Navneet Sharma has guided companies through the IPO process roughly 30 times. He is a Partner at KNAV, a global accounting and advisory firm operating across seven countries. He serves on the AICPA Auditing Standards Review Committee, has been recognized with 40 Under 40 honors in both the U.S. and India, and is a Forbes Best in State honoree. He is also one of the few people in this profession willing to say out loud exactly what AI is — and is not — doing on live audit engagements today.

In this episode, Drew Carrick and Chris Vanover dig into two conversations that do not usually share the same room: the behind-the-scenes reality of taking a company public, and what AI-driven audit tools are actually delivering in practice right now.

Topics covered include:

• Why being audit-ready does not mean being IPO-ready, and what private companies consistently miss
• The timeline disconnect between management, the board, and the audit team
• What it feels like to work inside a live IPO process and why one CFO told Navneet he loved it once and will never do it again
• Whether the proposed shift to semi-annual public company reporting is good or bad for the profession
• The KNAV AI tools currently deployed on real engagements — memo analysis, contract summarization, and vouching automation
• The "human in the loop" protocol KNAV built to ensure staff are genuinely engaged with AI output, not just clicking through it
• How firms should be rethinking entry-level training now that AI handles what used to teach professional judgment
• Where AI audit standards actually stand within the AICPA and PCAOB right now

This episode is CPE eligible on the Earmark app.

Qualified Opinions is a flagship content series from CPA Club, built to inform, challenge, and modernize the conversation around public accounting. New episodes release every first and third Wednesday of the month. Available on YouTube and all major streaming platforms.