Name: AI in Tax & Accounting: Boosting Productivity and Client Relationships
Uploaded: 2025-07-14T20:17:52.537Z
Duration: 1 h 32 s
Description: AI in Tax & Accounting: Boosting Productivity and Client Relationships

Transcript for "AI in Tax & Accounting: Boosting Productivity and Client Relationships": Alright. So pleasure to join you all and host today. My name is Langley Barth. I'll be emceeing our discussion on AI in tax accounting, boosting productivity and client relationships. So first, little bit about my background. I was a name law officer for six years, and I've worked at Intuit for the last four as a product marketing manager on ProConnect tax. Now let me hand it over to Randy. Hey. My name is Randy Hughes, and I'm the, founder of Counting Pennies LLC and, been there. We've been doing this for over twenty years now. I also cofounded Seven Figure Profits, about two years ago along with my wife, and happy to be encountered a privilege to be a part of this, this live discussion on AI today. I'll turn it over to Nick. Hey, everyone. My name is Nick Boscia. I'm also known as the Balance CPA. I joined my family owned accounting firm in 2013, but it was founded in 1975. So a big part of what I like to speak about is how I love learning and how I could help other firm owners improve their firms through technology. And, obviously, in the session, we talk about AI, which I'm really excited about. Also, an Intuit tax council member alongside with Randy, and I love traveling. So the last point about me is I've been a Lucerte user since 02/2013, but I've also been using Lucerte for our firm has been using Lucerte since the very beginning. Alright. So for today's panel discussion, we're gonna go into a lot of things. So what's the hype all about? How Nick and Randy are really leveraging some of these AI pieces every day in their firms? And then what did they learn along the way and where to start. So before we do, let me start with the story. So the topic is really exciting for me. I use a ton of AI in my work and personal life, and a huge part of my job is talking to hundreds of accountants like yourself each year to learn about your business needs. So two months ago, I attended an in person event for accountants, and I had two key takeaways. One, that about half the attendees that came to talk to us at our booth asked about AI. The other, that about one third of the 30 breakout sessions were on AI and accounting. So I'm a curious guy. I wanna attend the session, so I attend all 10 of them. As I'm in these sessions, they all seem to meet this precise formula. They would start the same way to create a sense of urgency and fear saying, hey. AI is here. You need to be using it for accounting. We'll help you do that today. Okay. Sounds good. Then they would move on to saying, if you don't start using AI ASAP, your firm will suffer, which led me to think, gotta love some casual fear mongering and accounting presentation. And then lastly, right when it would come time to show you the practical use cases, they would kinda flip the script and just start talking about how their software will help solve your firm's problems. So that wasn't exactly what I was hoping for for most of those sessions. What we're gonna hope to do today is to focus on practical use cases that you can then research and determine which one's right for you. So this will not be a one time event. Next month, we're gonna have a virtual conference on August 20. It's gonna expand upon the practical education and knowledge for accountants regarding AI. We'll talk about how to get started, what tools to use, and even how to level up your craft. So mark your calendars. We hope you can attend that event as well, and we'll share the link to register for the event. Now a few housekeeping items before we get started. So first off, use your computer speakers here. The platform that you're gonna find that works best is Chrome and Safari. If you're having any trouble with some of the polls or surveys, try doing it in incognito mode. At the end of the session, if you could help us understand if this was valuable by participating in the survey, that's super helpful so we can make sure we have the most relevant and engaging content possible in the future. You can find a PDF of these slides in the handouts area that you can download, and you can use this exact same link that you used today to come back to listen to this session again. Now for polls, we will have one polling question in this webinar, and it'll happen pretty shortly. When we launch the poll, you'll see two ways you can answer. One, there's a tab that appears next to chat on the right side of your control panel. The other the poll will also take over your screen while we have the poll open. So you can select your answer using the little radio button. If you're having any problems, if you have the window open to full view, you may need to use the escape button to reduce that window size and see the control panel. And if you don't see the polls tab, it's polls tab, it's possible you have a little bit lower bandwidth, and it could be delayed. You might just wanna refresh. Standard disclaimer here, just letting you know this is not tax advice. And because it might be the reason for the season for some of you, CPE and CE credit. So the course is worth one CPE. You have to be present for fifty, five zero minutes, and answer the poll question to qualify. Your CPE will be sent to the email address you used to register for the event shortly after the webinar is over. And if you have any problems at all, feel free to shoot us an email at [email protected]. So speaking of CPE, let's start things out with a poll. So this poll question will be up for about thirty to sixty seconds. Where are you currently on your AI journey within your accounting or tax firm? See if people are starting to fill it out here. Yeah. It's a it's a very interesting topic. When I was talking to a lot of people in person at this conference recently, there are many different angles, but I think everyone is at a point of, a little bit aspirational. You know? So let's give it another twenty seconds or so, and then we'll dive deep into our conversation. Randy, where would you say you are if I gave you a scale one to 10? You know, for me, I would probably say I'm about at a seven or an eight. I've really taken you know, really tried to embrace it over the last few years, and, man, I it's incredible. How about you, Nick? Yeah. I think I'm about where Randy's at. We were talking at Intuit Tax Council. It's at how we use AI in our firm. And there's always more to learn, and it keeps evolving. So that's why I don't think anyone could give themselves a 10 unless if you're doing this full time. But, yeah, that's where I put myself. Yeah. I joke around that it's normally a red flag. If someone says a nine or a 10, it's they're very likely not a nine or a 10. Okay. So let's kick things off. So with that today, we're incredibly fortunate to have two pioneering leaders leaders with us. We have Randy and Nick. We're not just discussing AI. These guys are actively leveraging it within their practice to drive efficiency, enhance client services, unlock new growth opportunities. So for the rest of the session, we're just gonna try to have a useful conversation. Feel free to, ask as many questions that come up, and we'll get to as many as we