White paper
The power of agentic AI for modern tax and audit firms
Today’s tax and audit professionals are navigating a profession that is becoming more complex by the day. Regulations continue to evolve, clients are asking more sophisticated questions, and firms are expected to deliver clear, accurate answers faster than ever before. While the demand for expertise is clearly growing, the time and resources available to deliver it are often shrinking.
Persistent staff shortages, retirements, and turnover make it harder to maintain a firm’s institutional knowledge and train the next generation of professionals. Research remains time-consuming, deliverables can vary in quality, and junior team members often struggle with complex tasks that require experience and judgment.
From a technology standpoint, most tax and audit firms are forced to change between multiple systems to find information, review documents, and prepare deliverables. This constant “context switching” slows productivity and diverts attention. In audit engagements, document and evidence sprawl adds additional complexity as teams work to track supporting information across multiple sources.
The question is clear — how do modern tax and audit firms scale expertise, maintain quality, and deliver defensible answers without placing additional strain on already overloaded teams?
The answer comes in the form of agentic AI. By embedding intelligence directly into the workflow, tax and audit professionals can ask complex questions and receive citation-backed answers, analyze large volumes of documents for insight, automate repeatable workflows, and access firm knowledge in a shared workspace.
The result is expertise that becomes more accessible across the firm, thus enabling staff members at all experience levels to produce consistent, defensible work without switching systems.
Defining agentic AI for tax and audit
The use of agentic AI in the tax and audit space is best understood in simple terms — it’s AI that can work toward a goal, not just respond to a prompt. Instead of waiting for instructions at each step, agentic AI can plan and execute multistep tasks alongside tax or audit professionals. Simply put, it doesn’t just generate answers; it helps move work forward.
Yet, according to the 2026 AI in Professional Services Report, only 15% of respondents said their organizations use agentic AI. An additional 53% say their organization is either planning or considering it. By 2030, 77% of those surveyed expect agentic AI to be central to their workflow.
This shift toward goal-driven assistance offered by agentic AI is unlike traditional automation, which follows rigid rules or requires constant prompting. Agentic AI acts as a "digital coworker" that strengthens your firm’s professional expertise. In tax and audit environments, this means navigating complex regulations, analyzing information, and supporting action with minimal back-and-forth prompting.
Despite these technological advances, professional human judgment remains central. Responsible agentic AI operates within a human-in-the-loop model where the system gathers information, performs analysis, drafts outputs, and monitors developments. At the same time, professionals review, interpret, and make the final decisions. Responsibility and authority do not transfer to the technology; they remain with the tax or audit professional to ensure outcomes are guided by professional judgment and context.
Trust is essential in this domain. Trustworthy agentic AI relies on authoritative source material and provides clear citations, transparent reasoning, and traceable outputs. Its work can be reviewed, explained, and defended if needed. In tax and audit, where positions must stand up to scrutiny, any output must be supported and auditable. Trusted systems make their processes visible rather than operating as black boxes.
Ultimately, agentic AI shifts tax and audit work from task execution to workflow orchestration. The work itself does not disappear. Instead, the role of the professional evolves toward higher-value analysis, judgment, and advisory impact.
Understanding the different types of AI
- Traditional AI and machine learning identify patterns and make predictions. Common examples include spam filters or credit scoring systems.
- Generative AI (GenAI) creates new content based on prompts. Tools like ChatGPT can draft emails, summarize documents, or generate text.
- Agentic AI goes a step further by completing multistep tasks. For example, it can research regulations, draft a document, identify issues, and refine the work with minimal step-by-step guidance.
