What would Chuck Norris do: What Happens When AI Does the Work That Trains CPAs

In The Karate Kid, Mr. Miyagi hands Daniel a sponge and tells him to wax the car. Daniel confused but eager, does what is asked. Then he is asked to do other rote, manual labor. He becomes impatient as he cannot "see" what is he being taught. The lesson isn’t about cars or painting a fence. It’s about how repetition builds muscle memory and patience and dedication. The work that looks like grunt work is often where mastery actually begins.

The accounting profession is losing its version of wax on, wax off. Several industries are in the same boat.

For decades, junior CPAs learned by doing the tasks nobody else wanted: vouching transactions, reconciling ledgers, tracing numbers through trial balances, documenting workpapers in meticulous detail.

Tedious? Absolutely.

That repetition built judgment and a feel for what looked right and what didn’t. An intuition working with real data for when a number was technically accurate but contextually wrong. The Journal of Accountancy is now asking, openly and publicly, how the next generation of accountants develops that judgment when AI is doing the waxing.

AICPA-endorsed platforms like the Dynamic Audit Solution (DAS), built with CPA.com and Caseware, are already automating risk assessment, data ingestion, and adaptive workflow sequencing in live audit engagements.

COSO (National Commission sponsored by AICPA, AAA, IIA) just published formal governance guidance “Achieving Effective Internal Control Over Generative AI." This is designed to be audit-ready today, giving firms a structured framework to demonstrate AI governance maturity to regulators and auditors.

The tools aren’t on a roadmap. They’re in production.

What has not been addressed is that AI is shifting practitioners toward “high-value judgment work” only works if those practitioners developed judgment somewhere first. If the entry-level work that built judgment for prior generations is automated away, firms will need to be intentional about designing new pathways. Assets such as mentorship structures, simulation-based learning, conceptual coursework paired with real case supervision.

The apprenticeship model does not disappear. It just needs to be redesigned on purpose and not left to chance.

The firms that develop human judgment alongside AI capability will hold a competitive advantage that’s genuinely hard to replicate. The ones that automate the grunt work and assume the thinking takes care of itself are writing a different kind of risk into their practice.

Mr. Miyagi knew exactly what he was doing. The question is what are today’s firms doing to remediate this change taking place today.

Chuck Norris, a karate legend, created his own martial arts system. As he studied, he believed no single traditional style was complete enough. He wanted a system that reflected everything he learned and mastered. This is an example of how we train today's young generation of future CPAs. We evolve and find a better way.