While the timing appeared catastrophic—and many partners grumbled about how it was surely coming out of their compensation—the $450 million investment transformed into what leadership now describes as a strategic “accelerant” for the firm’s most ambitious pivot ever: the AI revolution. Today, Lakehouse is one of the firm’s major hubs for training a new generation of professionals to navigate a world where generative AI is no longer a peripheral tool but a core component of professional service.
Fortune was invited to sit in on a three-day session with 600 winter interns, chosen from a pool of 9,000 applicants, representing 146 schools, as the waves of talent from New Jersey to Utah to Texas celebrated leaving school by essentially going back to class again. Lakehouse had bits of flair located throughout, such as the KPMG-branded “GEN AI Invaders” arcade game, but the large, modern building feels like a blend of a state-of-the-art hotel, a KPMG office building, and a learning center.
Lakehouse has 800 single-occupancy guest rooms (staffed by long-term partner Hyatt) and common areas on each floor, complete with a fully packed fridge. Lakehouse boasts high-end dining amenities, including the Common Ground grab-and-go coffee shop, a wine bar called Blend, a sports bar known as the Landing, and a market-style food hall called the Exchange, where you have choices including shawarma, pizza, salads, and more. (It even features a company history section, including a 1932 edition of Fortune, profiling the hot new sector known as accounting.)
The campus also encourages physical activity through a (recently updated) sports complex called Lakeside Park, featuring basketball, beach volleyball, bikes, 1.2 miles of walking trails, pickleball, and an 18-hole miniature golf course, modeled on the actual PGA tour. Patrick Ryan, national managing partner of advisory strategy and markets, told Fortune at Lakehouse that compared to the firm he joined decades ago, you can feel how different KPMG is now—literally. He recalled a pickup basketball game at Lakehouse a few months previously. “There were a couple hard fouls, like really hard fouls going on,” Ryan told Fortune. “I wasn’t giving them. It was a hard game.”
Ryan said he heard afterward that some of his team members had gone up to the interns afterward and said, “Hey, just so you know, that was a hard foul on the guy who runs the advisory business.” He said that while he avoided getting dunked on, he definitely took “some hard charges, we’ll just say that.” (Ryan actually started his career at KPMG and, in a relatively rare move, departed before boomeranging back in 2011 as a partner in KPMG’s deal advisory and strategy business. He then became office managing partner of Washington, D.C., and leader of the federal business in June 2024 before adopting his current role in July 2025.) “I think we’re a flatter organization than a lot of the big firms,” he said. “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 cutting 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.”
Sherry Magee, a longtime Orlando resident who has worked at Lakehouse since it was a construction site, drove this editor around the campus in a (quite fast-moving) golf cart, emphasizing that the central Florida location was within a two-hour flight for most of KPMG’s U.S. workforce.
Given that KPMG has 2,400-plus partners, there’s sometimes not enough Lakehouse to go around. (KPMG said it sometimes works with several partner hotels to accommodate larger groups if necessary.) As Magee wheeled around the sidewalks and man-made lakes of Orlando, she highlighted features such as the on-site beekeeper (four colonies and 80,000 bees, by last count) and falconer (to steer away the prospect of coyotes, snakes, and alligators). She also highlighted the many ways KPMG is turning Lakehouse into an AI crash course, even down to AI-themed playing cards, available at its aIQuad, its AI channel on a nearby TV and the library located next to the Blend featuring AI thought leadership books. (She wouldn’t let Fortune walk away with a deck, but she did offer a gift of AI-themed dress socks.)
Many of the KPMG interns that Fortune spoke to described a strange situation where the accounting classes they learned even two years ago were obsolete in a world where AI would do much of the lifting for them. Bedecked in quarter-zips and khakis, the students were learning best practices on AI from instructors who were writing the curriculum virtually in real time.
Ricker and other instructors explained that interns are being taught to utilize AI in two distinct capacities: as a learning partner to fill knowledge gaps in unfamiliar topics, and as a thought partner to iterate and bounce ideas off, once a foundational understanding is established. Ricker said the tax practice is using a prompting framework called C-A-R-T-S to tailor outputs for different audiences. It stands for Character/Role, Audience, Request & Context, Type of Output, Style & Tone. The audit practice has a similar acronym: C-R-E-A-T-E, which stands for Context, Role, Expected Outcome, Adjust parameters, Tone, Evaluation/Extra.
This shift is significantly altering the daily workflow, reducing the “middle to middle”—the automated, repetitive tasks that previously consumed three-quarters of a professional’s day. By automating these tasks, KPMG intends for its employees to reallocate their time to critical thinking, judgment, and the human element of service.
Nguyen shared several times how excited she was to get started on her internship (specifically, she wanted to note that she’s a financial due diligence intern specializing in energy (ENRCI: Energy, Natural Resources, Chemicals, Infrastructure) at KPMG’s Houston office. At the same time, Nguyen also said she was worried about the impact of AI on her own work and her generation’s job prospects. “It’s scary; the reliance on it is really scary.” In Nguyen’s opinion, she was lucky to enter school slightly before the onset of ChatGPT, so she “built those fundamental skills to discern when it’s right and when it’s wrong.” She couldn’t explain how to develop that sense of when the AI might be hallucinating, but “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.”
On the subject 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 said, adding that “of course” she understands it won’t always provide perfect information, and you always need to “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.”
