AI improving client service

Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, the variety of generative AI applications has mushroomed. Now practitioners can develop customisable bots that help them become more efficient, cut costs and deliver a better client experience.

‘Generative AI can help to create a marketing plan, it can help define an ideal client profile, it can help with social media and come up with strategic plans,’ says Shane Lukas, managing director of AVN. ‘It really is like you are working with a larger team.’

Communication tool

It’s also proving successful in helping with client correspondence. It can distil emails and other formats of client documentation into key action points, and then draft a well-structured response.

Sheetal Shah, partner at DSK Accountancy, says that he is getting everyone in his practice to use ChatGPT for letter and email writing ‘to make things simpler’.

‘A lot of people procrastinate when they see their inbox. We are giving them these tools and training them how to use them to make their life easier,’ says Shah.

The use of text-to-speech software is also proving increasingly popular. Apps such as ElevenLabs enable creators and publishers to generate life-like audio, to improve how they share ideas and communicate with clients.

‘Practitioners don’t have to sit there and record a message and re-record it – all of those things that make the audio output hard work to produce,’ says Paul Roberts, CEO of MyCustomerLens.

The same thing can be done with visual communication. The ability to share short video files can be helpful when trying to explain tax regulations or legislation, or simply explain how something works.

‘AI solutions make your creative suite broader, so you can communicate with clients in a way that might be easier and more engaging for them, and that fits with how they want to listen and learn,’ says Roberts.

Great leveller

Peter Ellington, founder and CEO of Triple Bottom Line Accounting, says his firm uses AI ‘on a daily basis to get the day job done’ so they can focus on the value-added work.

Ellington’s go-to tools are ChatGPT, Claude 2 – a rival chatbot to ChatGPT that can summarise novel-sized blocks of text, such as PDFs – and Perplexity, a so-called ‘answer engine’ that is a challenger to Google’s search engine.

Ellington says that the technology can be combined to support practitioners in giving comprehensive advice to clients. For example, the tools are able to quickly analyse a property company client’s articles of association to determine whether they need a special resolution for a loan transaction, then write the resolution and loan agreement in a fraction of the time a human would have taken.

‘We ended up with a document that took an hour to produce,’ Ellington adds. ‘Without AI it wouldn’t have been as comprehensive and would have taken three to four hours.’

He also uses ChatGPT to analyse proposed shareholder agreements for terms and provide advice, respond to a client’s request for information on zero VAT, and prepare IHT reviews and company valuations.

Where Ellington is suspicious that AI may be providing incorrect information or hallucinating, he runs the ChatGPT prompts through Claude 2 and Perplexity to ‘triangulate’ the responses, as well as test the outputs with experts within the practice.

‘ChatGPT is a great leveller. It can produce rubbish, but if you ask intelligent questions and know what you are looking for and are inquisitive, you can use it to great advantage,’ says Ellington.

Analysis and insight

AI can also be used to provide financial analysis and insight on a client’s financial health and potential areas where they can improve their business, although firms need to be wary about the privacy and data protection implications.

For instance, ‘a very basic profit and loss account’ can be passed into ChatGPT or Bard with contextual background about the business, and the AI will analyse the data and provide insights and recommendations, says Lukas.

‘It will do that in a nanosecond and give you recommendations that you can analyse as a jumping-off point for more detailed conversations with clients,’ Lukas adds. ‘It is shortcutting coming up with those solutions.’

Shah says he uses tools such as Bard and Gemini Ultra to help produce business plans and advice for a pitch, based on 30-minute brainstorming sessions with clients. ‘Within minutes it creates a pitch deck. It’s stunning,’ he says.

By using AI, Shah was able to generate a financial forecast for a client setting up as an optician by asking it what equipment was needed and how much it would cost; it also assessed a reporting issue that the client had, which had been ‘a headache from compliance perspective’. 

Normally, he might have gone to the SORP (statements of recommended practice) or the relevant regulation, but instead was able to ‘put that whole scenario [into the AI] and it gave us the disclosures automatically’.

However, AI still comes with a health warning: accountants should check the suggestions generated against their own knowledge and the source material or run it past their heads of compliance.

‘It’s best to think of AI as a bright 15-year-old, very keen to impress and support you, but prone to making things up rather than admitting their ignorance,’ says Mark Lee, who runs the Sole Practice Club, a group supporting sole practitioners.