Can you guess the craziest thing I’ve done with generative AI so far?
I made a clone of myself.
RyanBot!
It’s trained on everything I know and helps accounting firm owners get answers about pricing, hiring, systems.
Whatever they need, available 24/7.
But more than anything, it has been super helpful to me.
How?
In April 2025, I suffered a concussion.
Normally, that would have meant stepping away from work almost entirely.
(I did have to take fewer calls and slow down a bit.)
But thanks to generative AI, I was still able to do a whole lot of work.
RyanBot helped with supporting members of my coaching program while I recovered.
It gives me back about 30 hours a month — almost a full work week every month.
If generative AI can help me keep Future Firm running with a concussion…
Imagine what it can do for your accounting firm.
Let me show you how.
How Does Generative AI Help Accounting Firms?
AI has made my job harder.
I discussed in my Future Firm newsletter that AI-generated work becomes table stakes:
In other words, the baseline is much easier to hit now.
Which means you need to one-up what’s standard just to stand out.
Yes, the bar is higher now…
But that also means the firms that figure out how to clear it consistently will have a massive advantage.
And the ones that don’t adapt will be left behind.
That’s why I made it mandatory for the Future Firm team to use AI as much as possible.
Because when you use it right, it helps unlock three things every firm owner wants:
Benefit #1: Fewer Working Hours
This is the most obvious benefit, but it’s still worth spelling out.
AI handles the routine stuff that fills your calendar but doesn’t require your expertise:
- Emails that follow the same template
- Reports that need formatting
- Research on common questions you’ve answered a hundred times
- Chasing down information for routine tasks
When you offload that work, you saving time and creating space to focus on what actually grows your firm.
Here’s where that time can go:
| Instead of this… | You could do this… |
| Formatting financial statements | Going on sales calls with prospects |
| Writing routine follow-up emails | Strategic planning to grow revenue |
| Researching basic tax questions | Building systems that scale your firm |
| Administrative task management | Working on the business, not in it |
Want to see what this looks like in practice?
This video shows a real-life example of how generative AI can save time during tax season.
The time AI gives you back is yours to allocate however you need it.
Benefit #2: More Value Delivered to Clients
Here’s what happens when AI takes over the routine work:
You have more time for the stuff clients actually value:
- Strategic guidance.
- Making them feel heard and understood.
- Giving them the peace of mind that comes from working with someone who truly gets their business.
You can then package your offer around these high-value services and charge more.
As an example, check out this comparison (yes, that’s my handwriting):
The offer on the right is 2.67x more expensive.
A lot of firms have to work twice or thrice as many hours to earn that amount of money.
But with AI handling the routine work, you don’t need to.
- Need to prep for a strategy call? AI pulls key insights from their financials in seconds.
- Client emails with a complex question? Use AI to analyze their situation and pressure-test your thinking before you respond.
- Tax planning conversation coming up? AI runs multiple scenarios faster than you can think through them manually.
The work that makes them think, “This is exactly why we hired them.”
It gives you the capacity to consistently deliver what you’ve been promising all along.
Benefit #3: Stronger Positioning
There’s a real advantage to being a pioneer to new technology.
I know this because I have quite the experience as a pioneer in the accounting industry.
Back in 2013, I built Xen Accounting as one of the first fully online accounting firms in North America.
Here’s what that looked like back in 2013:
Hardly anyone was doing cloud accounting then — most firms were still mailing paper files back and forth.
Being early to that shift gave Xen a huge positioning advantage.
We attracted clients who valued the modern approach and were willing to pay for it.
Generative AI offers the same opportunity, just bigger.
Here’s a comparison of a traditional firm vs. one that uses AI to demonstrate:
| Traditional Firm Experience | AI-Enhanced Firm Experience |
| Waiting days for responses | Quick answers to routine questions through AI-powered email templates |
| One-size-fits-all service | Custom GPTs trained on your firm’s knowledge to provide consistent, accurate responses |
| Manual document chaos | AI categorization and smart tagging that keeps everything organized |
| Generic communications | AI-assisted personalized client updates and reports |
The firms that figure out AI will have the same advantage I had with cloud accounting in 2013.
If you stay a traditional firm, you blend in with the 99% still doing things the old way.
But if you make smart use of AI…
You stand out.
Take GrowthLab, for example — they’re one of the firms that made it to our Top 50 Modern Firms of 2025.
