Using GenerativeAI to help scale your CAS practice

Imagine you had an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant purpose-built for accountants to help you run your Client Accounting Services (CAS) practice. Imagine this AI assistant could, in a matter of seconds, help you prepare for client meetings, produce charts and graphs, write executive summaries and action points for your client reports, help research benchmarking metrics, write engagement letters, help generate client forecasts, look for duplicate transactions, or even suggest business plans for your clients. 

Would this kind of AI be useful in the future? You’ll be pleased to know this is already possible!

We’ve all heard how GenerativeAI (GenAI) is going to impact all kinds of businesses. Understanding GenAI and using it in the right way is going to help you scale advisory to your clients in ways that previously were never possible. The profession is on an exciting journey—and it will be powered by AI.

Even though GenAI is a new and emerging technology, it is great at creating content. CAS firms are using AI to:

• Generate words around data or trends for clients in seconds.
• Changing the tone by turning formal accounting language into something clients will understand—really personalizing delivery to clients.
• Looking for data anomalies in large data sets.
• Summarizing long documents.
• Drafting client communications.

And there is a lot more to come ….

As you think about scaling your advisory services with generative AI, it’s also useful to understand the financial opportunity behind that growth. Use our CAS Revenue Calculator to estimate how much revenue your firm could generate by expanding advisory services.

Before we dive deeper into what GenAI is going to do specifically for CAS in other articles, there are five areas to consider as you prepare to use this new and quickly evolving tech.

1. Your role will change

AI may not take your job. But it will change it.

When used in the right way, GenAI is great at preventing writer's block. It will mean you don’t have to start from scratch when writing executive summaries for all of your clients. It will be good at suggesting words that you can use to help explain technical accounting language in a way that clients can understand, and will change your role from “doer to reviewer.”

Let AI provide a first draft—and you can take it from there. This is a huge timesaver, and lets you review and fine tune the content, rather than write all of it.

2. Hallucinations: Don’t trust it blindly

AI is not perfect. Think of it as an inexperienced intern with access to the internet. It will do its best to answer questions and help you, but sometimes it gets things wrong. And sometimes, because it's so eager to please you, it will even make things up, aka “hallucinations.” I highly recommend not to trust it blindly. If you want AI to help you write the executive summary for your client’s management report—in the same way a junior accountant might provide an initial draft—you should closely review it before sending it to your client.

Still, GenAI is a big timesaver, and can come up with great ideas for you to use. Less doing, more reviewing.

GenAI is getting better with every new upgrade—and the upgrades are coming fast, so embrace it now and use it with caution.

3. Prompt like a pro

Unlike traditional rule-based software, GenAI relies on quality input from you. The input is normally written in the form of a prompt, but don’t make any assumptions when you prompt AI. Assume it knows nothing and provide it with a lot of context. Structure your prompts well and you’ll reap the benefits. You can even ask the AI to help you with your prompts.

Once you find something that works for you, save it for future use.

Remember, it’s AI. The answer won’t be the same every time … just like if you asked a human.

4. Attract new talent to your firm

From my experience, younger candidates coming into the profession all expect to use AI. They’ve been using it in their personal lives and at college; will they want to join a firm that doesn’t embrace this kind of technology?

You have an opportunity to differentiate your firm and attract ambitious candidates by giving them the latest tools. What are your competitors doing?

The firm of the future, where AI helps scale advisory, requires different people to a traditional firm, so use this opportunity to drive change.

5. Privacy and security

Please don’t put client data into any free or public AI product! There are great solutions that will look after you and your client’s data, and have been built with privacy and security from the outset. Select the right tool, and then give GenAI a try.

There are great tools out there that have GenAI built in. Find a way to test them for your firm and get started. It’s easier than you think, but you need to get started soon.

The future is infinite

We are just at the beginning when it comes to using GenAI in our work and personal lives—and trust me when I say this is just the beginning. The future is even more exciting with AI agents and other automations coming our way. Stay tuned.