How CPAs can start implementing AI before tax season

The AI discovery process provides a framework for CPAs to figure out how best to utilize AI and ultimately save time, money and maybe a little sanity.

By Rick Meyer, CPA, MBA, MST

If I read one more AI article, I’m going to pull what’s left of my hair out!

Seriously, I’m tired of the theoretical jargon, the words like “AI pilot” and “digital transformation.” I’m exhausted reading abstract articles about the potential of AI to revolutionize my business, followed by no practical steps of what to do now. Useless! Stop all this gobbledygook!

I am just a practical, old time, semi-retired non-tech savvy CPA who struggles to even use a TV remote control. Don’t waste my time with theory. Just give me answers to a few basic questions:

1. What specific, practical tasks can AI do today to make a CPA’s life easier?
2. What specific, practical steps can a CPA take to use AI for 2025 tax season preparation?
3. What dollars will this save me?

Last year, with my frustration and passive aggressive nature in hand, I marched into Chris Stephenson’s office (our director of intelligent automation) and aired my AI grievances. He explained the process for answering each of my three questions above. It’s called “AI discovery,” and he’s done it for businesses in every industry, including hundreds of CPA firms in single sitting. Here’s the story.

What is AI discovery?

Last year, Chris put together a think tank session with 200 top CPA firms nationwide to gather feedback on how AI might help their practices. The No. 1 thing he heard? “I don’t know where to start.” 

CPAs understand there is incredible potential with AI, but they don’t know what to do with it, where they should put it, what it does best, how to scale it across a practice, and how to get it to do what they need.

Chris explained how an AI discovery session can help reveal those answers. During AI discovery, organizations identify where AI actually makes the most sense for them and how they can get started. This is the practical first step every firm can start to do right now. Here is what the process roughly looks like. 

1. Ideation session: During this workshop, leaders and staff present their problems and ideas for possible AI solutions. Everyone on the team probably has ideas on how to use AI; the trick is getting them all out in the open and figuring out what will have the most value.
2. Scoring: So, you got a bunch of ideas. Now what? This is where scoring is critical. Discovery often hinges on scoring each idea based on objective measures to determine their priority. Every firm is different, but you want to score on several dimensions such as which can get solved the fastest, which will have the biggest impact, which can scale for every department, etc. These rankings will demonstrate what has the highest value and where you should begin. 
3. Technology infrastructure assessment: Ok, now you may know which AI projects are going to have an impact on your business — but is your system even ready for AI? You’ll need to have your tech infrastructure evaluated to determine its AI readiness, and to find out if there are any shortcomings preventing you from getting started.
4. Roadmap: Finally, you need a clear roadmap to lay out how you’re going to deploy each solution. Do you need to buy a solution? Build an AI? How about training employees? How do you measure if your solution is having an impact? A roadmap should lay out all of that for you.

At Chris’s think tank, after he had run through an ideation session that generated nearly 500 ideas, his team ran a scoring algorithm and identified five problems that AI could help nearly every firm with:

1. Collecting payments from clients.
2. Requesting and processing documents from clients.
3. Moving trial balances to workpapers.
4. Responding to IRS letters.
5. Online chat to handle internal queries, like HR questions.

With this information, AI solutions can be created to address each of these problems.

Note that although these were the most identified issues with this group of 200 CPAs, every firm is different. Not every firm needs one of these five solutions. CPA firms may have their own unique problems they’d love to get fixed with an AI solution. So don’t just jump to buy a package of AI add-ons from a local vendor to solve issues that may not even exist in your firm. Instead, do your own AI discovery to identify your firm’s biggest pain points and develop a plan to attack with AI. 

This same process could work with CPAs in corporate finance teams as well, who may want to enlist AI solutions to solve their own different set of problems.

How much could CPAs save?

At this time in Chris’s story, the dollar signs started flashing in my head.

I thought about CPAs’ increasing bottom line profits. I thought about all the time I used to spend with the client billing analysis Excel spreadsheets to analyze my time, project by project, to justify hours and bills, and put that into a client letter. I thought about all those routine IRS notice letters I had to write to explain why my client’s 1099-DIV did not match the tax return Schedule B. I thought about some other mundane tasks I used to do in public practice that bored me.

You may now ask yourself how much CPAs could save if AI were to do some specific tasks.
Early statistics show firms that adopt AI are earning 40% more per professional. Another statistic reveals companies that are AI leaders outperform competitors by six times compared to those not implementing AI. Firms that employ the document request tool and the trial balance to workpaper tool are seeing up to a 25% reduction in time preparing returns.

So, would life had been better as a CPA 45 years ago when I started in public practice if AI existed back then? Should I even consider a return to public accounting from my semi-retirement with AI in the picture?

The answer to the first question is an obvious “yes,” and to the second question an even more obvious “no.” But for those still in the game, let’s face it: It’s time to jump on the AI bandwagon to be more profitable, have less stress, have more free time, and have more fun.

Rick Meyer, CPA, MBA, MST is a long-time member of the Illinois CPA Society and has served on various tax committees over the past 45+ years. He is a Director for alliantgroup, a national firm that works with businesses and their CPAs to identify powerful government-sponsored tax credits and incentives, talent solutions, and emerging technologies like Generative AI.