While technology is advancing at a pace that can feel impossible to keep up with, artificial intelligence (AI) has moved beyond science fiction to integrate into many aspects of our professional and personal lives. For tax and accounting professionals, AI has emerged as an indispensable tool, streamlining workflows, eliminating repetitive processes, and saving valuable time on manual data entry.
To help firms gain a competitive edge, Intuit Accountants is committed to integrating practical AI into Intuit® ProConnect™ Tax to boost productivity, enhance accuracy, and create a better experience for you and your staff. The AI-powered features in ProConnect Tax are not intended to replace professional expertise; they are designed to help firms transition from compliance providers to year-round strategic advisors.
Embracing an AI-supported future
AI is beginning to create a digital divide between firms that embrace their potential and those that do not. According to a recent survey, 85% believe failing to adopt new technologies will prevent them from reaching their growth goals, and for 95% of respondents, technology is helping their firms reduce time spent on compliance tasks while creating more capacity for strategic advisory services.
Download a new white paper, “How ProConnect Tax’s AI integrations amplify your expertise and enhance your practice” to learn more about AI features in ProConnect Tax.
The objective of integrating AI-powered technology isn’t to automate for automation’s sake. Instead, the goal is to build a future-ready firm with advanced tools that eliminate repetitive tasks and create the capacity for higher-value work. A study by Jung Ho Choi and Chloe Xie found that accountants using generative AI can support more clients, close the books faster, and provide higher-quality service. While some accountants in the study expressed concerns about AI-generated errors and job stability, the findings showed that firms using generative AI saw a 12% rise in reporting quality. This research reinforces the idea that AI works best when paired with human expertise because it synthesizes information while the final judgment remains a human decision.
ProConnect Tax offers an AI-powered workflow designed to help shape successful firms. The AI tools act as a sophisticated amplifier, automating routine tasks, anticipating client needs, and providing informed insights. This allows your firm to transform its compliance workflow and navigate the complexities of the modern tax landscape with greater confidence, always with the tax pro making the final decisions.
Key AI-powered features of ProConnect Tax at a glance
- Intelligent data import: Understands the context of data on uploaded documents, helping to accurately populate fields into the tax return, ready for your verification.
- Predictive navigation: Anticipates user patterns and suggests the most likely next step to help reduce clicks and search time.
- Automated client briefings: Pulls key information from more than 60 data points in your client’s previously filed return, using generative AI to create a summary that can give you a head start on their next return.
- AI-driven review engine: References a large database of diagnostics, offering a deep, contextual review of every return, preparing insights for your evaluation.
- Anomaly detection: Leverages intelligence and data to reduce review time, flag meaningful trends, and strengthen client communication.
- Virtual team of AI agents: Provides access to an agentic AI team that saves you time, simplifies the day-to-day running of a business, and helps you more confidently and quickly advise clients on key decisions.
- Intuit Tax Advisor: Built into ProConnect Tax, Intuit Tax Advisor becomes your generative AI partner for tax advisory, designed to quickly identify optimal tax strategies for clients and generate personalized, actionable tax plans.
Here is a drill-down explanation for several of these features:
Slash data entry with intelligent data import
One of the most significant and tedious time drains in tax preparation is manual data entry. ProConnect Tax addresses this directly with its AI-powered data import.
Instead of keying in numbers line by line, the system intelligently extracts information from a range of source documents, including W-2s and 1099s. It understands the context of the data to accurately populate fields in the tax return, ready for your verification.
This feature can fundamentally change how a firm allocates its resources. ProConnect users have reported saving more than 30 minutes on average per return by importing data, freeing up staff for more complex tasks and valuable client interactions.
“Intelligent data import into ProConnect Tax saves us a lot of time, especially with cumbersome K-1s,” said Melina Maslehati, owner of Seed Money Consulting and a member of the Intuit Tax Council. “The AI understands the context of the data, providing the guardrails our preparers need to ensure information is inputted correctly into any given form.”