can towards the end of this session. So, Randy, let's start with you. For the beginning of your journey with AI, do you recall a moment where AI shifted from just a buzzword you were seeing on the Internet to something you felt like you needed to engage with on a personal or professional level? Absolutely. Yeah. You know, I I've been hearing about just like everybody else, you know, hearing about it. Oh, that sounds cool. That sounds nice. But I think, honestly, for me, you know, when you've been doing something and you've had some success doing it a certain way, you're wondering, is this thing that I'm hearing, you know, is this just the next the next shiny light? You know? Or is there really something to this? And when you're not sure, at least I'll speak for myself when I wasn't sure. I was like, well, you know, things are going pretty good the way they are. You know? Why break? Why try to fix what isn't broken? But I think the the the the change came from me when, actually, my wife was using it for things that she does in her, you know, in in in her work. And I saw an opportunity to for it to help me with something that I was you know, had questions about, and then I moved it over and asked a question through AI on something that was counting in tax related and was blown away at the thoroughness of the answer that I got back. And so for me, that's how my journey started because once I had one win to one question, well, then I had, well, what about this question? What about that question? And then it was kinda one of those nights. And for those of you that are are are video game people, you'll understand this. I'll never forget the first night I got my first Nintendo, and my brother and I, we stayed up all night. And, you know, we played, you know, Super Mario Brothers because it was that in Duck Hunt, right, that came with the Nintendo. And we stayed up all night because we were so excited. It was kinda like one of those Nintendo moments for me once I realized the power of what I finally allowed myself to get familiar with. That hit home on a number of fronts. One, if I had a dollar for every time my wife helped me with a particular work idea that then launched something else, I'd be a rich man. The other I remember those Nintendo launches real well. Nick, did you have any particular light bulb moment for you that really sets you down on this path? Yeah. Definitely that I can remember. And, like, what you mentioned when you went to a what you went somewhere and three quarters of the sessions are about AI. I felt the same way. I felt like everyone's talking about AI. At the time, I don't really know what it's all about, and I'm thinking it's just for tech people. But I actually went to an accounting conference, and a friend was giving a presentation. So I wanted to join our session, and she was talking about how she actually applying it in her firm. And she was talking about how she helped her build her presentation and just, like, showing me actually explaining use cases that could be valuable to me and my firm. And it's funny. She actually started the session. This is the light bulb moment for me where I'm like, I need to get on this because I wouldn't consider myself, like, an early adopter of technology. Like, I'm gonna wait till everyone's like, alright. This thing's really good, and then I'm gonna go learn it. And it was at the point because if I'm I'm ballparking these numbers, but, like, Instagram took two and a half years to get a 100,000,000 users, and ChatGBT took two months to get a 100,000,000 users. So when she started that the session with that, I'm like, oh, wow. I'm like, I'm already behind. And this thing is now for x number of months at the time. So I'm like, I really need to start learning it and seeing how people are actually applying it to them, and it wasn't just for tech forward people. But that that's basically how it started for me. Yeah. I think sometimes you just gotta watch the evidence. And when you see something crazy eye popping like that, go for it. So, Nick, let's dig a little bit deeper. What was, like, a first use case? As you start to see, wow, this is something that's happening, I need to get on board. What was the first use case in, like, the the tax and accounting world that you said, hey. Let's take it for a test drive or try something out? So definitely. And I feel like I get this across the board because I love talking about AI. So, like, when I'm hanging out with friends or colleagues, I like talking about how are you using AI. And I feel like almost everyone's like, oh, well, I just started using emails. So answering emails is really powerful, and it's really powerful. Like, a good example that I I first started is, like, I don't know if anyone out there ever deals with a difficult client or someone who rubs in the wrong way or talks rude, and you get emotionally charged, and you might not draft the picture perfect email. So I how I first used it was that type of client was difficult and maybe a little bit frustrating. I would type the email I wanted to say that might let's just say wasn't the most professional email. And I'm like, you know what? Chat GPT, can you rephrase this in a kind professional way? But getting the point across that you haven't paid us in three months or you haven't given us your documents and make it sound very professional. And when I've used it for the first time like that, I was like, this is an awesome use case, taking the emotion out of business and being clear into the point. And then, like, once I had that one taste, I'm like, wait. This is cool. Then it launched me into, like, all the stuff I do today. Yeah. I have certainly taken that path of giving a specific prompt for an email. Please make this less passive aggressive. But, Randy, I know that you were kinda teasing earlier that you were playing around for one of the first times and really impressed by some of the feedback. So what were some of those early use cases for you where you started to see maybe the light at the end of the tunnel? You know, actually, I went to something very similar to what we're doing now, and I watched somebody. This was going back probably this is probably during COVID, going back, you know, when all of us were were were looking at a lot of webinars and stuff because we were trying to figure out how to use our time. And I watched somebody go into, QuickBooks QuickBooks online to the sample, business that they have there for, you know, us as accountants to work on. And they copied and pasted the books into ChatGPT and then prompted ChatGPT to do a financial analysis on the books and watched them do it. And I was blown away something that, you know, for us accountants, yeah, we can do that. It's gonna take some time, but we can do it. We're gonna analyze it. But a couple of strokes of the, of of of the mouse and the button, and it was done almost instantaneously, I was blown away. So then I said, well, you know what? Let me go and try that with some of, you know, some of my clients without, you know and, of course, disclaimer, of course, you have to make sure that you are careful with security and you're not putting your client's information out there. That's very important, and I think we'll talk about that a little later. But just taking the data itself and putting it in there and looking at the feedback, the the anomalies that it