Their CEO, Dan Gertrudes, founded STRMS, an AI automation agency that deploys custom automation workflows for their clients.
So instead of just using AI to do bookkeeping faster…
They’re helping clients eliminate manual data movement, automate repetitive tasks, and connect their disconnected systems.
This also made it easier for them to position themselves as an FP&A-first firm that uses AI to deliver operational efficiency their competitors can’t match.
That type of work stands out.
That is also the type of work that clients are willing to pay premium pricing for.
How Can Accounting Firms Use Generative AI?
All of the above sounds great.
But the challenge many firm owners face isn’t understanding why generative AI matters — it’s figuring out where to actually use it.
Here’s what I mean.
Generative AI has a shiny object problem…
Every week there’s a new tool, a new feature, a new promise.
(Truthfully, I think most of it is noise.)
Here are the five uses that actually deliver results for accounting firms.
1. Free Yourself From Low-Value Work
There’s a category of work in every firm that eats up time but doesn’t require your expertise:
- Researching uncategorized transactions
- Reviewing financial statements
- Drafting routine emails
This is grunt work.
Important? Yes.
Worth spending lots of hours? No.
This is exactly the kind of work generative AI handles well.
Here are a few examples:
Transaction Research
Got a transaction labeled “Payment to ABC Corp” with no context?
Instead of spending 10 minutes digging through bank statements and emails, you can:
- Copy the transaction details into ChatGPT
- Ask it to analyze patterns from similar transactions
- Get a suggested category with reasoning in seconds
You still review and approve it, but the research legwork is done.
Jason Staats even created a custom prompt you can copy and paste in this LinkedIn article.
Financial Statement Review
Need to spot anomalies or unusual trends in a client’s financials?
Tools like ChatGPT can analyze P&Ls and balance sheets to flag:
- Month-over-month variances that need explanation
- Unusual expense patterns
- Accounts that don’t match typical industry benchmarks
Again, you’re still doing the analysis, but AI speeds up the initial review.
There are also tools that let you directly interact with an AI inside documents like these, such as AskYourPDF and PDF.ai.
Accounting practice management tools like Karbon even have AI features built directly into them.
For more ways to free yourself from grunt work, you can check out my accounting automation guide.
2. Transform Your Client Experience
Many firm owners assume that generative AI stops at routine tasks and compliance work.
They’re missing the bigger opportunity.
Generative AI can transform how clients experience working with you.
And that’s where the real differentiation happens.
Here’s how generative AI helps with that:
Deliver a Better Client Experience With Videos
Tools like HeyGen let you create personalized welcome videos for new clients.
Instead of a generic “thanks for signing up” email, they get a video with their name, their specific situation addressed, and a clear outline of what happens next.
It takes you less than 10 minutes to record one template.
The AI can personalize it for each client automatically.
Aside from onboarding, videos like these are great for presentations too.
I mentioned earlier that when I had a concussion, I leaned on generative AI (RyanBot).
But I also leaned on HeyGen.
I used it to deliver a presentation — here’s a sample video of what I did with it:
Provide Instant Answers With Custom GPTs and Chatbots
Earlier, I mentioned RyanBot, my AI clone.
I built it using Delphi.
It’s trained on all the Future Firm Accelerate materials, so members can ask it questions anytime and get immediate guidance.
You can do the same for your clients.
Build a custom GPT trained on common tax questions, your firm’s processes, or industry-specific guidance.
Clients get instant answers to routine questions, while your team handles the complex stuff that requires expertise.
There are even tax filing GPTs that can guide clients through the filing process.
3. Amplify Your Marketing
If you’re creating content for your blog, social media, and newsletter, you’re probably spending way too much time coming up with new ideas.
You don’t need new content all the time.
You need the same content adapted for different platforms.
Adapt Long-Form Articles Into LinkedIn Posts
Other accounting firm owners, business owners looking for better service, referral partners — they’re all scrolling LinkedIn daily.
And you might have blog articles, newsletter content, or case studies that are interesting enough for these people to engage with.
But that long-form content doesn’t work well on LinkedIn.
This is where generative AI helps.
Tools like ChatGPT and Claude can rework your content based on what works well on each platform.
Instead of taking forever reformatting content, you can use Claude or ChatGPT to rework your content based on what works.
Let’s say you have one story about a client win.
