Artificial intelligence has moved well past the novelty stage for tax professionals. Firms that are building AI into their daily workflows are seeing real gains in speed, accuracy, and capacity, not by replacing judgment, but by freeing up the people who exercise it. Here are ten practical applications worth exploring.
1. Research and analysis. Tools like Blue J, Checkpoint Edge AI, and Bloomberg Tax's AI features are built specifically for tax research and keep your queries within secure, compliant environments. They can surface relevant authority, synthesize positions, and flag conflicts faster than manual research alone.
2. First drafts of client communications. AI is well-suited to drafting routine letters, response templates, and client-facing summaries. You provide the facts and conclusions; AI handles the structure and language. Your team reviews and refines before anything goes out. This can include things like tax memos and planning templates for tax strategies.
3. Meeting preparation. Feed AI a meeting agenda or a prior-year summary stripped of sensitive identifiers and ask it to generate discussion points, follow-up questions, or a checklist of items to cover. This takes minutes instead of an hour. Tools like Fireflies with built-in AI can help source discussion points from prior meetings and prep follow-ups and deliverables for your next agenda.
4. Training and onboarding materials. Creating internal guides, process documentation, and staff training content is one of the highest-return uses of AI in a smaller firm. It scales your institutional knowledge without requiring a dedicated training team. You can even customize to your specific software usage.
5. Workflow and SOP documentation. If your processes live in people's heads, AI can help extract and formalize them. Interview-style prompting, describing what you do step by step, produces usable draft documentation that your team can then refine. Utilize tools like ChatGPT or Claude to turn Loom videos into detailed SOP guides.
6. Proposal and engagement letter drafting. Scope-of-service descriptions, fee summaries, and engagement terms follow predictable structures. AI handles the drafting efficiently, and your team focuses on the tailoring that requires professional judgment and can include price comparisons for your internal analysis.
7. Internal CPE and technical summaries. When legislation changes or new guidance drops, AI can help your team quickly digest lengthy documents and produce plain-language summaries for internal review. This is especially useful during busy legislative periods. Always verify AI summaries against the source before relying on them.
8. Email triage and response drafting. For general correspondence, appointment scheduling, document request follow-ups, and status updates, AI-assisted drafting reduces the cognitive load on staff who are already managing heavy client queues during peak season.
9. Marketing and thought leadership content. Articles, newsletters, social media posts, and client alerts are time-consuming to produce. AI can generate strong first drafts based on topic briefs, which your team then shapes with the firm's voice and technical accuracy.
10. Scheduled workflow automation. Tools like Claude Cowork can connect your firm's existing platforms, including your project management system, calendar, meeting transcripts, and email, and run automated routines on a schedule. A morning brief that pulls open tasks from a CRM, flags unread client emails, and summarizes yesterday's meetings can be built once and run every day without staff involvement. This kind of ambient automation compounds over time, turning what used to be twenty minutes of daily overhead into zero.
A word of caution that applies across all of these uses: never upload client tax data, Social Security numbers, financial statements, or any personally identifiable information into a general-purpose AI tool unless your firm has a business associate agreement or equivalent data protection arrangement with that provider. The efficiency gains available from AI do not require compromising client confidentiality. Work at the structural and language level, with anonymized examples, templates, and internal content, and the benefits are both meaningful and compliant with your professional obligations under IRC Section 7216 and your broader duty of confidentiality.
The firms that will benefit most from AI are not necessarily the largest. They are the ones that are deliberate about where AI belongs in their workflow and disciplined about where it does not. Also ensure your practice has updated your WISP documentation and had it re-signed by all internal team members documenting the understood acceptable and unacceptable uses of AI within your practice.
Dr. Christine Gervais is a licensed CPA, using her skills to help businesses grow and achieve their fullest potential. Christine has a Master’s degree in accounting from Southern New Hampshire University in addition to holding her CPA license for over a decade. Notably, Christine is a nationally recognized speaker providing education to other CPAs on how to best serve clients as well as instruction on a wide variety of topics for business owners on how to maximize success. Christine prides herself on the value she can bring to clients with her extensive tax knowledge and provides strategic, forward-thinking financial strategies to help clients grow. When not behind her desk, you can find Christine spending quality time with her daughter and stepson or tending to the family’s excessively loved farm animals.
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