was finding, getting instant KPI, I was just absolutely blown away. And so when I saw the power that it had, then I started incorporating that in our workflows for all of our clients to have. And quite frankly, we look like rock stars now because there's things we're able to get done, and we're able to highlight things in a very, very clear way, but it's not taking the kind of time that it would have taken even five years ago. Yeah. That certainly hits home. I know, some of the people listening in today are interested in, hey, what are some of these practical use cases? So let's get to that earlier. Nick, if I had to start with you, what are some of the different things that you're doing that maybe started off as a trial and now is just standard protocol for the firm, given some different AI use cases? So as I started with replying to emails, I think, is really powerful just because the amount of times I mean, me and my team are responding to emails, it's you know, it takes up a lot of our firm's time and especially when a client has a laundry list of questions. So I think all of us have a client who, you know, barely asked the question, and we all have a client who asked a 100 questions, explain this line to me, explain that to me. I was thinking about becoming an s corp, and they go with a list, 10 bullet pointed questions. So that's when I started from that that intro email to just make it sound nicer to start really seeing it. It it could save me massive amounts of time. So I have a client with a 12 bullet point list of of questions about their their taxes or whatever situation they have going on. And I would take that and put that into a ChatGPT thread. And always I'm sure if you haven't heard of a prompting, prompting is essentially telling ChatGPT what you wanted to do. So I would say, hey, Chat GPT. I want to make sure you're helping me draft this email for my tax and bookkeeping firm to help my clients and save me time. So once I preface that, then I could put that email right in, and it's it does an unbelievable job spitting out of, like, as long or concise email as you want. You could say give me a bullet point answer or elaborate. Some of our clients want the nitty gritty of why they should be an s corp or not be an s corp. And I think that's where it can be really powerful. And for people out there who aren't using it at an advanced level, the best thing to do is just start with the basics. Just put the email and see what it spits out. Like Randy said, don't put the client's personal information. But a lot of the questions we get are questions we get all the time. So, like, an example is clients are always asking, especially with, like, the gig economy workers. Everyone's asked a home office deduction, and we all know how to answer that question. But every time I was typing up that email or I would save a pre templated email, I'd have to go find it and copy and paste it. I don't have to do that anymore. The I just drop that email in, explain to this client, do they qualify for home office? And then I'll go through the fact pattern and give them a really clear email. But also another disclaimer, always read the emails. Because some people are like, oh, I don't trust AI yet, which I felt the exact same way. I still, to this day, I've been using it for years. I'm always reading through the full email, making sure that everything's accurate before I click send, obviously. But it but all that that 12 bullet point question, that's where you're saving a ton of time because it does a fairly good job clearly and actively answering all the questions. And the clients are always responding back to me like, oh my god. Thank you for such a thorough email. So, that's just a tip for me. Yeah. I think you hit on kinda two huge pieces there. One, if I looked at the ethos for your answer, it's really scaling your personalized touch to a larger audience, which I talked to many firm owners, and they say, oh, I'm just buried in emails for this time. And, like, anytime you see that manual work and think, I can do that. Like, I I might be able to get past automating some amount of that kinda key. Now for the rest of the audience here, I just wanted to break down on one other topic. So he mentioned prompting. So prompting is everything with AI. And much like swimming, you're not gonna become a better swimmer by running. Prompting, you're going to get better at prompting through practice, and that's really just giving better guidance to the AI as you're going through it. It's gonna learn from you. You're gonna learn a little bit about it as well. And you even touched on my other favorite piece. I say that working with AI is a mix of prompting and being a goalie. You just gotta be ready that whatever's coming back at you, it's gonna vary. Sometimes half of it's gonna be great. Sometimes 95% of it's gonna be great. Sometimes it's all perfect and you're ready to send it off. But you have to be going through with a fine tooth comb and just making sure to catch those one or two things that maybe aren't in your voice or maybe aren't even accurate. So, Randy, if I was to ask the same thing of you, what are some of those things in your firm that you think could be helpful to some of the audience today to research a little further? You know, two ways that we've used it. We've been using it a lot in our firm in across a variety of spectrums, but two ways that I'd like to highlight is, how we do our copy. So for our marketing purposes and the messaging that we do through our firm because in our firms, we do quite a bit of marketing, and messaging because we also come from an educational standpoint where we're trying to get information out not only to business owners, but also to other accountants. And so our AI has been able to learn how we approach business. So the values that we have as a core business, it has that information, but then it also has the ability to go out and identify who our ideal client is based on information that we provided. We say, hey. We're looking for this criteria and this criteria and this criteria. It can identify who the ideal client is, and then it has the ability to then go out and identify individuals or post public forums, of course, where individuals where that ideal client is making certain comments or voicing certain struggles, challenges that they're having. And it's able to bring that information in, and then it helps us with our messaging. So now when we have a presentation, when we do a sound bite, when we're sending out an email, when we're doing a post, we're able to speak in the language of our ideal audience because AI has learned that ideal client, knows what their struggles are because it has gone out there and it has pulled it in, and it has helped us to really, really refine our copy in that way. But another way that might resonate even more with some of the accountants and business owners on the, call today is using AI to capture meeting notes. So many of us are familiar with meeting notes. If you're using like, if you're talking individuals on, on video, which is what we do in our firm, We do a lot of video meetings, video conferencing. And so we use Fathom. Fathom is a note taker. I know some individuals use Zoom note taker as well. But Fathom is the one that we use, and that's not to be confused with Fathom HQ, which is actually a KPI accounting software. But Fathom