How agentic AI supports multistep workflows in tax and audit
Agentic AI doesn’t just help complete tasks. It manages workflows from start to finish, allowing tax and audit professionals to focus on judgment, interpretation, and risk response.
| In tax, agentic AI can manage workflows such as: | In audit, agentic AI can manage workflows such as: |
| Automating the full life cycle of tax return preparation, from client intake to draft completion and filing | Orchestrating multistep research across accounting standards, regulatory guidance, and firm methodology to support conclusions |
| Coordinating data gathering, validation, and organization across multiple client systems and prior-year records | Coordinating evidence gathering, walkthroughs, and testing procedures while automatically documenting audit trails and rationale |
| Continuously monitoring legislative and regulatory updates, linking changes to client positions, and recommending updates to tax strategy | Channeling work-paper preparation, research, and document review into a single, iterative process to ensure consistent, audit-ready outputs. |
| Orchestrating multistep research across tax authorities and firm guidance to support compliance or advisory questions | Tracing supporting documentation across systems, highlighting inconsistencies, and integrating findings into risk assessment and materiality analysis |
| Integrating scenario modeling, credit and deduction identification, and planning recommendations into a unified workflow for strategic tax planning | Updating workflows dynamically as new risks emerge, standards change, or anomalies are detected, ensuring audit scope and conclusions remain accurate |
| Conducting continuous or “always on” transaction monitoring across full populations, integrating anomaly detection, risk pattern identification, and variance analysis |
Understanding the four capabilities that make agentic AI real
Agentic AI becomes meaningful when it improves how work actually gets done inside a firm. Instead of helping with isolated tasks, it supports the full workflow — from research and analysis to documentation, collaboration, and knowledge sharing.
This shift is driven by four core capabilities best described as ask, analyze, automate, and access. Platforms like CoCounsel Tax and Audit from Thomson Reuters bring these capabilities together in one environment. Firms can start with CoCounsel and expand their workflow with solutions such as Ready to Review and Ready to Advise as they grow their practice and advisory services.
Let’s explore how these four capabilities of agentic AI transform workflows.
1. Ask: Research with confidence
Research is foundational to both tax and audit work. Professionals must find answers and ensure they’re supported by authoritative guidance and can withstand scrutiny. Traditional research often involves searching multiple systems, verifying sources, and documenting citations — a process that can take hours.
Agentic AI simplifies this task by helping professionals quickly locate and synthesize relevant guidance while maintaining defensible support. The goal is not just faster research, but research that you and your staff can confidently rely on when advising clients or supporting conclusions.
With CoCounsel Tax and Audit, your firm can research complex questions using trusted sources such as Thomson Reuters Checkpoint content; IRS guidance; FASB, GASB, AICPA, and IFRS standards; and curated sources — all with authoritative citations.
| Advantage | How it works | Benefit to firm | Use case |
| Trusted research | Search authoritative tax and accounting guidance | Reduce research time from hours to minutes | Analyze complex tax positions |
| Citation-backed answers | Provide clear references to source material | Improve defensibility and confidence | Support audit conclusions |
| Integrated sources | Connect regulatory guidance, firm knowledge, and trusted web content |
Reduce time spent switching tools | Handle nuanced, multisource tax issues |
| Plain-language responses | Convert complex guidance into clear explanations | Speed up decision-making and understanding | Explain regulatory changes to clients |
2. Analyze: Turn documents into insight
Tax and audit work depends heavily on document review. Professionals spend significant time analyzing client records, supporting documentation, and prior-year materials to identify changes, inconsistencies, or risks.
Agentic AI helps scale this effort by quickly reviewing large volumes of documents, surfacing relevant insights, and highlighting potential issues. Instead of manually reviewing every page, you can focus your attention on the areas that matter most.
With CoCounsel Tax and Audit, your team can upload and analyze documents directly within their workflow, helping surface insights, detect risks, and organize information for collaboration. Extend these capabilities even further with Ready to Review, which accelerates review cycles and improves consistency.
| Advantage | How it works | Benefit to firm | Use case |
| Document review | Upload and analyze large volumes of documents | Save hours per engagement | Pull relevant data from contracts, leases, etc. |
| Insight generation | Surface critical findings and patterns | Improve quality and accuracy | Identify anomalies in audit support |
| Risk detection | Flag inconsistencies or missing information |
Reduce risk during the review process | Find errors and exceptions in provided-by-client documents |
| Organized collaboration | Structure document insights for teams | Improve efficiency across engagements | Standardize documentation and create firm templates |
3. Automate: Standardize the way you work
Tax and audit firms rely on repeatable processes to maintain quality and efficiency. However, manual workflows can vary widely depending on experience levels and individual approaches.
