In January 2020, KPMG executives gathered in Orlando for a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Lakehouse, a sprawling, state-of-the-art studying and innovation heart designed to be the agency’s cultural residence. Just two months later, the world shuttered beneath the weight of a international pandemic.
While the timing appeared catastrophic—and lots of companions grumbled about the way it was absolutely popping out of their compensation—the $450 million funding reworked into what management now describes as a strategic “accelerant” for the agency’s most formidable pivot ever: the AI revolution. Today, Lakehouse is one in all the agency’s main hubs for coaching a new era of execs to navigate a world the place generative AI is now not a peripheral device however a core element {of professional} service.
Fortune was invited to sit down in on a three-day session with 600 winter interns, chosen from a pool of 9,000 candidates, representing 146 faculties, as the waves of expertise from New Jersey to Utah to Texas celebrated leaving college by basically going again to class once more. Lakehouse had bits of aptitude situated all through, resembling the KPMG-branded “GEN AI Invaders” arcade sport, however the massive, trendy constructing seems like a mix of a state-of-the-art resort, a KPMG workplace constructing and a studying heart.
The Immersive Cultural Home
Lakehouse has 800 single-occupancy visitor rooms (staffed by long-term accomplice Hyatt) and customary areas on every flooring, full with a absolutely packed fridge. Lakehouse boasts high-end eating facilities, together with the Common Ground grab-and-go espresso store, a wine bar referred to as Blend, a sports activities bar often known as The Landing and a market-style meals corridor referred to as The Exchange, the place you will have coiches together with shawarma, pizza, salads and extra. (It even options a firm historical past part, together with a 1932 version of Fortune, profiling the scorching new sector often known as accounting.)
It’s a far cry from the accounting, auditing and consulting agency—recognized for its royal-blue colour scheme and its standing as one in all the “Big 4” in company accounting, together with PwC, EY and Deloitte—and its gleaming new headquarters in New York City, as toured by Fortune‘s Eva Roytburg in November. The firm’s new Chair and CEO, Timothy Walsh, who started his five-year time period in July 2025, spoke to Fortune in October about the worry “that honestly keeps me up at night,” round cyber and quantum evolving quicker than KPMG and its purchasers can hold forward of.
Under Walsh, KPMG has consolidated three legacy Manhattan places of work—345 Park Avenue, 560 Lexington Avenue, and 1350 Avenue of the Americas—into a 450,000-square-foot area that features “war-mapping” technique rooms, skyline lounges, and even what one government referred to as “MTV-style” confession rooms for purchasers to file reflections after huge tasks. “I really do believe that someone can start here as an intern, like I did, and build a long-term career,” he informed Fortune in November. And whereas the Manhattan headquarters supply one sort of point of interest for KPMG’s 90-plus places of work and greater than 36,000 staff and companions, Lakehouse is the place interns begin their journey.
The campus additionally encourages bodily exercise by way of a (lately up to date) sports activities advanced referred to as Lakeside Park, that includes basketball, seashore volleyball, bikes, 1.2 miles of strolling trails, pickleball and an 18-hole miniature golf course, modeled on the precise PGA tour. Patrick Ryan, National Managing Partner of Advisory, Strategy & Markets, informed Fortune at Lakehouse that, in comparison with the agency he joined a long time in the past, you may really feel how totally different KPMG is now—actually. He recalled a pickup basketball sport at Lakehouse a few months beforehand. “There were a couple hard fouls, like really hard fouls going on,” Ryan informed Fortune. “I wasn’t giving them. It was a hard game.”
The new pickleball courts at the KPMG Lakehouse.