notetaker where it comes in, it's a it it's almost like another participant sitting in the meeting, and it listens to the conversation. So the person that you have coming in, whether it's a client or a potential client, they have to give their permission. They know that it's there. They're not caught off guard. Now we're having a conversation, but it's capturing everything that's being that's being talked about. But then because it's an AI based program, it can identify when the individual got excited, what they were talking about, the struggles that they mentioned. And all of these things, we then use to build proposals if it's a potential client. We send a copy of the meeting notes to clients after the meeting. We're able to go back and take a look at the language that they use, and we're able to use that language back with them. So it helps us to feel like and to present like being very engaged, which we are engaged, but it helps us to be better engaged because now we're able to use language that they're using, and it's just been an absolute game changer. And for that matter, the people that we're meeting with, they like having a copy of the meeting notes as well so that they don't have to try to take notes during the meeting as well. So it's those are two ways we've been using it. Yeah. And one thing I kinda like to bring up when I see potentially a discrepancy between tech stack or how you go about things is seeing and really showing that there's a lot of different tools that you can use for whatever your use case might be. So, Nick, for some of your meetings with early clients, you use a different tool. Am I right? Yep. So I've been using otter.ai. I see a bunch of people in the chat are familiar with otter.ai. And like Randy said, like, I think all these tools are great. It's more of the concept of using a tool to add more value to the client. Because once I implemented it and recorded the meeting, obviously, you need your client's permission, but it's clear that the client sees the the note taker in that video call and everything gets recorded. But the best part about it is, like, I have a prompt, and the prompt is just a copy paste. And it basically says, summarize the key points. Make I I like saying, what are the client's action items? What are my action items? So now it so I just copy and paste that. So it just summarizes that email. I don't even send them the transcript. I'm they never asked for it, but if they wanted to, I could give them access. But I try to make it as simple for my clients as as possible. And it's fun even today. I had a I had a client meeting, and it was really powerful to go through. He was asking me some complex trust questions, and I'm giving him my best answers, like, off the on the fly. But I'm like, hey. I'm gonna make sure I research that point just to make sure that what I'm giving you is accurate. So then it automatically gives me that follow-up saying, hey, Nick. You were gonna look into this discussion point. And then when you couple the otter.ai with ChatGBT, I pull that data, pull that conversation in, and be like, hey. Could you just double check and search the web to make sure what I said is accurate? So now that instantly is giving me that answer, and there was essentially no extra time used. So for anyone out there who doesn't know absolutely everything, it's a really powerful tool. Yeah. And I feel like you guys are hitting on some key points. The two quick things coming out of there. One, for any given AI use case, do your research. You know? Run on your community. It's the same thing for looking at any other type of software. Like, you're gonna find a lot of different resources or softwares, and try them out. That's the best way to figure out what the best, potential use case is for you. Other than that, let's head forward and ask about a big piece that I've seen some questions come in on the chat is kind of the change management of this. You guys are talking about some of the, like, upfront individual experimentation that you looked into. But outside of that, how did you look to actually kinda scale or standardize some of these processes once you started to see the goodness from them? Nick, you wanna start or you want me to? You can start us off. Alright. So, one of the things that we really enjoyed is once we started seeing how it was saving us time, that really was it was almost like an moment because we got a chance to say, okay. Wait a minute. How can we use this? How can we leverage this to help our entire team? So I'll give you some some examples. One of the ways that we use it is we get a lot of client questions that come in. I think Nick was talking about this earlier, where we have a lot of questions that come in, and a lot of them are the same same same kind. So AI is great for that. One of the ways that I enjoy using it though, which just helped me and then I'll explain how it also has helped my team is, sometimes you get a client with a pretty complex situation and you're trying to figure out how to address that situation. And you're trying to figure out, okay, what is the answer to this? And you're thinking about all of the hours it's gonna take for you to research this. One of the things that we've been able to do is take those questions, put it in AI. It will give us an answer, and then when we take a look at the answer because of our experience as CPAs, as enrolled agents, as tax professionals, we can then go in and tweak the answer given the situation that we're dealing with. And for anybody that's listening who had to study for a CPA exam or had to study for an EA exam, I mean, we had to study for those all that information so that we could pass the tests. But how many of us really remember all of that information when it comes to practical value? One of the things that I love is when I'm dealing with a real life situation, I can prompt it in AI. And if AI spits me back an answer that takes me back to what I learned or what I considered when I was in college, when I was studying for the CPA, when I was studying as an enrolled agent. I recognize that, and then that's where I can focus my time, and it just speeds up the process so much. So when I'm having this experience, my operations team is having the same experience because we do team member surveys. And we have company values that we've programmed into our specific AI because we have specific AIs that know our business in particular. And so what our operations team does is when we get team member surveys in, we can put those surveys into AI. It can take a look at the results of those surveys, compare it to the values of our of our firm, and it can give us a a concise report of how that team member is adding up or measuring up based on the company culture that we've that we've that we've established. So it's saving us so much time and allowing us to be so much more efficient whether we're dealing with something accounting or tax, something with regards to accounting or tax, or whether it's something with regards to operations. It's just saving us so much time and giving us so much more ability to deliver value in a faster way. Yeah. It really just feels like you're calling back the time that otherwise would be used for some of this manual work that you might have done last year and any years before that. I think some people view it in different ways. You know? I