For years, I have urged professionals to write their own story. I first shared that advice with a graduate internal audit class at my alma mater, Georgia State University (GSU), shortly before the pandemic. My message to the students that night was simple: “As you make important decisions about the path you will follow in your career, you need to write your own story.” I have repeated it in speeches, blogs, and mentoring conversations ever since.

That advice matters more today. Artificial intelligence is transforming the way people tell their story. In seconds, AI tools can draft a résumé, polish a cover letter, and rewrite your LinkedIn profile. Many employers now use AI to screen the applications those tools produce. I use these tools myself. However, AI can only arrange the facts you give it. It cannot decide what your next chapter should be. You must remain the architect of your own career.

The stakes are high. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that 170 million jobs will be created and 92 million will be displaced between 2025 and 2030. Employers expect 39% of key skills to change over the same period. With that much transformation and uncertainty, you cannot afford to follow a traditional career roadmap drawn in a different era. Many of those roadmaps lead to roles that AI will reshape or eliminate. You need to take charge of your career and chart your own course.

My own chapters

COVID-19 forced me to apply my own advice. Isolation from the workplace and my intense travel schedule gave me time to reflect, and I realized I was no longer writing my own story. After 12 years as global CEO of The IIA, I was spending my time on things that no longer challenged me, including running a $70 million business, so that I could do the things I still had a passion for: advocating for the profession, writing, and teaching.

So, I took out my pen and wrote a new chapter. My career has included a major move in each decade:

• In my 20s, I joined a corporate internal audit function.
• In my 30s, I became CAE over a 300-person internal audit function.
• In my 40s, I retired as an inspector general in the U.S. government.
• In my 50s, I joined a Big 4 accounting firm as a national practice leader.
• In my 60s, I joined Optro (then known as AuditBoard), one of the fastest growing tech start-ups in America.

Today, I own my own client service firm, serve as Optro’s Senior Advisor, Risk and Audit, Chair UNICEF’s Audit Advisory Committee, and serve as the Overseas Dean of China’s Nanjing Audit University. My new book, Trusted Advisors: The Human Edge in the World of AI, adds AI acumen to the attributes of outstanding internal auditors I first described in 2017. Each of these moves came from my own choices. None came from a script someone else wrote for me.

Question the conventional path

Many accounting students still obsess over landing an internship with a public accounting firm. They believe it is their only real option because it leads to the CPA. That belief often comes from what has been drilled into their minds rather than what is in their hearts. The message they hear is this: “If you don’t become a CPA, you won’t be as successful.”

A CPA can enhance your career opportunities. It is not the only path to success. I enjoyed studying accounting, but not enough to pursue public accounting. At 21, I joined the internal audit department of a local bank, fully expecting never to walk the halls of a public accounting firm. Yet unexpected things happen when you write your own story. After a long career in public sector internal auditing, I joined PwC at age 50, where the average age was barely half mine. I took the job because of my passion for the internal audit services PwC provided its clients worldwide. Nobody else dictated the move.

AI creates a new version of the same problem. A chatbot can generate a “recommended” career path in seconds, based on what others have done. That path reflects the past. Your story should reflect your purpose.

Tips for writing your story in the AI era

• Know your purpose. Do you want to work to live, or live to work? AI cannot answer that question for you.
• Use AI as an editor, not the author. Let it sharpen your résumé, then make sure the story it tells is yours.
• Cultivate a career vision and stay open to change. If I have any regrets, it is staying too long in some roles.
• Build the skills AI cannot replicate. Judgment, ethics, relationships, and the courage to deliver hard messages will set you apart.
• Don’t obsess over finding new opportunities. They will often find you.
• Do not fear failure. Fear will limit your ambitions.
• Never write “the end” at the conclusion of a chapter. Write “to be continued.”

Some of my chapters were long and rewarding. Others were short because I discovered the role was not, or was no longer, a good fit. I spent 21 years as an internal auditor for the U.S. Army and could have stayed put. My passion was waning, so I left the Pentagon and wrote one of the boldest chapters of my career with the U.S. Postal Service. Only three years later, I turned the page again and became Inspector General (CAE) of America’s largest public utility, the Tennessee Valley Authority.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.”

When I started my career, I never imagined how it would progress. Today, nobody can predict how AI will reshape our profession over the next decade. That uncertainty is the reason to take control now. Let AI help you write your résumé, and make sure you write your own story.

I invite you to share your perspectives.