Nick Lichtenberg/Fortune
Ryan stated he heard afterward that a few of his group members had gone as much as the interns afterward and stated, “Hey, just so you know, that was a hard foul on the guy who runs the advisory business.” He stated that whereas he averted getting dunked on, he undoubtedly took “some hard charges, we’ll just say that.” (Ryan really began his profession at KPMG and, in a comparatively uncommon transfer, departed earlier than boomeranging again in 2011 as a Partner in KPMG’s Deal Advisory and Strategy Business. He then grew to become Office Managing Partner of Washington, D.C. and chief of the Federal Business in June 2024 earlier than adopting his present function in July 2025). “I think we’re a flatter organization than a lot of the big firms,” he stated. “Lots of reasons behind that, but I think we’ve done that pretty intentionally relative to our culture.”
Ryan recalled that he was at the ribbon chopping for Lakehouse in January 2020 and remembered the grumbling at the time: “Capital-intensive, middle of nowhere in Orlando … some people might think the worst timing. It turned out it was actually the perfect timing, because this was our safe haven for the middle of the pandemic.”
Ryan was one in all a number of KPMGers who described how Lakehouse became the Big 4 agency’s model of the NBA bubble in close by Disney world, because it incrementally reopened to KPMG staff with security protocols in place, together with onsite testing and social distancing, for each indoor and outside occasions and gatherings. Then, as soon as reopening was beneath means, in 2023, “we have clients here every single week in scale.”
Sherry Magee, a longtime Orlando resident who has labored at Lakehouse because it was a building website, drove this editor round the campus in a (fairly fast-moving) golf cart, emphasizing that the central Florida location was inside a two-hour flight for most of KPMG’s U.S. workforce.
Given that KPMG has 2,400-plus companions, there’s typically not sufficient Lakehouse to go round. (KPMG stated it typically works with a number of accomplice lodges to accommodate bigger teams if crucial.) As Magee wheeled round the sidewalks and man-made lakes of Orlando, she highlighted options resembling the on-site beekeeper (4 colonies and 80,000 bees, by las depend) and falconer (to steer away the prospect of coyotes, snakes and alligators). She additionally highlighted the some ways KPMG is popping Lakehouse into an AI crash-course, even all the way down to AI-themed taking part in playing cards, out there at its aIQuad, its AI channel on a close by TV and the library situated subsequent to The Blend that includes AI thought management books. (She wouldn’t let Fortune stroll away with a deck, however she did supply a present of AI-themed costume socks.)
‘Think, Prompt, Check’: The New AI Standard
Many of the KPMG interns that Fortune spoke to described a unusual scenario the place the accounting courses they discovered even two years in the past had been out of date in a world the place AI would do a lot of the lifting for them. Bedecked in quarter-zips and khakis, the college students had been studying greatest practices on AI from instructors who had been writing the curriculum nearly in actual time.
At the coronary heart of the present lesson plan is a framework by which KPMG instructors coaching tax interns to “think, prompt, check,” or TPC. Holly Ricker, a director in the tax studying and growth group, informed Fortune that the framework had advanced in simply the final three months; it was “think first, prompt later,” however she and different instructors realized that they wanted to explicitly inform college students to test issues. “We were telling everyone to think first and then prompt, but … just because you’re prompting, doesn’t mean you’re getting the right prompt.” She stated she’s happy with the early outcomes. “Everyone’s going around saying ‘TPC, remember the TPC.’ It’s really caught on.”
Justin Day, an intern primarily based out of the Salt Lake City workplace, defined that he was older than lots of his fellow classmates, as he had completed up at Brigham Young University after spending two years as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Ethiopia and Kenya. When he received to varsity in 2022, he had invaluable real-world expertise and was poised to undertake AI from the very starting, he stated, as he began utilizing ChatGPT inside days of its launch. Day defined that he was an avid AI adopter as a result of it was useful for researching the historic accuracy of his inventive writing passion: fantasy novels, in the model of Brandon Sanderson. He stated he discovered from it even when it was unsuitable. “I think that was just part of the learning curve. Usually when it leads me astray, it’s more my fault, and I just didn’t know what I did wrong to prompt it to not give me the right answer.” Day might not have recognized it, however he was already modeling “TPC.”