think a lot of people on the call potentially have a thought of, like, is this ready to replace me? No. It's not ready to replace you. There are a lot of really helpful tools that are available right now that can it it's like every member of your firm is wearing a jetpack. You know? You're just able to accomplish so much more than you were able to before. Yeah. And the more that you can get that streamlined across your firm, the more it's gonna help. Now, Nick, similar for you from a change management angle, have you potentially run into, any issues when trying to implement broader AI solutions within your firm? So one so when I use and, obviously, primarily, the AI I use is ChatGPT. I see in the chat, like, a lot of people are talking about Claude and Copilot, and they're they're all awesome tools. They all do similar things. I don't have the bandwidth to test them all out. But ChatGPT, I would say, is highly accurate when I'm using it for whatever use cases I have, but it does sometimes make mistakes. One of the a good example I have is I was client was emailing about how to pay their taxes, and it's funny because people are worried about AI replacing us. But clients could easily go Google that, and they still don't. They still like reaching out to us. They wanna hear from us. They don't wanna hear from Google. They don't wanna go or even go to an AI to ask the same question. They want it from their trusted professional. So which makes me not fear AI taking my job, but I do see it as a launch pad to give us add more value to our clients and give them a better experience. But where sometimes it doesn't work out so well is one of them is sometimes it's not the best with math. So I don't know if anyone has ever if you're playing around with with ChatGPT, like, a good use case is a client will give us some taxis or give us a a printed out PDF of all their expenses, but no sum total. So in the past, I would say, hey. Can you send me an excel file so I could just sum total this? And just a little thing, but we serve a lot of clients. So if a 100 of our clients bring in PDF printed out, we can't sum total that. So I'll throw that into chat GPT and say, hey. Can you put this into a CSV format or an Excel format? And because at first, I would say, can you total this for me? And then I've oh, I know other people saying how sometimes it has issues doing math, which is surprising. So I'd ask for the CSV, and I would recalculate myself in Excel, and the numbers are sometimes wrong. So that's just, like, a good warning sign. So, like, I do check its math, which is kinda crazy, but sometimes it makes mistakes there. And then sometimes it does hallucinate, and it makes up things that it thinks is correct. So one time a client when they were asking how to pay their taxes sorry. I got derailed on that at that point. But when the client asked about how to pay their taxes, it I asked it to write the email. Because why am I gonna write the whole email saying you could pay it electronically, you could mail a check, you could do so Chatuby writes the email, but in the email, it was like, oh, if you mail a check, you have to make sure it gets to the IRS by April 15, which I know is incorrect. So just, like, little things like that, but, like, of the all the uses I have, only those few little things that were incorrect. And I know to, like, keep an eye out for that, but, hopefully, that answers what you were looking for. Yeah. So not getting exactly what you want from a client. You know what I'm saying? Okay. So going into maybe a little bit more focus here, we've had some questions in the chat about examples of AI, like, truly in tax and accounting. So, Randy, I know from a previous discussion, you've mentioned a lot of different things from tax resolution to tax research to tax planning. Can you let us know how you kinda partner with AI to maybe simplify some of those processes or even double check yourself? Absolutely. Yeah. Happy to talk about that. So in our firm, we use, Intuit ProConnect because it connects with into a tax adviser, and that is incredible when it comes to being able to, especially with the monthly accounting clients that we have. The whole process from QBO to ProConnect to tax adviser is just fantastic. At the same time, though, we also deal with clients that we're not dealing with on a monthly basis. So we're not we're not we don't have ownership or we don't have access to their QBO file. Or maybe they're not business owners for that matter. So those individuals come into the firm and now let's, for example, say that they want tax planning. So one of the things that we've done is we have a process, and and this is where where ChatGPT has been incredible because we've been able to go on the back end and we've been able to to to prime our GPT on what we wanted to spit out when we give it certain information. So we what we do in our firm is we have a questionnaire that we've developed when questions that we wanna know that's gonna help us to guide us in the tax planning process. So we have access obviously to the previous returns. We're gonna review that. Then there's gonna be some questions that we're gonna ask them that we wanna know to help us to build a tax plan. Once we have them fill out the questionnaire and I've met with them or one of my other team members has met with them. Now we have a pretty good idea of what they're trying to do, what they're trying to accomplish, how much they're trying to save. So what we'll do is we'll go into and and, again, security protocols, not using names and things of that nature. We'll say, we have a client who's single or married filing joint, who's in this age range, who, has who's in this type of business. Let's say they're if they're a business owner, this type of business, this type of industry, this was their AGI last year. This is what we're looking at. I'd like you to build me a tax plan or provide me with tax strategies that would help this individual to save. And so what our what our GBT does, because we've trained it to do this, is when we go in and put in that prompting information, we have prompted it to come back to tell us the tax strategy, to give us a definition of what that tax strategy is, of where in the IRS publications and sections it can find that information, the estimated tax savings based on some numbers that we have put into that particular profile for that particular, for that particular case, and then action items for how to execute that particular strategy, should the client decide to pull the trigger on that particular strategy. So because we've done the work on the front end, when we go in and just put in that information that we've gained, it will build literally a tax plan with all of that criteria already loaded. Now my responsibility as the CPA and enrolled agent is to now go through that plan, make sure that it's accurate because as Nick mentioned, sometimes there's hallucinations that thinks it's right on this or that. That's where my value comes in. Because I can go in and make sure I can tweak it. If the estimated tax the estimated tax savings seems to be a little off, I can make adjustments to that based on my knowledge and experience. What is the estimated cost to implement this? Because we can go in and tell a tax we can go in and tell somebody, you know, you're gonna save $50,000 in taxes. But if it requires them