007 - An AI Love Letter to our Clients

A Special Kitchen Table Automations for Tax Practitioners

Hey Friends,

I have a confession - I was at first terrified about the implications of AI to the tax, accounting and financial planning professions. I spent over a month feeling vaguely nauseous as I peered into the future.

And now? Now I’m really excited (not sure if you could tell). Ask the poor souls that have to sit next to me on a plane, stand in line with me at Starbucks or examine vegetable freshness at the grocery store - I believe that AI can have an amazingly positive impact.

So, I wrote a love letter to AI. But, I wrote it from the perspective of a tax firm owner (because that is part of who I am). And I wrote it for my clients. And for your clients too! (to be clear, I wrote it for *you* to send to your clients - I’m not trying to steal your clients - that would be silly).

Why did I write this? Because our clients are going to be curious about this technology anyway. And, once they realize that it can pretend to give good tax information, they’ll use it without knowing whether they’re getting good output.

Also because one of the biggest challenges we can have with supporting our clients is that they might not even understand the question that they’re asking. That’s why every question is a “quick question”, even when it’s not. Why not give them the tools to initially sketch out their ideas and challenges?

So! Instead of letting them flail around and further compound the “TaxTok” effect, I figured we could empower them to use the technology properly (plus, we’d get more “cool accountant points” towards our “cool accountant merit badges”).

Without further ado, here is my love letter - I present it with the hopes that you will feel comfortable taking it and using it in your practice.

---

ChatGPT for Your Taxes

How to harness AI to help with tax preparation and planning

ChatGPT seems to be everywhere right now – all your favorite news presenters are using it for that “gotcha” surprise that they prepared their script using ChatGPT (not so much of a surprise anymore), articles coming out about how it will end or save humanity, and discussions about its role in our education system.

But what if you could use it for taxes?  Can you use it for tax preparation?  Wouldn’t that be a dream – not to have to worry about collecting all your documents and having ChatGPT prepare your tax return?

We can all agree that harnessing the power of AI to make tax preparation simple again would be ideal.  Unfortunately, we’re not there yet.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t opportunities to use tools like ChatGPT and BingChat to make your tax compliance a little bit easier, though.  Let’s talk about some Do’s and Don’ts in harnessing this new technology:

🚫 Don’t – automatically trust the TaxGPT websites and apps proliferating around the internet.  It is *very* challenging to provide the GPT4 model with all the tax knowledge it needs.  If it were easy, firms like Intuit would have already rolled something out – they’ve been working with this technology even before it was announced to the public.

If you find a website with the correct answers, please let us know!  We love testing the new tax AI offerings and seeing if they meet tax professionals’ standards.

✅  Do – use the BingChat tool built into your Edge browser (the ‘B’ at the top right) to summarize and ask questions about IRS and State tax publications – it works better in Creative mode and on HTML versions of the publications and instructions.

Feel free to ask additional questions if the answers don’t make sense!  Just a hint – if it stops showing that it’s searching for the answer, it might not get you factual information.  It’s okay to start over. 

And please reach out once you have a general answer; we’ll be happy to fill in any blanks or correct any misunderstandings!  AI is excellent at providing baseline knowledge in a helpful and understandable way.  We’re here to help you build on that baseline.

🚫 Don’t – use ChatGPT3.5 (the unpaid version) or ChatGPT4 to calculate a tax estimate.  ChatGPT3.5 is notoriously bad at math, and ChatGPT 4 is only good at mental math.  Also, the models were only trained until September 2021, so they don’t have all the necessary information.

If you need assistance with tax projections and estimates, we have specialized software to help you.  Please let us know!

✅  Do – use ChatGPT to brainstorm new business ideas.  ChatGPT (especially ChatGPT4) has been trained on most of the internet through September 2021 and can be an excellent partner in helping you work through emerging ideas.  It can also suggest some challenges and government red tape you might encounter.

Once you’ve worked through the initial pros and cons, we’re happy to work with you further to build your idea and partner on your success.  Starting a new business or expanding your current operations can be daunting, but we can help you make that happen.

🚫 Don’t – put any proprietary business or personally identifiable information into ChatGPT or BingChat – the information is not secure and can be used to train the model.  Also, ensure your employees know that while ChatGPT and BingChat are great timesavers, they must keep specific information out of the tools.

✅  Do – use ChatGPT and BingChat in your business!  With effective prompting, the tools can save you a lot of time and energy generating emails, information tables, and even internal documentation. 

Keep in mind that ChatGPT might need to be given additional information past September 2021 or more details on esoteric topics (which BingChat can pull for you). There’s a lot you can do with this new technology!