Ricker and different instructors defined that interns are being taught to make the most of AI in two distinct capacities: as a studying accomplice to fill information gaps in unfamiliar matters, and as a thought accomplice to iterate and bounce concepts off, as soon as a foundational understanding is established. Ricker stated the Tax follow is utilizing a prompting framework referred to as C-A-R-T-S to tailor outputs for totally different audiences. It stands for Character/Role, Audience, Request & Context, Type of Output, Style & Tone. The Audit follow has a related acronym: C-R-E-A-T-E, which stands for Context, Role, Expected Outcome, Adjust parameters, Tone, Evaluation/Extra.
This shift is considerably altering the every day workflow, decreasing the “middle to middle”—the automated, repetitive duties that beforehand consumed three-quarters of a skilled’s day. By automating these duties, KPMG intends for its staff to reallocate their time to important considering, judgment, and the human factor of service.
KPMG’s AI technique is bolstered by deep technical partnerships with business giants. The agency makes use of a Microsoft surroundings, integrating Copilot into Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel and Teams to streamline communication and presentation constructing. Partner Patrick Ryan highlighted the latest launch of Google Gemini as a “market-leading” turning level. For instance, he highlighted the preparation work he has to do for exterior conferences with high executives, which entails going by way of previous notes, PowerPoint displays and correspondence. He used to spend a “huge chunk” of his time on this, however with AI instruments, and Gemini specifically, he estimated that he reduce his prep time by as much as 75%. “There was just this moment of: everything just became easier, especially on the go-to market side of things,” Ryan informed Fortune.
‘More about conceptual things than hard facts’
Ok-Linh Nguyen, an intern from Houston, Texas, informed Fortune that she wasn’t a typical “Aggie” regardless of her darkish maroon Texas A&M polo shirt, selecting her research over soccer video games most of the time. Her mother and father had fled wartorn Southeast Asia to settle in Houston, she defined, and he or she was drawn to A&M’s Professional Program in Accounting, or PPA, as a result of it permits college students to get each an undergraduate and grasp’s diploma in simply 5 years. Her father, a former PwC marketing consultant, now owns two companies in the Houston space, and her mom works alongside him.
Nguyen shared a number of occasions how excited she was to get began on her internship (particularly, she wished to notice that she’s a Financial Due Diligence intern specializing in vitality (ENRCI: Energy, Natural Resources, Chemicals, Infrastructure) at KPMG’s Houston workplace. At the identical time, Nguyen additionally stated she was frightened about the impression of AI on her personal work and her era’s job prospects. “It’s scary; the reliance on it is really scary.” In Nguyen’s opinion, she was fortunate to enter college barely earlier than the onset of ChatGPT, so she “built those fundamental skills to discern when it’s right and when it’s wrong.” She couldn’t clarify the best way to develop that sense of when the AI is likely to be hallucinating, however “You have to have an eye for it … You can’t teach that eye unless you — How do I say this? It’s one of those things where you have to experience it to appreciate it.”
Angela Chen, out of KPMG’s New York City workplace, informed Fortune that her mother and father had been torn about the lengthy hours she spent learning at Baruch College, as a result of they wanted her assist operating their Chinese restaurant in the Coney Island part of Brooklyn. Eventually, although, her mom inspired the profession path, calling it a “golden spoon”—a profitable to earn a residing and discover independence.
On the topic of AI, Chen was level-headed. “I use AI as a learning tool. I think it’s very helpful for me to work with it,” she stated, including that “of course” she understands it gained’t all the time present excellent data, and also you all the time must “check” what it’s telling you. “Usually when I use AI, I just search for definitions and concepts … it’s more about conceptual things than hard facts.”
Chen wrote to Fortune through LinkedIn that her three-day crash course at Lakehouse had set her up for success: “It was great, I was filled with learning and food.”