From there, you can:
- Turn it into a LinkedIn post (conversational, starts with a hook, optimized for LinkedIn’s format)
- Keep it in your newsletter (more detailed, personal)
- Expand it into a blog article (comprehensive, includes examples)
Same core message, three different formats, done in a fraction of the time.
For example, I published a 3,000+ word blog post about how I helped a firm owner double his revenue.
Is it something people would want to read?
Absolutely.
But there is no way someone scrolling on LinkedIn would sit through 3,000 words!
So I repurposed it into a LinkedIn post with hooks and punchy one-liners:
Generative AI lets you do this in 10 minutes.
Turn a Newsletter Into a Podcast
I trained an AI voice clone on ElevenLabs that reads scripts and produces episodes of the Future Firm Podcast.
I write the script, the AI voice reads it, and the episode is ready to publish.
Here’s a podcast episode where my AI voice talks about the story of Remitian (the tax payment tool I mentioned earlier):
Does it sound exactly like me?
No, but it’s close enough that it saves me hours of recording time.
At one point, I even used AI to create a song about accounting burnout…
(It’s here if you really, really want to listen to it!)
If AI can help you stand out and have a little fun with your marketing, use it.
Here’s something you can try:
Take your last blog post or newsletter and paste it into ChatGPT or Claude.
Then, ask it to turn it into 3 LinkedIn posts in your voice.
Review them, adjust the tone, and schedule them.
Just like that, you just got a week’s worth of social content from something you already wrote.
4. Improve Your Sales Process
Sales is where many firm owners get stuck.
Not because they’re bad at it, but because it’s time-consuming and mentally draining.
Here are two ways you can use generative AI to improve your sales processes:
Use Transcripts to Customize Three-Tiered Plans
Generative AI can handle the heavy lifting while you focus on the relationship.
Here’s a workflow you can swipe:
- Record your discovery call with a tool like Fireflies (I use this to record and summarize my Zoom meetings)
- Export the transcript
- Paste it into ChatGPT or Claude
- Ask it to identify the prospect’s pain points, goals, and budget signals
- Have it draft three-tiered pricing options that address their specific concerns
The AI will catch things you might have missed like small comments the prospect made in passing that may give a hint on what they actually care about.
Let’s say a prospect mentions they’re “drowning in receipts” and casually says “I have no idea what my cash flow looks like month to month.”
You paste the transcript into ChatGPT or other AI chatbots for accounting firms and ask it to create three-tiered pricing based on their pain points.
The result should look something like this:
The AI caught their pain points and built a proposal around them.
You get a custom package without replaying the entire call in your head.
Tweak Your Sales Proposals Based on Past Wins and Losses
You’ve closed dozens of deals.
You’ve also lost dozens.
But most firm owners don’t take the time to figure out what worked and what didn’t.
Here’s how AI can help you spot the patterns:
- Gather 5-10 proposals that won and 5-10 that lost
- Paste them into ChatGPT or Claude
- Ask it to identify patterns in:
- Pricing structure (What wins came from specific tiers or payment terms?)
- Messaging (How did you frame the value?)
- Services included (What did winning proposals emphasize?)
- Objections raised (What concerns came up in the lost deals?)
The AI will analyze all of them at once and surface patterns you can’t catch manually.
For example, you might discover:
- Prospects who saw three clear tiers closed 60% more often than those who got a single package
- Deals where you led with “tax strategy” instead of “tax preparation” had higher close rates
- Lost deals consistently mentioned “unclear deliverables” or asked “what exactly am I getting?”
These insights tell you exactly what to adjust.
Maybe you need to make your deliverables more concrete.
Maybe you need to restructure how you present pricing.
Maybe your winning proposals all emphasized a specific pain point you should lead with every time.
Instead of guessing what works, you’re using your actual track record to refine your approach.
That kind of analysis would take you hours (if you ever got around to it at all).
With AI? About 20 minutes.
Make Generative AI Work For Your Firm
You’re probably already using generative AI in some way.
Maybe it’s working great. Maybe you’re not sure if it’s worth the effort yet.
Either way, remember: it’s a tool.
The value comes from using it intentionally on the right problems.
If you’re interested in learning more, I wrote a guide about how accounting firms can use AI in general.
So what’s your experience been?
Which tools or practices have made the biggest difference in your firm?
Did I miss any use cases you’re seeing results with?
Drop a comment below. I’d love to hear what’s working for you. 🙂