to pay $35,000 because they gotta put into this IRA and they gotta put into this cash balance plan and they gotta put they need to know that. So again, we've built in all that information, but the the the the AI does all of that work. So now we're doing reviewing. So to give you an idea of how much time this saves us, something that a plan that might have taken us twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours to build previously, we're able to get done in less than two hours because of the power of AI. Okay. That was a gold mine. For anyone that's in attendance, like, it's always fun when we can go super deep for a few minutes during these conversations. So if you're gonna tune back in for any couple minute thread, you might wanna come back in and take notes on that. So we keep having a recurring theme with questions in the chat. People were wanting to know about, like, guardrails or best practices because I think sometimes the elephant in the room is like, I wanna do this, but, like, I don't wanna expose my client's data. So, Nick, do you have any advice for maybe someone that isn't as experienced with AI how to go about a lot of these different tactics in a way that still keeps your clients protected? Yeah. No. Great question. And that was one of the things that hindered me from getting started because I was afraid. I'm like, we can't put our client information in there. And then when I learned about other people using it, I was like, alright. I could just redact all my client's information, make sure you're not putting their business names or socials, obviously. This is the same rules we use around how we work inside our firms. Like, we know we're not emailing a w two, not unencrypted. We're using a secure portal. So when you're using AI, keep in mind what are you putting in there. But I know this is, like, more introductory, but, like, a more, like, a cool feature of if you were willing to pay for the team's plan. They have different plans in chat g b t. And I know a lot of people are saying, I'm not promoting chat g b t. It just happens to be what I use because I don't wanna I don't have the time to learn all the different tools. So I'd rather go deep on on one personally. But ChatGPT actually has a team's plan. And the team's plan, the cool part about it, it's it's s o two type two compliant. So that means it's audited and tested, and all the data stays secure in there, and it actually doesn't go out to train the other models. Or if you're using the free version and you put information like that is actually going out into chat g b t's cloud, whatever, and that's gonna help that's gonna train their models. So it keeps getting better and better, And that's one of the benefits of it is it keeps getting better. But you do have to just be careful. You know, when our team is using it, I'm very clear. Treat when you use ChatGPT or any AI tool, treat it the same way when you're sending an email. You want it to make sure you redact anything that is confidential, and I think that's the best best practices there. Yeah. I think you hit the nail on the head. Randy, did you have anything in particular to add to that one? No. I agree 100%. I mean, so, you know, there's there there's all sometimes, you know, to protect information, we use initials. Instead of the full name, we redact. We do all kinds of things because but I think the key is what, Nick mentioned is, using the Teams version. I mean and again, we're not here promoting any one particular, AI. We're not selling anything here. Right? But this is just what what we use. We're just trying to give ideas of what we use. There are probably other solutions out there that other accountants have used that are that may be able to do the same thing. But whatever whatever system you're using, you wanna make sure that it would it would hold up, you know, under IRS scrutiny if you needed to to defend your use of it. And ChatGPT has that. It has versions of it that are highly encrypted, that are that are are more robust than than maybe simpler versions. And as tax professionals, I I mean, we do that anyway. Right? We should be doing that anyway. So anytime we're gonna be using a tool, we need to make sure that it's safe, and we would do the same thing with the AI tool that we're using. And the good news is is that there are AI tools on the market that are compliant with the type of work that we do. And as long as we're doing our due diligence, we're gonna be alright. Yeah. I wanna I wanna throw one other point that I forgot to mention that I think is the best practice. Because for a long time when I was using ChatDVT, you could go on the web browser because I know some people are asking how to use it. You could go to OpenAI or just Google any any AI tool you wanna use. But and then I would download the app to my phone. And having the two factor authentication, I would highly recommend. Because for a while, I wasn't using it, and I I watch a lot of YouTube and stuff to, like, learn new things. And it is kinda like a like a moment. Like, you you have two factor authentication on all your important apps like your bank account. So I I would encourage you to have two factor authentication just so someone else isn't getting your password and logging into your chat GBT because maybe you have personal information in in one of your threads. Maybe you use it for personal journal entries about your day, your week, your vacation. So you don't want other people having access to that, so that would be my only thing I wanted to add. No. That was a nice addition. And I think to hit on a piece you mentioned earlier, sometimes with, like, new technology adoptions, there's just one piece of friction that is sitting there for you. And sometimes it is exactly like you were saying. Like, I'm not sure how I would engage in a safe way and, like, there's such an inherent I need to protect my clients, you know, that sometimes people are a little bit scared. So let's start with Randy. Randy, so if you were speaking to a firm leader in the audience who's really intrigued, but they're hesitant, What's, like, the one piece of advice you would give them to encourage them to kinda take their first step? First, understand timing. Right? If you're a firm owner well, let's talk about firm ownership. If you own a tax firm, then you know that from May to December, you're in a time of year where you should be improving processes in your sis you know, in your firm. You should be doing continuing education because it's gonna be generally slower during that nine months than it is during hot and heavy tax season. Right? If you're an accounting based firm that's not doing taxes, this is still a great time of year because your busy time of year is going to be end of year when you should be getting ready for budgets, having those types of meetings, then you're gonna be doing year end close, then you gotta close the books in January. The the the the downtime that both firms have is the time of year that we're in right now. So, Lang, to your point, what should the firm owner be thinking about or doing is understanding the timing of where they are in the year. The fact that they've come to this particular presentation indicates that there is an interest, but take the necessary steps over the next few weeks, over the next few months to to to do something, to take some some type of action. It