Every conversation about AI in tax practices jumps straight to the risky stuff, like feeding a return into a chatbot, exposing a Social Security number, training a model on client files. That caution is fair, but it also stops firms from touching tools like Claude at all. In reality, there is a long list of genuinely useful work that never requires a shred of client information. Here are five tasks worth handing over this week, each one pulled from the kind of email sitting in a typical inbox right now.
- Draft replies on ordinary back-and-forth threads. A payment deadline slips, and three emails go back and forth confirming which account something posted to, or why a portal will not load. None of that substance needs a client's identifying details to draft a first-pass reply. Paste the thread in, strip names if you want to be extra careful, and ask for a clear, professional response. You edit, you send, and you just skipped the ten minutes it takes to reread everything and find your tone. Bonus: use a connector like Superhuman to send the drafted email right from Claude.
- Turn a call recap into something usable. If your firm records client calls, you already get a transcript nobody rereads. Drop it in, remove names first if that matters to you, and ask for a summary organized by decision, open question, and next step. Fifteen minutes of scrolling becomes a two-minute read you can act on before the next call. Bonus: Ask Claude to update you before your next meeting on what was discussed on the last call to be sure you don’t miss deliverables.
- Draft internal policy language. An employee handbook update, a data retention policy, an engagement letter template, none of that touches an individual client's file. Describe what the policy needs to say, ask for a first draft, and route it to whoever actually approves policy at your firm. You are not asking Claude to decide anything, only to produce the draft you would otherwise write from a blank page. Bonus: Claude co-work can schedule tasks like annual reviews of your internal policies.
- Automate a recurring research scan. If your firm tracks something monthly, award nominations, filing deadline changes, regulatory updates in the states you serve, that is a research task, not a client task. Build the prompt once and run it every month instead of starting over. This is also the kind of task you can schedule so it lands in your inbox on its own.
- Triage inbound messages before you open them. Sorting, not reading. A quick pass that flags which overnight emails mention a deadline, a signature request, or a dollar figure, versus which ones are just check-in messages, can run on subject lines alone, no attachment required. That triage step can save the ten minutes you spend every morning reopening the same three threads to remember what is pending.
The pattern across all five is the same. The task is worth doing, but the input is never a client's personal information. That is the line worth drawing at your firm, not whether to use AI, but which side of that line a given task falls on. Pick one of the five, run it for two weeks, and decide from there whether it earns a permanent spot in your workflow.
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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