While many accountants eschew artificial intelligence (AI), others are using the technology in several different ways, Accounting Today reported, citing the experiences of six firms.

PKF O'Connor Davies uses AI for data preparation, said technology advisory practice leader Suma Chandar. "We are trying to come up with ... use cases that can potentially go cross-functional, where doing one or two things can bring in almost 30-40 percent efficiency in their day, whether that be tax or audit or ESG," she said.

Armanino LLP employs the technology for a number of uses: cash flow analysis, SOC [System and Organization Controls] 2 audit preparation, bespoke digital "workers," and answering internal staff queries.

“We're seeing a lot of traction there on a client basis," said Carmel Wynkoop, the partner-in-charge of AI, analytics and automation, about the cash flow analysis aspect.

“Audit Ally is our SOC 2 platform [that] we created in-house, and within the tool itself we're leveraging Anthropic's Claude [family of large language models] to help auditors fill out the information they need," she added.

The technology also allowed for the creation of “a digital worker that interacts with these web-based systems and does all the consolidation and reconciliation and provides a full audit trail and then sends it for approval," Wynkoop said. The digital worker “goes into 100-plus investment statements, pulls information on a monthly and quarterly basis, … creates a journal entry, points out the anomalies and routes it for approval,” said Wynkoop. “They save about 500 hours a year utilizing the RPA [robotic process automation]."

GWCPA finds the technology useful for financial statement analysis, generating content with consistent tone, exploring hypotheticals and finding forgotten information, said managing partner Samantha Bowling. "We take a client's financial statement, export it to a PDF, take all the client information out, … and we upload it and ask, 'If you were going to analyze this, what would be the key factors you'd alert the client to quickly?' Within seconds, it does it," she said.

Answering staff questions and extracting information are the two main uses of AI at CliftonLarsonAllen LLP, said James Watson, the firm’s managing principal of service.

“Fifty percent of someone's full-time equivalent was going through these sometimes very lengthy reports and extracting the same information across all of them,” he told Accounting Today. “What we did was say, 'We can create a process by taking the information and having the pipeline run where those questions are asked to the AI models involved, and they will go through and provide answers and try to cite themselves in the process to, hopefully, shave off hundreds of hundreds of hours per year."

Sergio de la Fe, digital enterprise leader at RSM US, told Accounting Today that the firm uses AI to prepare tax position papers. "Our clients get very complex very fast," he said. "You need to take into consideration legal precedents, the tax law itself, maybe [other] position memos we've taken and bring all that together with their facts and findings and write a position paper on this specific position. We've been able to create and leverage language models with generative AI to help us write those memos because it accesses all of our databases and information and is able to help us generate a response. So not just research, it's leveraging the actual end product in how those position documents are written."

The firm also uses the technology for automating compliance and as a “resource of resources.” For example, he said, "I can ask it, 'Tell me what automation tool I can use to do a sample selection.' You chat with it, and it gives you the tool you can use for sample selection for your audit client."

MBS Accountancy Corporation enhances client communication with AI, marketing manager Adolfo Marquez told Accounting Today. "We've used it in lead follow-ups to check out tone and to keep a consistent professional voice and help those whose grammar might not be their strongest point. Also, to make standardized email templates," he said.

The firm also uses it for search engine optimization. Marquez said, “We also use it a lot with SEO to rephrase and automate landing page creation, adding some specific POV as a firm."