A system undergoes adiabatic evolution when its population in the instantaneous eigenbasis of its time-dependent Hamiltonian changes only negligibly. The realization of such dynamics requires slow-enough changes of the parameters of the Hamiltonian, a task that can be hard to achieve near quantum critical points. A powerful alternative is provided by the counterdiabatic modification of the Hamiltonian allowing for an arbitrarily quick implementation of the adiabatic dynamics. Such a counterdiabatic driving protocol has been recently proposed for the quantum Ising model (del Campo et al 2012 Phys. Rev. Lett. 109 115703). We derive an exact closed-form expression for all the coefficients of the counterdiabatic Ising Hamiltonian. We discuss two approximations to the exact counterdiabatic Ising Hamiltonian quantifying their efficiency of the dynamical preparation of the desired ground state. In particular, these studies show how quantum criticality enhances finite-size effects in counterdiabatic dynamics.