Agentic AI helps systematize these processes by embedding your firm’s expertise into templates and automated workflows. This optimization reduces variability, speeds up routine tasks, and ensures work is completed in accordance with firm standards.
With CoCounsel Tax and Audit, your firm can support workflow automation through agentic capabilities that help standardize processes across engagements. Solutions like Ready to Review and Ready to Advise extend these capabilities by streamlining review cycles and translating analysis into clear recommendations for clients.
| Advantage | How it works | Benefit to firm | Use case |
| Workflow templates | Standardize common processes | Reduce training time | Automate tax preparation workflows |
| Task automation | Accelerate routine steps | Save time across engagements | Streamline audit documentation preparation |
| Consistent deliverables | Ensure outputs follow firm standards |
Reduce rework and review fatigue | Standardize client deliverables |
| Scalable expertise | Embed best practices into workflows | Help junior staff perform at higher levels | Structure audit testing steps |
4. Access: Turn knowledge into a firm asset
Firms accumulate valuable knowledge over time. Unfortunately, much of this knowledge — like client insights, prior analyses to workpapers, and documented decisions — remains difficult to locate or tied to individual staff members.
Agentic AI helps turn this institutional knowledge into a shared asset by centralizing information and making it easily accessible within your firm’s workflow.
CoCounsel Tax and Audit provides collaborative workspaces where your team members can access information across clients, projects, and documents in the same environment where they work. This connectivity ensures that firm knowledge remains easily accessible as your staff collaborates.
| Advantage | How it works | Benefit to firm | Example use case |
| Centralized knowledge | Store firm and client information in one place | Reduce key-person risk | Access prior-year analysis |
| Collaborative workspaces | Enable teams to work from shared information | Improve engagement collaboration | Support multiperson tax and audit engagements |
| Connected systems | Integrate with firm platforms and document systems |
Reduce time searching for information | Link workpapers and guidance |
| Institutional memory | Preserve insight across engagements and years | Speed up onboarding and continuity | Access prior-year audit decisions |
Together, these four capabilities help your firm move from fragmented tools and manual effort toward a connected, AI-enabled workflow. For large firms, this framework supports scalability, risk management, and global consistency. For mid-market firms, it provides a path to faster growth and competitive advantage. For small firms, it enables competition with larger firms by reducing key-person risk.
Real-life impact: Agentic AI in tax and audit firms
Across tax and audit firms, the work is getting more complex, but the expectations haven’t slowed. Professionals are asked to deliver faster answers, review more information, and maintain high standards with fewer resources.
In this environment, agentic AI becomes less about innovation and more about execution. The following examples show how firms are using agentic AI to shape the experience of work itself by bringing structure to complexity, momentum to stalled workflows, and confidence to every stage of the engagement.
How Jansen & Company CPAs delivers higher-value tax advice with CoCounsel Tax
Jansen & Company CPAs is a small firm with eight employees that handles complex individual, business, trust, and estate work. For them, deep research and defensible guidance are essential, especially as tax planning and advisory questions become more technical.
The challenge
As client issues grew more intricate — spanning areas like multistate complexity, trust planning, and nuanced technical questions — traditional research methods often meant lengthy searches, dead ends, and time pressure that made it harder to validate positions with confidence.
How agentic AI showed up
Agentic AI became most valuable at the point where complex tax questions and limited time collided. Instead of spending hours searching through guidance and validating whether a source was reliable enough to stand behind, the team began using CoCounsel Tax to move more directly to trusted, citation-backed answers.
