Episode 6: AI Agents, Insider Trading, and the Fight Against Greenwashing

AI Agents, Insider Trading, and the Fight Against Greenwashing The profession is facing three fast moving fronts at once, and each one comes back to the same core skill: judgment. Chartered Accountants Worldwide, working with member institutes and Ipsos, has opened wave two of its global study on AI and the future of the profession. Wave one set the baseline, and this round digs into how attitudes are shifting on traditional AI, generative AI, and agentic AI, the systems that carry out tasks on their own rather than simply assisting with them. The point of the exercise is straightforward, the findings will shape strategy and leadership decisions across the whole global profession, so it's worth the fifteen minutes to have your perspective counted. Responses are anonymised and aggregated, and the survey link is in the show notes. From there, a story that puts two unlikely topics side by side. EY's Richard Harrison has been discussing how audit firms are deploying AI agents to take on more routine work, which raises a genuinely open question: how much can automation reliably own, and where does professional judgment stay non negotiable. In the same conversation, Polly Tsang flags a separate risk worth watching, prediction markets, where people trade on the outcome of real world events. It sounds abstract until you hear that a Google employee reportedly made over a million dollars trading on inside information through one of these platforms. Existing insider trading rules were never built with this in mind, so finance professionals working on anything market sensitive could be exposed without realising it. Different problems, same root cause, technology is outrunning the frameworks meant to govern it. Finally, greenwashing, and why Chartered Accountants are increasingly the ones asked to separate genuine sustainability claims from spin. As sustainability reporting has gone mainstream, so has the temptation to oversell it, vague language, unsupported net zero pledges, and selective disclosure that shows the good numbers and buries the rest. The consequences are real. Volkswagen's emissions scandal wiped out a fifth of its share price and roughly thirteen billion euros in market value, and regulators are catching up fast, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority can now fine misleading environmental claims up to ten percent of global turnover. The same scepticism and evidence standards Chartered Accountants apply to financial statements are exactly what's needed here, which is why the profession's role in this space keeps growing. Three different stories, one consistent message: as the tools and the claims get more sophisticated, it's professional judgment, not the technology itself, that keeps the profession trustworthy.