Steer through complexity with predictive navigation
ProConnect Tax manages intricate returns with numerous forms and schedules with “Smart Nav,” an AI-powered feature that helps create a more intuitive and streamlined workflow.
“I like predictability … and ProConnect is predictable for us; it allows us to create a workflow that is intuitive to our clients, but also helps our team save time,” said Al-Nesha Jones, CPA, MPA, owner, ASE Group, and also a member of the Intuit Tax Council. “The AI-powered Smart Nav is a great example. It seems to anticipate our next move, making navigation through complex returns feel second nature. And we’re only able to do that because we are doing this in just one software.”
By analyzing the screens you’ve visited and the specifics of the return being prepared, the system intelligently anticipates and suggests your most likely next steps. This predictive navigation learns user patterns over time, evolving into an efficient tool that can reduce the learning curve for new team members and empower seasoned professionals to navigate returns with improved speed and ease.
Bridge compliance and advisory with automated client briefings
As a firm grows, maintaining a personalized experience for every client can feel overwhelming, particularly when pre-meeting prep can take up to two hours. The AI Client Briefing feature is designed to give that time back to you. This briefing uses generative AI to pull key information from more than 60 data points in a client’s previously filed return, creating a quick summary.
This transforms the conclusion of a compliance task into the beginning of a strategic dialogue about your client’s financial future. With this feature, it has never been easier to scale personalized and easy-to-understand support to your clients, allowing you to focus on building the relationship.
Support accuracy with an AI-driven review engine
Compliance is non-negotiable. A simple error can have significant consequences for a client and a firm. ProConnect’s AI acts as a watchful partner, working in the background to help you maintain accuracy. This is far more than a simple spell check; the AI-powered tax engine performs continuous, always-on analysis by referencing a large database of diagnostics. This deep, contextual review helps identify potential errors and flags them for your professional judgment. This dramatically reduces review time and enhances your firm’s confidence in every filed return. It’s like having an extra set of expert eyes on every return, 24/7.
“The AI-driven diagnostic tools provided by ProConnect have been an invaluable resource,” said Ricky Cobban, lead tax preparer at EPL Financial Services. “ProConnect has helped us streamline our processes and elevate our services. Thanks to these tools, I am able to better serve my clients and improve our overall performance.”
Intuit Tax Advisor: Your generative AI partner for tax advisory
Intuit Tax Advisor, now built into ProConnect Tax, specifically helps you find the best tax-saving strategies for your clients. Its automated strategy generation leverages generative AI to analyze a wide range of client data from ProConnect Tax and instantly identifies relevant tax-saving strategies.
Intuit Tax Advisor can also generate user-friendly reports and personalized plans, helping you move beyond raw data to client-facing deliverables. The tool automatically incorporates legislated tax law updates and can create various scenarios for robust client discussions. This seamless integration makes the “books-to-tax-to-advisory” workflow a reality.
The AI advantage in practice
Adopting an AI-powered ecosystem is a strategic business decision, not just another investment in technology:
- Gain increased productivity. By automating low-value tasks and accelerating high-level strategic analysis, your firm can handle more client volume without sacrificing quality. This efficiency is crucial for meeting the demands of the modern tax season.
- Benefit from enhanced accuracy and trust. Leveraging an AI-driven review engine for compliance and AI-vetted strategies for advisory helps reduce firm risk and deepen client trust.
- Create a better experience for your staff. By reducing tedious, repetitive work, you can empower your team with intelligent tools that let them focus on the engaging, strategic work they find most rewarding.
The bottom line? Future-proof your firm. The future belongs to those who are willing to evolve, not by abandoning their professional skills, but by supercharging them with intelligent tools that keep them ahead of the curve. The question is no longer whether you should embrace AI, but how you will adopt it as a technology cornerstone of your firm’s growth and success.
Download a new white paper, “How ProConnect Tax’s AI integrations amplify your expertise and enhance your practice” to learn more about AI features in ProConnect Tax.
Thanks for reading CPA Practice Advisor!
Subscribe Already registered? Log In
Need more information? Read the FAQs
