For anyone who sat in on client conversations at Baker Tilly over the first half of 2026, one thing we can all agree on is this: the mood has changed. Clients are no longer coming to us with ‘what ifs’ but rather looking to discuss ‘now what’. After a year defined by uncertainty, they aren’t waiting for clarity anymore. They’re preparing for whatever comes next.
Experts across our Tax, Advisory, and Corporate Finance practices sat down to give a ground-level view of what they heard and how the conversation is shifting. Let’s take a listen to what they had to say about the year that was (so far).
Deal appetite hasn’t disappeared. It’s gotten more selective.
“Generally speaking, buyers are more selective than they used to be,” says National Managing Director of Corporate Finance, Mike McIsaac, who spends his days helping private equity groups and strategic buyers evaluate acquisition targets. Buyers still have capital to deploy – plenty of so-called dry powder sitting on the sidelines – but they’re scrutinizing recurring revenue, client concentration, and management depth far more closely than they were a year ago. A quality-of-earnings report isn’t a formality anymore; it’s the deciding factor.
That selectivity is playing out unevenly across sectors. Always-in-demand manufacturing and industrial businesses remain, in the words of M&A expert Tom Hamilton-Piercy, “just the constant.” But mining, oil & gas, and anything tied to aerospace or defense have gotten noticeably hotter this year, a pattern that Todd King, Partner in Atlantic Canada ties directly to renewed global defense spending and growing strategic interest in coastal and Arctic access. Meanwhile, mid-sized and larger players across industries seem to be doubling down on their strongest markets.
What’s being delayed is just as telling. Tariff volatility through 2025 froze a wave of deals outright, and while that risk hasn’t fully resolved, it has become something businesses have learned to work around rather than wait out. On the tax side, a cascade of federal legislative drafts moving through Q1 and Q2 – some tracing back to the legislative proposals released in August 2022 – left business owners hedging structural and succession decisions until the rules were finalized. Tax expert Rebecca Adrian described the period as “a lot of, well, what if?” But the hesitation isn’t just on the buyers’ side; sellers, too, have been pumping the brakes: several who signed engagement letters expecting to transact on strong 2025 numbers found offers had softened by the time they reached market. As a result, these companies are choosing to wait rather than accept a discounted offer.
Every client conversation touches AI now, but the vibe has shifted.
“AI in business is less novelty chatbot and more, wow, there are some major efficiency gains,” notes Todd, who also spearheads Baker Tilly’s internal AI initiatives in Nova Scotia. That optimism, though, sits alongside real friction. At a recent gathering of corporate finance teams from across Baker Tilly International’s global network, the consensus was candid: everyone was doing something with AI, but few had a coherent strategy behind it. As Tom candidly puts it, “Most people don’t know what they don’t know about AI.”
For example, clients arrive having run their own numbers through a chatbot and expect us to match what often amounts to an unrealistic projection. Others lean on AI for tax research without realizing how quickly the underlying laws can shift. The deeper issue, as several of our experts noted, is that AI can’t weigh what a plan is really for. The family dynamics behind an estate plan, or the risk tolerance behind a sale structure – these aren’t inputs an AI model can simply infer, and that’s where an advisor comes in.
Where the technology is working, however, is where AI supports judgment rather than replacing it. As Rebecca points out, tax research has been “absolutely revolutionized” in the past two to three years, and clients now routinely show up to meetings having already used AI to prepare. Issues do arise however, where that AI prepared material is accepted at face value. But the value of these tools depends on the judgment applied to them: without an experienced professional questioning the output, testing the reasoning and verifying the conclusions, AI-prepared material can be useless, or worse, harmful. So, our experts’ advice to businesses today mirrors what we practice internally: don’t build an AI strategy alone. “Go out and engage with somebody to help you develop that strategic plan,” says Mike, calling out advice he himself followed before implementing AI tools across his own team.
Underneath it all sits a more persistent concern: people.
Senior-level talent is, as Rebecca puts it, “hard to get, hard to grow, and hard to keep.” Losing a senior leader is costly, and AI complicates the succession pipeline further: with AI now doing the entry-level work that once built a leader’s judgment over eight to twelve years, businesses have to rethink how those skills and knowledge get built at all.
Todd sees the same strain from the ground up, and our experts hit on issues such as hiring difficulty, unresolved return-to-office tension, and, for companies preparing to sell, the hard reality that buyers now expect a proven, multi-year succession plan. Todd even shared his own approach to mentoring: “I have this kind of ‘always bring a buddy’ concept. Every time I have a meeting, I want someone in that meeting with me, learning.” It’s about investing in people – and in their knowledge and development.
Todd also flagged cybersecurity as a less obvious talent-adjacent risk growing alongside AI adoption. With sophisticated impersonation scams costing clients a lot of money, he reminds us that embracing new tools has to be balanced with real operational discipline and the right people to lead the charge.
Uncertainty has stopped being an excuse to wait.
Our experts don’t know exactly what the second half of 2026 will hold. But they can all agree that success this year revolves around preparation. Businesses that are selective about where they grow, deliberate about how they adopt AI, and intentional about how they invest in their people are the ones that will go far.
Instead of waiting to see what the future holds, clients should be building runway before they sell, building AI strategy before they’re forced to, and building bench strength before a buyer asks who’s next in line. That distinction – preparation over prediction – is likely to play a key role in the second half of the year. And it’s also the starting point for a future article in which we’ll bring together leaders from across Baker Tilly to decode what this all means heading into 2027. Stay tuned!
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