This shift changed the rhythm of their work, as research became more focused, less fragmented, and easier to defend when communicating recommendations to clients. As confidence in the tool grew, the firm began looking beyond research alone and exploring ways to analyze documents like trusts and wills to extract crucial details and identify tax-sensitive issues more efficiently.
Over time, the team also saw opportunities to reduce variability in how they performed work by leaning into more repeatable, template-driven approaches rather than one-off research processes. As those patterns emerged, shared workspaces provided a foundation for reusing prior analysis and building a more durable body of firm knowledge, making expertise easier to access and apply across engagements.
Together, these changes added up to more than incremental efficiency gains. By shortening the distance between question and answer; creating clearer, more defensible outputs; and reducing rework; agentic AI helped Jansen & Company CPAs operate with greater confidence as complexity increased. The firm worked with more certainty and consistency, even as advisory demands grew.
How Robert St. Pierre’s CPA firm is modernizing nonprofit and government audits with CoCounsel Audit
Robert St. Pierre’s CPA firm is a small, long-standing practice focused on nonprofit and government audits, completing roughly 80 audits per year. It’s an environment where large documents, repeatable procedures, and rigorous documentation create constant pressure for review.
The challenge
Audit teams face document sprawl and highly repetitive review tasks — for example, board minutes and complex agreements — where manual approaches can slow engagements and increase the risk of errors or inconsistencies.
How agentic AI showed up
Agentic AI had its greatest impact on the sheer volume and complexity of audit documentation.
By using CoCounsel Audit, the team was able to review extremely large documents, such as lengthy bond indentures, in minutes rather than hours, allowing auditors to focus on higher-risk areas rather than on manual extraction and summarization. Day-to-day questions that once required waiting on a specific person could be resolved more quickly through self-serve research, helping reduce bottlenecks during active engagements. Templates played a vital role in bringing consistency to repeatable audit procedures, such as reconciliations and agreement analysis, reducing manual copy-and-paste work, and the risk of inconsistency from one engagement to the next.
As the firm customized and refined these templates — adding clearer instructions around formatting, chronology, and handling missing information — they were able to save and reuse stronger versions over time, gradually establishing a more standardized, firm-wide approach to audit work without sacrificing professional judgment.
Taken together, these changes reshaped how the firm now approaches audit work under pressure. By reducing time spent on manual review and standardizing how repetitive tasks are handled, agentic AI helped the team move through engagements with greater consistency and control. Large documents no longer slowed momentum, routine questions no longer created bottlenecks, and audit procedures became easier to execute the same way, every time. The result was a more reliable, repeatable process that allows professionals to focus their judgment where it matters most, even as documentation demands continued to grow.
Where agentic AI creates the most value for tax and audit firms
Agentic AI delivers value not by replacing humans, but by improving how work moves through your firm. In most tax and audit firms today, work often slows down at predictable points in the workflow: waiting for research, gathering documentation, reviewing files, or resolving inconsistencies. Agentic AI helps remove these friction points by assisting with the tasks that interrupt momentum, allowing your staff members to stay focused on analysis, judgment, and client service.
Rather than merely offering suggestions, agentic AI can complete meaningful steps within a workflow. It can analyze trial balances, review large sets of documents, draft risk or research memos, organize supporting information, and surface relevant insights. All of this happens within a secure, collaborative workspace grounded in trusted sources and authoritative citations, ensuring that outputs remain defensible and aligned with professional standards.
The real shift, however, happens at the firm level. Traditional productivity tools tend to improve how individuals work, but agentic AI improves how the organization operates as a whole. Expertise becomes easier to scale because guidance and best practices are embedded into the workflow. Deliverables become more consistent across teams and offices. Information lives in fewer, more connected systems, making it easier to find and reuse. As a result, implementing new processes, training staff, and adapting to regulatory change all become far more manageable.