it's okay to learn, but take some type of action. And maybe that action is what speaking to what Nick said earlier. Go to OpenAI and open a free account. Not necessarily for your clients, because we just got done talking about security, but test it out. You gotta start somewhere or whether it's one of the other, whether it was one of the other suggestions that have come up in the chat. But take some type of action and then start playing with it. Let it start doing your emails. Test it on your copy. Get a note taker if you don't have a note taker yet, but do something and use the time of year that we're in right now to help to advance your firm so that you can start benefiting from some of the things that you've been hearing about today. Nick, do you have anything to add for that audience member that is just a little bit hesitant? Yeah. No. I I agree with what Randy said a 100%. And I do agree with the point that the fact that everyone has joined this webinar shows you have interest. So you took the first step because, like, my dad who started our firm, he's 77. He has absolutely no interest in AI. He doesn't wanna get started, which is completely fine, but you're here. So the least you could do is try one of the AI tools. Use it for something personal. Like, the first time I ever used chat GBT was because I went to that accounting conference, and then my my attention was peaked. And then I had a friend tell me he how he used it to help plan his vacation. He's like, oh, I went to Miami. He's like, can you help me plan a three day vacation over this time period? And he's like, it did a really great job because he's like, I don't wanna research thing. I'm like I'm like, well, I love traveling, and I I travel a lot. And the amount of time I spend researching travel, it takes up a lot of my time. So that's where I actually first started using AI was just for personal stuff. Help me do an itinerary if I wanna go to Spain for seven days. What are the top things to do? And then you start realizing how you can make it better and better. I'm like, well, I really enjoy being by the beach. I don't wanna be in the city. And then it and then you learn it. So, like, just take the first step whereas whether if it's travel for you, if you wanna say, I'm in the grocery store and I'm trying to be healthy. Give me the list of the healthiest foods I can look for. And boom. It's just gonna help you and you could keep using that and it gets better and better. So the most important thing is to take the first step. You're already here, so just start with something and you'll start re you'll start figuring out use cases that work for you that are completely different than everyone else. Yeah. I totally get that now. So we are having some interesting questions, and thanks so much for the engagement for everyone that's here. I'm interested to see what you guys think about this one. What does the future hold for CPAs and trained financial professionals? Robert's asking. He says, are you reducing the fees you charge and your clients for the time savings? Are you even reducing your staff at the firms? So, Randy, how do you view this? Let's start on the reducing the fees. Absolutely not, because my fees have nothing to do with how long it takes me to do something. So there's a we talk about value pricing. That's a different presentation. We won't go too deep into that. But what the AI is doing is it's helping us to be able to be a lot more efficient. Does it replace individuals in the office? I'll be honest. It hasn't replaced anybody in my office. What it has done is it's been like an assistant. I heard somebody use the the term earlier like, you know, it's like everybody in the office having on a jetpack. Right? That's a beautiful, perfect illustration for what it is. It's like having a very smart assistant that knows a lot of things. Doesn't replace me. My clients still wanna talk to me, but I can provide a lot more guidance a lot faster as a result of having that. So as far as the future is concerned, I think that it's going to be there. It's gonna help a lot of accounting firms that are interested in taking that step into advisory. It's gonna help those firms to work or to step into advisory a lot faster and a lot more efficiently? Do I think it's going to replace people? No. I don't I personally do not believe that. I don't think you know, just like there's been technology through if we take a look at our history as an accounting firm, there's been technology that's been introduced into the industry for decades, but the accountant is still here. And there's a reason for that, and I don't think this is any different. Yeah. I I am fully with you there, and I think an ethos of how much of this work that is so manual today can we just start to shrink and start to move a little bit higher, you know, and just work a little bit more on that high priority, high value work that you can provide. Nick, did you have anything in particular in regards to that question about the future for CPAs? Yeah. No. I I agree with Randy. I'm not worried at all. If anything, using AI is making me a better accountant and a better firm owner. I'm able to help more clients and be more robust in my responses, more clear in their specific needs using AI to eliminate those low value tasks, like typing up the whole email or having to take physical notes during a meeting. Like, that doesn't didn't that didn't add value to the client. So using AI to just streamline our processes and just give the client a better experience. But it's like we all everyone on this on this call has AI at their disposal whether you're using it or not. Someone's gonna be using it. I wouldn't say I'm like I said in the beginning, I'm a maybe a seven user of AI. And there's people who are 10 out there. Those are the people who almost make me worry because I'm like, I need to learn more and more and more. But as long as you're starting somewhere, we're gonna give our clients a better experience. Yeah. And I just think I I think one of the things I see, and I feel like every accountant I talk to hears the same thing, and clients say the same thing is clients always reach out to me. And they're like like, if I get a new client, they're like, oh my god. You're the best account I ever had. My last account didn't answer his emails. He never got back to me. He never explained things to me. You use the AI and it makes that process almost seamless. And the clients already see you as the best account they ever worked with, so you could actually charge more for that or at least charge the same. Definitely not reducing my fees if I'm giving them a better experience. Just because I'm more efficient wouldn't mean I'm gonna discount what I do. Yeah. Not to get too nerdy, but when you look at, like, social psychology, it says that a human can only maintain, like, a real robust personal relationship with a 150 others. So when you look at clients, that's tough. You're trying to maintain that personal relationship with them, but sometimes it's hard. And I think AI can be really helpful in that regard. With that being said, we're gonna shift to have a, polling question. Just to try to engage the audience here, if you could pull that up. Okay. So this will just be answered in the chat. What AI related topics are you most interested in learning more about? So we'll use a lot of this input just