A CPA's Success at the Intersection of Accounting and AI Bodes Well for Profession
by Kathleen Hoffelder, NJCPA Content & Communications Manager
Richard (Richie) A. Sater, CPA, a member of the NJCPA since 2021, never considered himself a math whiz. But he recently used artificial intelligence (AI) agents to solve a decades-old math problem and has been invited to present his work to an international audience of mathematicians at his alma mater, NC State University. Richie, a North Carolina native, approached the project using the same skills he applies to accounting and business problems.
As the AI adoption and deployment leader at SIGIL Intelligence Systems in Washington, DC, Richie wanted to see whether the AI methods he currently uses in client training and certification programs could also work in mathematics. He built a system that ran AI agents from his MacBook, which he describes as a small army of “AI math workers,” and broke his project into tasks and assigned them to AI agents. He then deployed the AI agents to solve the math problem that had remained unanswered and stumped mathematicians since the Soviet Era. According to Richie, Viktor Monakhov, a Russian mathematician, put “Problem 10.34” into the Kourovka Notebook, a global collection of open problems in group theory, in 1986.
The first AI agent searched old math papers. Another generated examples. A third tried to break everything the others found for results. A fourth, meanwhile, handled citations, etc. “It’s messy and noisy and dangerously effective,” says Richie. “What’s interesting is that even after I solved it, convincing professional mathematicians to take the result seriously was a big hurdle. They eventually trusted the result after I gave them what was essentially audit evidence: a test and transcripts they could verify themselves.”
The revelation that he had solved the problem using the AI agents immediately got him noticed by those professors and other universities. After solving that problem, he solved another. The Mathematical Association of America will be publishing Richie’s own narrative of the project in its September 10, 2026 edition.
Applying AI to CPAs
The most interesting part, according to Richie, wasn’t just solving the math problem and the accolades he may be receiving. “It was convincing skeptical mathematicians the solution was correct without handing them a mountain of work to review,” he says, noting that those skills can and should be adapted to the new technological aspects of modern accounting. “That experience made me think CPAs may have a very specific role in the agentic era: figuring out how to test AI-generated work, deciding what evidence is enough and giving other experts a reason to trust it.”
The math test overwhelmingly supported his beliefs about AI and the accounting profession. “AI is producing more technical work than experts can possibly review, so every field is going to need a way to test that work at scale. That is what CPAs already do: we provide assurance over work we did not create and explain why someone else should trust it,” he says. For accounting firms, he sees an opportunity to build client services around deploying AI and testing the work it produces. “The same approach can be used, for example, to help clients automate complex tax processes, from gathering the data to producing work that’s ready for review.”
Taking a technological approach to accounting always came naturally to Richie. “I was a programmer and a CPA from the get-go. I always had a foot in both those worlds,” he says, noting that he received his B.S. in accounting from NC State with a concentration in information systems. After graduating, he worked his way up to a manager in tax technology at EY, where Richie started applying new technology to tax problems. “Since then, much of my career has involved applying AI and automation to accounting, finance, compliance and related workflows,” he says.
Richie spent more than four years as CEO of 4Thought Technologies, an AI automation company he founded at the age of 26. There, he was responsible for winning clients and delivering automations that, he says, saved his clients more than 120 hours a month. While leading 4Thought, he was nominated for EY Entrepreneur of the Year award.
Over the years, he has won several AI/algorithm-related awards and scholarships. He was previously chosen out of 17,000 people to receive the Bertelsmann Scholarship for an AI Programming with Python Nanodegree. He also filed a patent application in 2014 for an opacity-based pitch correction algorithm that smoothly adjusted sound frequency. Going through the patent process is what eventually led Richie to go into accounting in the first place. “What I learned from that process was that the business side of things was such an important part. The business side is harder than making it (the patent) in the first place,” he explains. “I wanted a business that required math. Accounting has been a good fit for me.”