Smaller accounting firms' reaction to ChatGPT has been a combination of curiosity and caution, with professionals eager to explore what accessible artificial intelligence can do for them, while at the same time treading carefully as they examine the strengths and weaknesses of this novel technology.
This has meant that while many firm leaders are enthusiastic about the talking AI, they hesitate to apply it directly to client work. Instead it seems the most immediate use has been for generating marketing and PR materials, something which the large language model is especially good at.
Adolfo Marquez, leader of Fresno-based MBS Accountancy, said this has been one of the more easy-to-apply use cases so far.
"One of the main things we've done, almost immediately, is use it as a junior writer for blog posts. A lot of firms that we've seen don't have a marketing person on hand, they usually use an agency, so one of the benefits we've had is obviously marketing. What we've done is feed it content we previously wrote and train it from there," he said, adding that the output still requires some fact-checking before publication.
Akshay Shrimanker, founder and CEO of New York-based Shay CPA, which specializes in tech startups, was in a similar position. While his firm is still experimenting with possible applications, one of the ones most immediately apparent was in promoting the firm by generating copy.
"This is one area where we've tested it and implemented something. We're creating some content and we use a copywriter who does our marketing and blog posts and we've been able to use some of the content she created, and her voice, to create something new. We've been testing that out to see how it will work," he said.
This is not to say he's ready to lay off his copywriter. He pointed out that ChatGPT "doesn't get everything right" and so still needs editing. Further he said that his human copywriter actually understands the business and its mission. But it's still been helpful in generating LinkedIn updates (complete with emojis) that summarize human-written blog posts.
Another common application is a little closer to client-facing technical work, though still not part of the technical workflow: accounting research. Shrimanker said ChatGPT is a good sounding board for accounting issues, as well as a summarizer of long documents. He noted that no one should ever treat ChatGPT as the final word on anything, and that users must be mindful of the possibility of it being flat-out wrong on something, but this doesn't mean it can't be a good starting point to expand from.
"You've Googled in the past, and you've put in a search term and you don't get quite the good results, but this seems to be able to [let you] provide something with context and get answers. For an accountant, what we do a lot is interpret tax laws and accounting standards and then apply them to client situations or something we may be doing internally. In the past what's happened is sometimes there have been gatekeepers for this knowledge. Now with ChatGPT it's almost like those gates have now come down," he said.
Chris Ferretti, operations manager of Maryland-based Club Capital, said his firm also uses it for research. However, they have been willing to go slightly further, in that his firm has incorporated it in client communications, particularly when they have technical questions.
"We've been using it to automate the communications that we receive from them. By us asking the question through ChatGPT that our clients are asking, we're able to provide a faster response. I understand ChatGPT is not 100% accurate, so of course our actual professionals check to see if something is off," he said.
He said the process is systemic in order to account for potential errors. They might start with ChatGPT but they will never end with it. The team, he said, begins by entering a thorny question into the AI, maybe about an especially complex tax situation. Then the experts read the output and make sure the information is correct and check to see if there's anything missing. Once this process is finished, "We send that to the client."
"I would say, the way I look at it, it's like having access to a smart person 24/7. It's like a cheat code," he said.
Parsing the risks
Shay CPAs' Shrimanker, though, expressed a hesitation to work ChatGPT further into his firm's workflows, as the technology is still new, and the legal particularities surrounding it are still being worked out. He said he's waiting to see what the larger players do before jumping head-first into the technology.
"I think not enough information has been put out there or communicated yet to be able to fully implement it into our workflows, so we're just taking our time with it and experimenting with it," he said.
Firms are quite cognizant of the professional risks that can come with using ChatGPT, especially where it concerns client confidentiality. Each firm leader we spoke with acknowledged that everything one enters into ChatGPT ends up in the servers of OpenAI (the company behind the talking bot).
Cathy Allen, an accounting ethics expert who is the founder of training company Audit Conduct, noted that entering client information directly into ChatGPT could constitute an ethics violation.
"Absolutely [it] could be considered a breach of the ethics rules if the CPA were to upload client information to a server that was not secure. Wherever the CPA stores client confidential data, they would need to ensure, through their own due diligence, that the information was protected and could not be accessed by other parties," she said.
For this reason, each firm leader also had implemented some sort of control system that accounted for these risks. MBS's Marquez, for example, said that everyone understands that they are never to enter client information into the AI system.
"I have a pretty strong cybersecurity stance. I went to school for tech stuff so I'm really [a believer in] of zero access until you need it. So I take that approach with AI. I can get really good results without giving away a bunch of data," he said.
Shrimanker, similarly, restricts access to ChatGPT only to himself, the firm's operations manager and another marketing person on their team. And while his own firm does use ChatGPT to discuss clients, care is always taken to ensure that the details given don't necessarily identify who that client is. This means that even if the data were to leak out of OpenAI's servers, people won't be able to do much with it.
"We would never say, for example, Chris from Milwaukee. It's always 'some person from Milwaukee, 29 years old, single' and [we say] walk me through [this situation]. It's always in very general terms because at the end of the day the way AI works is it learns from whatever you feed into it, which means it stores things. Obviously we don't want to compromise security by putting client specific data into ChatGPT," he said, adding also that only management can access ChatGPT.
Allen said this approach does make a difference when it comes to ethics. "Unless one's client is so unique, known in the community, etc., that it would be obvious to others who the client is, it would typically not be viewed as divulging confidential client information," she said.