The day-to-day work experience changes as well. Teams encounter fewer stalled moments while searching for information or waiting for answers. Rework and multiple review cycles decrease as documentation becomes more complete and consistent from the start. Cognitive load is reduced because staff no longer need to manually track every step. Workflows become more predictable, giving seniors and managers better leverage across engagements. Late-stage scrambles for supporting evidence become less common, and review notes become clearer and easier to resolve.
In practice, agentic AI helps your firm move from reactive problem-solving to smoother, more structured execution, so your team members can spend more time interpreting results, managing risk, and advising clients.
Where you’ll see immediate impact
Research and guidance
Reduce hours spent locating and validating authoritative guidance by quickly generating citation-backed answers to complex tax and audit questions.
Document and data review
Analyze large volumes of client documents, trial balances, and supporting materials to surface insights, flag inconsistencies, and accelerate review cycles.
Workflow consistency
Standardize common processes — such as tax preparation steps, audit workpapers, and risk documentation — so teams produce more consistent deliverables.
Knowledge sharing
Make firm expertise accessible across teams by capturing prior work, guidance, and best practices in a shared workspace.
A practical path to agentic AI adoption
Adopting agentic AI does not require a complete transformation overnight. In practice, the most successful firms take a phased approach, starting with targeted use cases that deliver immediate value and expanding as teams gain experience and confidence.
By following a practical adoption path, your firm can introduce AI in ways that strengthen existing workflows, maintain professional oversight, and ensure consistent quality across engagements.
- Start with a clear roadmap
Most firms begin with high-impact use cases such as research, document analysis, and draft preparation. As teams build confidence, they expand into standardized workflows and advisory support that scale expertise across the firm. - Build in the right controls
Agentic AI works best when paired with strong governance. Human review, authoritative citations, and clear documentation ensure that outputs remain defensible, compliant, and aligned with professional standards. - Scale adoption across the firm
Over time, AI becomes embedded in daily workflows. Firm guidance, prior work, and best practices can be shared across teams and offices, thus reducing knowledge silos and making expertise accessible to professionals at every level.
By approaching adoption thoughtfully, your firm can realize the benefits of agentic AI while maintaining the trust, oversight, and professional judgment that define the tax and audit profession. Starting small, reinforcing strong controls, and expanding strategically enables your firm to scale AI in a way that strengthens both operational performance and client service.
Are you ready for the next step in the evolution of tax and audit?
Agentic AI represents a meaningful shift in how tax and audit work gets done. By bringing together research, document analysis, workflow automation, and shared knowledge into one connected environment, CoCounsel Tax and Audit can help you move beyond fragmented tools and manual processes. The result is a more execution-driven experience where all levels of staff can complete complex work faster while maintaining the accuracy, defensibility, and control the profession demands.
Many firms start with CoCounsel Tax and Audit and expand their capabilities over time with solutions like Ready to Review and Ready to Advise as their needs evolve and advisory services grow.
Ultimately, the value of agentic AI is not simply speed but smarter execution. When research is faster, documents are easier to analyze, workflows are standardized, and firm knowledge is accessible, professionals can focus more of their time on judgment and client guidance. In this sense, agentic AI becomes a strategic partner that strengthens your firm’s performance, delivers immediate operational benefits, and builds a resilient, future-ready practice in an increasingly complex landscape.
The firms that thrive in the years ahead will be those that successfully combine professional expertise with intelligent technology. Agentic AI offers a practical path forward by helping tax and audit teams work smarter, scale expertise, and deliver greater value to the clients who rely on them.
To learn more and explore how agentic AI can support your firm, consider the following resources:
- Learn the fundamentals of agentic AI. To better understand how agentic systems work and why they are becoming a critical capability across industries, refer to Agentic AI 101: What Your Business Needs to Know.
- Estimate your potential impact. The CoCounsel ROI Calculator helps you understand how AI-powered workflows can reduce research time, improve productivity, and generate measurable value to your practice.
- Explore our AI-driven platform. See how CoCounsel Tax and Audit, designed specifically for tax and audit professionals, can help automate tasks, accelerate document analysis, and standardize workflows across your firm.
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