Demystifying AI: How artificial intelligence is helping accounting firms make real-world gains

If it feels like AI showed up overnight and immediately started rewriting the rules of how accounting firms work, you’re not imagining it. 

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In the span of a year, generative AI has moved from a curiosity to a daily conversation in tax and accounting. Adoption has accelerated fast. But the technology is evolving even faster, and that has left many firms stuck in the same place: intrigued, experimenting and still unsure where AI will actually drive meaningful value.

That uncertainty is understandable. It’s also fueling a familiar narrative: Is AI going to live up to the hype? The honest answer is that it depends on how you’re measuring success — and whether you’re looking in the right places.

A recent PwC 2026 CEO Survey found that although 30% of businesses have reported increased revenue from AI and 26% have lowered costs with it, 56% of CEOs believe they have neither increased revenue nor decreased costs from AI in the last 12 months.

These results are important for a few reasons. First, they underscore the fact that different businesses are experiencing AI in very different ways. Second, they illustrate the relatively narrow view the business world has applied to AI ROI.

The ROI blind spot

New data from a Thomson Reuters AI in Professional Services Report goes one step further to uncover how tax and accounting, legal, and risk and compliance professionals are assessing the value of their AI investments. 

It finds that just 18% of respondents say their organizations collect metrics around ROI from AI. Of those, the measures tend to be internally focused — cost savings, adoption rates, employee usage — rather than the outcomes that actually differentiate a modern firm: client satisfaction, faster turnaround on high-stakes work, better advisory depth, stronger retention, and more consistent quality.

Increasingly, the data is telling us there is currently a hole in the marketplace when it comes to defining the ROI of AI. For firms that are using AI as a part of their everyday workflows, efficiency gains are significant, and important. But, in addition, tax and accounting professionals are finding that AI is helping them dig deeper, unlock new insights and level-up their game in countless ways that are hard to quantify, but easy to see. Here are a couple of examples I’ve encountered recently that make this real.

1. Scaling the personal touch (without burning out your team). There are acute periods in an accounting firm’s lifecycle when it feels like it is possible to collapse under the weight of success. Growth is great, of course, but sometimes the volume gets amplified so much that it can be hard to keep pace. That was the exact situation Katie Lomness, owner of Lomness CPA, found herself in as she prepared to acquire another firm, and its 600 clients. The challenge was that Lomness had built her successful firm on the back of highly personalized advisory and tax planning services, and the firm she was acquiring had never done advisory work before.

Lomness needed to be able to scale quickly, bringing her firm’s magic formula to a new staff and an entirely new segment of clients without losing that personal touch. She’s managed to drive that transition by leveraging AI to automatically scour client data to surface areas where her firm could find opportunities for savings, feed detailed advisory instructions to junior staffers, and streamline communications across her firm. The result has been a firm-wide, systematized approach to personalized advisory services.

“I think that the ability to show step-by-step how to implement the advisory services is going to help our younger, less experienced staff be able to upskill,” said Lomness.

2. A firm-wide knowledge base. Brittany Lanphier, owner and managing partner of Lanphier LLP, experienced a similar challenge in her attempt to manage firm growth while continuing to deliver the same high-quality advisory services to clients. With most of the firm’s work rooted in manual, experience-driven processes, Lanphier always found it difficult to get junior staffers up to speed.

“A lot of our advisory work has historically lived in the heads of our senior practitioners, making it difficult to delegate, replicate or scale,” Lanphier explained. “There’s only so much we can prioritize and manually analyze as a firm, so the potential with AI to expand the volume of viable strategies we can bring to our clients is really so powerful.”

Lanphier’s firm is currently in the process of implementing a large-scale AI transformation initiative in which the entire company knowledge base is being leveraged to support client strategy identification, delegation of tasks, and guided workflows that put the experience and instincts of the firm’s senior leaders at the fingertips of every team member.

Building better relationships

As I continue to work with firms on AI implementation projects and hear more about their biggest pain points and opportunities, it’s becoming clearer that the true value of AI is much bigger than hours saved or dollars earned. It’s really about giving teams the tools they need to deliver a higher level of service to all clients.

The experiences of Lomness CPA and Lanphier LLP are not unique. Nationwide, firms of every size and type are starting to find that AI is helping them democratize their expertise. They are able to deliver the level of white-glove service they would provide to their biggest clients to all clients and train the next generation of CPAs and advisors along the way.

While this is a harder value proposition to quantify than simple balance sheet metrics will show, over time, the impact of AI on these kinds of systematic process improvements will be impossible to miss.