Oct 22, 2026 | AI and product innovation
Tax and Audit Professionals Asked If AI Could Actually Do the Work. Today We Answer
I have sat in a lot of rooms with tax partners, audit leaders, and corporate tax teams over the past two years, and I keep hearing some version of these questions: Can AI actually do the work, and can the profession trust what comes out the other side?
Most of what has been pitched to this profession has not earned a yes. Tools that answer a question and hand the work back. Drafts a professional still has to rebuild from scratch. What they’ve been offered is simple convenience at best.
Today we are changing that answer with the launch of the next generation of CoCounsel Tax, Audit & Accounting, built to the Fiduciary-Grade AI™ standard these professionals live by.
Decades in the Making
A lot of companies are racing into tax and audit AI right now. Few of them have what it takes, because it’s more than just a capable model. It takes decades of authoritative tax content, hundreds of credentialed experts who understand how this work really gets done, and tools already built into the systems firms use every day. We have spent decades building exactly that.
We launched CoCounsel Tax, Audit & Accounting last year, built on authoritative content including Checkpoint, our accounting research platform, which holds more than 12 million primary source and proprietary analytical documents, expertly maintained and kept current by hundreds of experts including CPAs and tax attorneys. Research powered by authoritative sources, alongside leading tax applications including Ready to Review and Ready to Advise, was a strong start.
What we are launching today is a significant step forward. Our next generation of CoCounsel is a fully agentic platform that plans the work and uses the right tools for the job. It writes and runs code to complete calculations, works directly with spreadsheet data, creates multi-tab workbooks with formulas, analyzes long and complex documents, and turns the work into a finished deliverable you can review and refine. We built it to run on any frontier model, so the platform keeps improving no matter who is ahead in the model race.
To learn more about the build, read the blog post from Chief Technology Officer, Joel Hron.
First, in their own words
“CoCo is freaking amazing!! So much more that it can do. I loved CoCounsel before, but this is the peanut butter to my jelly!”
Linda Forde, CPA – Chief Executive Officer, Forde Firm
“It does a better job of handling multi-step tasks while keeping the process organized and easy to follow.”
President – Small Business: 1-50 employees Diversified Financial Services Company*
“I used it to review a new workpaper I was creating. It had great feedback, points, and pointed me in exact direction/cell for updating.”
Tax Senior Manager – Tax, Audit & Advisory Firm: 500+ employees Professional Services Company*
I like that it narrates its thought process more fully so that I am able to see where CoCounsel is drawing its information. It is easier to tell where communication gaps are coming from.
Staff Accountant – Small Business: 1-50 employees Diversified Financial Services Company*
“The ability to output HIGH quality documents that are 99% ready for client presentation.”
President – Small Business: 1-50 employees Diversified Financial Services Company*
From Planning to Finished Work: The Agent in Action
Those reactions are not an accident. They are what happens when the foundation is finally strong enough to support real transformation. We believe that transformation will happen for tax, audit and accounting professionals in three stages.
- Accelerate, the routine work moves through AI so your best people get their time back.
- Elevate, that time goes toward the advisory conversations clients have been asking for.
- Transform, the whole practice starts operating differently, not just one person working faster.
Here is what makes the next generation of CoCounsel Tax, Audit & Accounting so exciting:
Code Execution and Verified Calculations
This is the part I think customers will feel first. The next generation of CoCounsel Tax, Audit & Accounting writes and runs actual code to work through depreciation, amortization, required minimum distributions, qualified business income, threshold checks, and multi-scenario comparisons. Your team stops relying on estimates and starts getting numbers that are exact and repeatable every time.
Client and Firm Context
Ask anyone who has picked up a client relationship mid-year what the hardest part is. It is rarely the tax question. It is figuring out everything the rest of the team already knows and never wrote down. When firms upload client information, engagement history, and supporting context into a shared workspace, every team member can quickly understand the engagement, pick up where others left off, and keep work moving without unnecessary rework or retracing what has already happened.
Spreadsheets and Deliverables
CoCounsel does not stop at analysis, it hands back something you can actually use. Think multi-tab Excel workbooks with the formulas intact and an assumptions tab built right in, memos and other deliverables ready in Word or PDF, and updates made directly to the spreadsheets and documents your team already uploaded, matching your firm’s own templates along the way.
MCP Support
We built native support for MCP connectivity into the platform from the start. In practice, that means CoCounsel can plug into the other applications and systems your team already runs, and pull context from those systems into its own work, so you are never stuck working in just one place to get the benefit of what we built.
Connected Systems
None of this helps if it only lives in one corner of your tech stack. We keep expanding our tax and audit integrations, UltraTax, Engagement Manager, and Guided Assurance today, with more on the way. Fewer tabs open, less jumping between tools, and work that keeps moving no matter where your team is working.
Built for This Moment
This profession runs on trust, and right now it is stretched thin. The workforce is shrinking at the exact moment client demands keep growing. We built this for where the profession is right now, and where it will go into the future.
What we are offering today is only the start. We will keep building on this foundation, adding the connections and capabilities professionals need, until this is the one platform they rely on to carry work from start to finish.
The next generation of CoCounsel Tax, Audit & Accounting platform is available now to customers in the United States, with more features and capabilities on the way.
Our customers need trusted AI that delivers. We set the bar high, and I think we met it. To learn more, visit our website.
*Anonymous quotes verified through user evidence.
Survey Research Report | Thomson Reuters
CoCounsel Tax, Audit & Accounting in action
With the new CoCounsel Tax, Audit & Accounting, seeing is believing. So, what does the work look like when the fully agentic system is put into action? Consider a tax manager reviewing a partnership return. This manager must navigate the complexity of prior-year returns, K-1s, source documents, partnership agreements, and firm review procedures before preparing comments for the partner.
Instead of reviewing documents individually, the tax manager simply asks CoCounsel to review the return against the source documents, identify potential issues, compare treatment to the prior year, and draft reviewer comments. CoCounsel draws context from client documents in the Workspace, trusted Thomson Reuters content, relevant tax authority, and firm knowledge and review methodologies. The result: CoCounsel identifies issues, summarizes findings, drafts review notes, and prepares a tax memorandum, while maintaining full engagement context.
Within the audit profession, teams must understand the client’s financial health, identify risk areas, and estimate engagement effort before submitting a proposal.
Once financial statements, key contracts, supporting disclosures, and other client documents have been uploaded to a Client Workspace, CoCounsel can compare footnotes to financial statement amounts, surface disclosure gaps, identify unusual balances, highlight potential audit risks, and draft planning summaries for the engagement team.
With CoCounsel, audit teams receive a first-pass risk assessment in minutes rather than hours, allowing professionals to focus on judgment rather than document comparisons.
