A focused, five-step roadmap for tax, audit & accounting firm leaders can help them align their firm’s technology and AI with growth, modernize operations, and unlock advisory services at scale
Key takeaways:
-
-
-
Create a customized strategy — Leaders of tax, audit & accounting firms need to build a formal, growth-linked tech strategy that maps end-to-end workflows, targets a few high-impact fixes, and is reviewed twice a year.
-
Improve efficiency with automation — Firms should seek to automate repetitive work with integrations and AI-assisted prep and review, while leveraging standardized portals, e-signatures, and digital checklists to free capacity and improve accuracy.
-
Push toward advisory services — Leaders need to shift their firms from compliance roles to advisory services by turning data into proactive insight, offering and packaging services, retraining teams, and sustaining client engagement with a disciplined clients-first cadence.
-
-
The ground under tax firms is shifting — fast. Client expectations are rising, compliance timelines are tightening, and AI is redefining what great service looks like. For ambitious firms in the tax, audit & accounting industry, this moment isn’t a threat — it’s a runway to greater opportunity.
Jump to ↓
Harnessing technology and AI for efficiency and growth
The leaders who win won’t simply stack more tools. They’ll align technology and AI directly to growth, modernize the firm’s operating backbone, and upskill teams so they can deliver advisory at scale. This playbook offers a clear path to cut low‑value work, elevate client experience, and convert compliance efficiency into profitable, year‑round guidance.
To offer firms a leg up, the Thomson Reuters Institute has published a new five-step playbook for firm leaders, Harnessing technology and AI for efficiency and growth, that outlines how firms can align their technology and AI to promote better growth and more modernization, while expanding service offerings to clients.
Starting with growth in mind
This path starts with a growth‑centric technology strategy, the playbook shows. Instead of plugging leaks with point solutions, you should instead design an architecture that compounds value and ties every tech decision to measurable outcomes. Define what growth and efficiency mean for your firm — is it more clients without an increase in headcount? A step‑change in advisory revenue? Or materially faster turnaround? Then, let that clarity inform choices.
You also should map the end‑to‑end workflow from intake to delivery to identify re-keying, gaps, and bottlenecks. Then, choose a small set of high‑impact upgrades and review your roadmap every six months so firm resources flow to what actually moves the needle. When technology, people, and processes align, each investment accelerates the next.
In this way, automation becomes the force multiplier. Human attention is your scarcest resource — don’t spend it on copy‑paste, reconciliations, or document hunting. Integrations that pull data from banks, accounting systems, payroll, and other portals reduce touchpoints and errors. And intelligent document management makes retrieval fast and sharing secure.
Leveraging AI for preparation and review can pre‑populate forms, flag anomalies, and locate what’s missing so your team can focus on judgment, not drudgery. Automated reminders, e‑signature nudges, and orchestrated handoffs can be used to keep work moving. The result is hours returned to your staff, faster cycles, fewer corrections, and capacity you can now redirect toward creating client value.
Indeed, a modern workflow backbone transforms both delivery and experience. Cloud‑based platforms bring real‑time visibility to tasks, deadlines, and dependencies, giving partners a live view of progress and bottlenecks. Secure client portals create one clean place for uploads, approvals, messages, and payments. And e‑signatures and digital checklists remove friction from every engagement. Instrumentation — tracking turnaround, queues, response lag, and rework — turns daily operations into a continuous improvement engine. Predictability rises, emergencies fall, and clients feel the difference.
People remain the key
Of course, none of this sticks without people. Technology doesn’t transform firms, people do. You need to make tech fluency a core competency for your team, one that’s woven into on-boarding, performance, and career paths. Empower champions who pilot tools, share playbooks, and mentor peers so curiosity becomes capability — and encourage low‑risk experiments, act on feedback, and normalize iteration. You also should recognize teams that deliver real gains in accuracy, speed, and satisfaction. Let culture become the multiplier that unlocks higher returns on your firm’s tech stack and attracts talent that wants to grow along with your firm.
As compliance work automates, your differentiator with the market and your opening with clients is advisory services. Use analytics to proactively surface trends, opportunities, and exposure before clients ask. Package planning, owner optimization, restructuring, and readiness into clear, repeatable product offers. And as prep time shrinks, retrain staff to lead planning sessions, scenario modeling, and outreach.
Stay close to clients with a thoughtful cadence that tracks milestones and prompts timely conversations. This way, relationships can deepen as revenue diversifies, and your firm earns its place as a strategic partner — not a seasonal vendor.
Such transformation isn’t a project — it’s a leadership discipline. Proactive leaders of tax, audit & accounting firms need to offer a clear vision, choose a few high‑leverage moves, execute in tight loops, and measure what matters.
You can download
a full copy of the Thomson Reuters Institute’s “Harnessing technology and AI for efficiency and growth” by filling out the form below:
