
Beyond that, the company intends to rebuild workflows, such as tax and audit services, and embed agentic AI technology within them to remove the more menial “grunt work.” Instead of needing to measure AI use in workers’ performance reviews, which “we kind of think that’s a red herring,” Miles said, “we think the way you implement AI is to make it workflow native.”
Baker Tilly also plans to harness AI to make highly specialized (and concentrated) industry expertise available to more people across the firm.
“We have a lot of people who’ve been working in, say, life sciences their entire career, but not everybody knows everything” about that sector and others across the company, he explained. “So how can we get our data ontology, our knowledge graph, deployable to every single person, every single client? That would increase the value to that client from industry expertise [and] relationship [standpoint].”
More to come. Baker Tilly has announced two additional acquisitions since completing its Moss Adams deal. In December, it shared plans to acquire Florida-based Berkowitz Pollack Brant, and in June, said it would acquire New York-based Anchin, Block & Anchin. As part of the Anchin deal, Baker Tilly is moving its headquarters to New YorkCity from Chicago.
The Moss Adams deal, which closed in June 2025, allowed the combined firm to “[continue] to invest in technology at a rate that we never would have done as independent firms.” Larger firms are able to spread technology investments across more clients, Miles said.
“It’s a myriad of things when we think about what our clients are asking for today, and probably more importantly, trying to anticipate what they’ll need two, three, [or] five years from now.”
One of those needs is—you guessed it—navigating the AI evolution.
Baker Tilly is considering some “very targeted acquisitions” to build up services to help its clients understand AI-fueled changes. Because of their size, middle-market companies aren’t “spending the time we do on AI,” he said, “so they’re asking us questions just to make sense of this rapidly changing environment.”