to help us shape some of the future content. Like the story we told you on the front end, we don't wanna be putting out any type of trainings that are not helpful and not what you want. We really wanna understand what's the most important for you and continue to, give you those relevant updates. Because in this space of AI, it's gonna keep changing. You know? So if you're an expert if you're a seven one month, another month goes by and you are out of office, you might be at four. So, I think it's a space that you'll have to have a growth mindset, be realistic with yourself, and continue to try to learn. Okay. So we have a number of really good questions here. Let's try to end strong with some of these. So Anthony from the chat says, how do you implement these technologies with your entry level staff to help train slash educate? Randy, do you wanna start with that one? Yeah. I mean, there's a number of different ways that could be done, but I'm gonna be honest with you. If you're a firm owner, leverage leverage your staff, especially the younger members of your staff. Assign the members of your staff that are tech savvy or maybe that are younger on your team that maybe have the mind to go in and do these types of things, that maybe some of us that are older, maybe a little slower to grasp or or or or to get on board with. Assign your staff to go in and do an AI hey. I want you to go out of there and I want you to research an AI. This is what I'd like to you know, I just went to this conference. I just went to I just saw this live panel, and it says AI can do this, this, and this. I want you to go out, do some research, and find one that can do this for us. Assign it to a team member. Assign it to a team member, and then once they identified one and you pick one, then assign them a task. Have them research it. Have them do a presentation. Let your team get in there and do it as a project for you. And I think that that would be one of the best ways to get them involved because as they're going through that particular project, they're going to be able to identify ways that it can help them while also checking off all the boxes that you provide them with. Because if we get into trying to do it all ourselves as firm owners with all the other things that we have to do, we keep kicking the can down the road, we keep kicking the can, and then the next thing you know, we're up on another tax season and we're not and we haven't gotten anything done. And we still can't get it done because now we're facing tax season. So that would be my suggestion is to get the team members involved. Okay. Now I'm gonna pivot to another question for Nick here given all the high quality questions we have coming in. Barber in the chat said, their concern is how do we ensure our clients come to us instead of going to ChatGPT when they're looking for future guidance? Nick, what do you think about that? Yeah. I it's a great question. But as I mentioned a bit earlier, like, I have no fear of that really because clients how many times do you get a question from a client that they could easily Google? And that that used to be, like, my biggest pet peeve. Clients would send me an email, and it's, like, the the most simple question, what's the standard deduction for 2025? Like and they still don't go to Google even though you know that's gonna be an in a super easy Google search, and they're still coming to me for the question. But but it's a good it's a valid concern because some clients will go to chat g p d, ask the question, and I bet you more often than not, they're still gonna come back. Like, I could tell when clients get their tax return. Maybe they put in chat GBT because they'll ask questions. I'm like, how do they know about section one seventy nine? And they know about all these crazy things that don't apply to their tax situation at all. And I'm like, well, that's isn't relevant, but they still come back to us. So that's just my what I've seen in practice. Like, I'm not I'm we're growing. We're not, like, losing clients to using AI, and they still need us to do the bookkeeping or do the tax or do the advisory. Like, I saw some people in the chat mentioned the doctor. Like, you could Google, hey. I have these symptoms, You still feel more comfortable going to your doctor. Mhmm. Yeah. 100%. I mean and I think it comes down to, is the IRS gonna love if something doesn't go the best? And you say, hey. Well, Chi ChiPT told me. Probably not. You know? That's where you probably want to have a professional. A couple of other hugs that we wanted to get in here before we wrap up and potentially get to one more question. One, as you can see probably on the bottom of the screen, we're gonna have this virtual conference or VCON, August 20 of next month where we're really gonna expand on a lot of these topics. A secondary thing is that I'll be hosting a LinkedIn live come July 23. So take a look, and it'll be in the chat. It's specifically for ProConnect tax and ask me anything session. So if you have some juicy questions, feel free to show up, and we'll do our best to handle them. Okay. So So we got an AI superuser in the chat. Adam is asking, and I'll say either one of you that wants to take this, have you built any agents to have you do applications, to have applications provide tasks for you yet? On our side, we have we're in the preliminary stages of doing that, and that's actually something that my wife, handles. She has a whole AI team that's being built to handle various tasks. We haven't rolled it out 100% yet, but we're in the process of building that for our firms. Sounds like we we might need to connect with your wife offline on some of these, future tech enablements. She kinda has it going on. Telling you, she's a genius, man. She she she knows this stuff inside and out. You guys got the wrong person on you guys got the wrong person on stage, man. You shoulda had her here. Please attend our v con next month with Randy's wife now. But might be a good idea. But, other than that, like, I've had a really great time talking through this stuff with you today. AI is a big part of my work life, and I'm always learning. You know? This is maybe if you're a career accountant or CPA, I think it's sometimes scary to see this big disruptive force come in and say, hey. It's gonna take your job. It's gonna do this. It's gonna do all these different things. It's not always the case. I think these things generally work a lot slower. But in the meantime, the more you can do to learn and model that growth mindset to your firm about different ways to continue to improve exactly what Randy was saying. We are in a little bit more of the downtime for the next few months for tax accountants. This is your time to really dig into those resources, connect with others, attend events, and see how you can make tax season next year a little bit easier and even outside of tax season. Just finding ways to claw back and automate some of that work. Looks like we will be cut off in about thirty seconds. Randy, Nick, it's been a pleasure. Hope I get to chat with you guys more soon. Love being here with you, Lane. Thank you so much. Thanks, Nick. Thank you, everybody. Alright. Take care, guys. Thanks for all the great questions to the audience. And if you ever need to look at anything, just type this URL back in, and you'll be able to look at the recording.