Once you’ve established what makes your firm, it’s important to reflect on what problems you have that are not. While AI can tackle complex issues and help enhance your unique selling points, your firm has problems that require less intentional thought and can be fixed quickly. From experience working with thousands of firms, there are a common set of problems that many need solutions for:
- Cash Collection: Cashflow is the lifeblood of any business, and bills can age quickly. Having a dedicated tool to reminding, collecting, and reporting new income can help your business take on more, and faster.
- Prepared by Client (PBC) document process tools: You and your firm should not waste time cleaning books or transferring data between spreadsheets. PBC document processing tools save you time and allow you to focus on the work you can bill for.
- Trial balance to workpapers: 15-20% of all project time is spent on workpaper generation. Automating your workpapers and having consistent automated data entry will save your team thousands of hours, which they can spend focused on generating new revenue.
- IRS Response tools: Tools which can generate a response in real time are critical time savers for your team. With the volume of inquiries firms receive, it’s imperative to have a resource dedicated to fielding them that does not distract from larger ambitions.
- Conversational AI chatbots: An internal tool focused on helping your team members find documents and the right information as they need it. By centralizing these questions and data, you create a singular source of truth for your organization.
While these may seem like small problems, once the easiest solutions are implemented, it will be much easier to gain traction on your higher impact problems. Many firms have already automated these processes, which catapults them towards further digital innovation.
Creating a mindset which focuses on quick value brings the necessary speed that a brand must have to compete. Most of an organization’s efforts should be directed toward AI projects with short development cycles for quicker learning and adoption. This is not settling for less, rather it creates a hyper focused culture focused on small but impactful improvements in rapid succession.
Conclusion
For CPA firms, integrating AI into their firms is inevitable and immensely valuable. Yet, it is the tailored approach—paced, focused, and pragmatic—that will redefine their success. In the end, effective adoption of AI doesn’t depend on being the first to adopt; it hinges on being the most strategic about when and how to employ these powerful tools. It’s about AI serving the unique needs of the firm, rather than the firm serving the ceaseless cycle of technological advancements.
