Your Clients Are Already Using AI Against You
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Your client just got their tax return. Before reading it, they fed it into ChatGPT. Now they're calling with a list of "errors."
This is already happening. Mark Koziel of the AICPA described exactly this scenario in a recent On the Air podcast. A small tax firm sends a completed return to a client. The client runs it through an AI tool and calls back with objections. They aren't entirely wrong, but they aren't right either. Their AI is pulling from a general knowledge pool. Your software is working with real-time, accurate data specific to your client's situation. The client can't see the difference, and that is now your problem to manage.
This is the pressure small practices are already feeling. The question is whether you are getting ahead of it or just reacting every time it happens.
The Big Shift: Compliance Is Not Enough Anymore
The AICPA's Rise2040 project surveyed over 6,000 professionals, advisors, and business leaders about where accounting is headed. They used AI to analyse the input, then validated the findings with advisory groups in Dallas and London. The result is one of the clearest pictures yet of what the profession looks like by 2040.
The core finding: compliance work is not disappearing, but it is no longer what defines you. Clients will increasingly expect compliance as a baseline, not a service. What they will pay a premium for is your judgment, your insight, and your ability to connect the numbers to decisions that matter to their business.
As Koziel put it:
“We’re not in the tax business anymore. We’re in the advisory and planning business. Tax is just one of the tools.”
A small firm in Louisiana that Koziel highlighted made this shift already. The practitioner describes himself not as a tax accountant, but as an advisor who uses tax as one part of a broader service. That change in identity, from "I do tax" to "I help clients make better financial decisions," changes what you offer, how you price it, and how clients value you.
This backs up what Why Advisory Services Are the Future of Accounting found: 85% of firms plan to grow their advisory offering in the next two years. The direction is clear. What is less clear for many small practitioners is what that actually looks like day to day.
Human in the Lead, Not in the Loop
One phrase coming out of Rise2040 is worth remembering: "human in the lead." It is a deliberate challenge to the more passive idea of being "human in the loop," where the accountant is just a checkpoint in an automated process.
Human in the lead means you direct the work, decide what questions to ask, and take responsibility for the outcome. AI handles the volume and the repetitive work. You handle the judgment, the context, and the relationship.
Interestingly, when the Rise2040 advisory groups reviewed the AI-generated findings, the AI had gone too far, suggesting compliance work would essentially disappear. The human advisors corrected that. Compliance is still essential. What is changing is how you do it, and what you build on top of it. That correction is itself a perfect example of what "human in the lead" means in practice.
The Training Gap Is Real, and It Is an Opportunity
One tension the Rise2040 research surfaces is what happens when younger accountants skip the foundational grind. For years, doing hundreds of tax returns or reconciliations built instinct. Now AI handles much of that base work, and new entrants move straight to analysis, sometimes without the foundation that makes the analysis meaningful.
The AICPA is building simulation tools to address this: environments where a junior accountant works through a full return without AI, then compares their output to the AI version. The review comments come from the simulator. It is faster and more scalable than the old way, and it builds the same base competency that used to come from years in the bullpen.
For small firms, this is an opportunity. You can bring juniors up to speed faster, give them more interesting work sooner, and spend less time on basic review. But you do need to be deliberate about building that foundation, because it will not happen automatically anymore.
Three Things You Can Do This Week
Call yourself an advisor, starting with how you think. How you frame your own work shapes what you offer and what you charge. If you think of yourself as a tax preparer, you will price accordingly. If you think of yourself as a planning professional, the client conversation changes.
Set client expectations before they use AI. A short note at delivery, explaining what your software does versus a general AI tool, saves a difficult phone call later. Clients who understand the difference are far less likely to second-guess your work.
Pick one compliance service and ask what you can add to it. Not a major redesign. One insight alongside the usual deliverable. One question that shows you have been thinking about their situation beyond the form. That is how the advisory shift starts, and it starts this week.
As What's Keeping Business Accountants Up at Night makes clear, the accountants who are growing are not the ones offering the most services. They are the ones their clients trust to join everything up.
👉 Join CIBA and we'll show you how to turn your compliance work into a practice clients trust and pay more for.