Artificial intelligence is changing the world, but not all of those changes are unalloyed positives. For every AI innovation, there is a disruption that negatively impacts someone. For accountants, there is a deep question about whether AI will be a net positive for the accounting industry. In the best-case scenario, artificial intelligence will serve as a supplement to the accounting field, freeing CPAs to focus on the more creative and innovative parts of their jobs, as well as managing their human clients, while AI handles some of the tedious, repetitive grunt work. In the worst-case scenario, the reverse is true: a handful of accountants will be left on the sidelines, editing and correcting AI-generated output while machines take on the majority of the work and take over a majority of the careers.
Which version of the AI future will come to pass is still open to debate, but to some degree its integration into the accounting field is inevitable. The question is whether you will be ready to work with AI to get the most out of what it has to offer while minimizing the risks it poses.
In this article, we’ll take a look at how AI and automation are transforming CPA marketing strategies and changing the way accountants sell themselves to clients – alongside insights from a team of affiliate marketers at Offer.One.
The Human Touch
Up until the launch of generative AI a few years ago, accountants were happy to sell themselves as, basically, tools of the technology they use. Many accounting firms touted the software that they used for accounting and relied on the aura of objectivity and correctness associated with computers as they emphasized the value of these software packages. With the rise of generative AI, it’s less of a selling point to talk about how much you rely on computers. Instead, accountants will need to pitch themselves as real human beings who can bring to accounting a human touch that generative AI can’t yet match. For instance, your accountant can get to know you as a person and may be able to understand your taxes at a deeper level than a machine, thus finding additional deductions or tax strategies that the strict rules and superficial analysis of AI might not be considered. Not everything is digitized yet, and it sometimes takes a real human to find savings hidden beyond the reach of a machine.
There are, however, two important ways CPAs should consider marketing themselves with AI. The first involves what AI can do for their clients and the second involves how AI can help them to sell themselves.
The Mystique of Artificial Intelligence
As things currently stand, Artificial Intelligence has a certain mystique that leads consumers to believe that products using AI are superior to those that do not. While a recent survey found that only a third of Americans say they trust AI, more than half of all Americans use AI in their daily lives. As businesses continue to market AI as a transformative tool, the number of people who rely on it will continue to grow. Some CPAs may want to consider embracing this trend and billing themselves in their marketing as utilizing the power of artificial intelligence and putting it to work for their clients.
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While this approach may not be appropriate for everyone or for all clients, some niches may benefit from appealing to the mystique of AI. For instance, for consumers who are focused on speed, it can be beneficial to advertise that you enhance your accounting with AI in order to process tax returns faster or to generate reports or other documents on demand. For now, it’s important to remind clients that everything you produce is reviewed by a human for accuracy, but the appeal to speed can help.
Another way some CPAs may want to advertise their use of AI is to market that they use it to help find new ways to save. AI can be very good at analyzing data, so it may be beneficial for some CPAs to advertise that they use AI as a second level of analysis to help discover things that human accountants may have missed. So-called “vertical AI” can help accountants through solutions tailored to accounting challenges such as evaluating complex regulatory environments, dealing with sensitive financial data, and exploring industry-specific insights.
For now, advertising your use of AI should be done with caution, only when your market research has determined that it is the right fit for the audience you’re trying to reach.
Using AI to Market Yourself
Perhaps the most important way AI is changing CPA marketing strategies is through the use of AI to market oneself. Many CPAs work alone or in small businesses, and not all of them are able to afford professional marketing and advertising services. AI can help CPAs to produce professional quality marketing materials, such as advertisements, social media posts, marketing messages, email marketing campaigns, etc. While there are still some challenges using AI for this, particularly when it comes to accuracy (and the occasional hallucination), AI can create useful first drafts that you can then modify or edit in order to create marketing materials that can promote yourself across various media outlets, and it can summarize documents and business news for clients. By taking advantage of the power of AI to develop professional marketing messages, even small firms can compete against the big guys and attract new clients.
Conclusion
With AI on hand to do time-consuming data entry and reconciliation work, accountants will have more time to market themselves and develop the human relationships that lead to more clients and more effective work-life balance. With the right prompts, AI might even help you manage the human side of accounting, too. According to Blake Oliver of The Accounting Podcast, AI will help accountants to do more work in less time and to market themselves as effectively as other professions. The future, according to Oliver, will be much different than the traditional long hours and word-of-mouth marketing: “We don’t have to work more than 40 hours a week, and we can do it remotely,” Oliver says of the coming changes to the accounting profession.