Discover how agentic AI is transforming tax professionals from once-a-year compliance processors into year-round strategic advisors, automating complex workflows while unlocking premium advisory opportunities that drive both client value and firm profitability.
Highlights
Agentic AI autonomously executes multi-step workflows, transforming accountants from compliance processors to strategic advisors.
Purpose-built solutions automate tax compliance, research, and planning while maintaining professional judgment and accuracy.
Firms adopting agentic AI today position themselves as tomorrow’s advisory leaders with competitive advantage.
In a profession known for its measured approach to change, agentic AI is emerging as a transformative force for accountants, redefining the nature of daily work and opening the door to more meaningful (and profitable) relationships with clients. As artificial intelligence continues to evolve — from basic automation to generative AI and now to agentic AI — tax and accounting professionals are experiencing a fundamental shift in how they deliver value to clients.
The progression from traditional automation to agentic AI in accounting represents more than just incremental improvement. It’s a complete reimagining of what “automated” work can look like and how accountants spend their time. Understanding where agentic AI fits on this continuum, and how it differs from the AI tools you may already use, is essential to realizing its full potential.
Jump to ↓The evolution from generative AI to agentic AI in accounting
From compliance-focused to client-focused advisory relationships
What are the practical applications of agentic AI in accounting?
Purpose-built agentic AI solutions for tax and accounting professionals
The future of accounting is agentic
The evolution from generative AI to agentic AI in accounting
To understand agentic AI’s transformative potential, it’s essential to see how it builds upon and extends the generative AI capabilities many firms already use.
Generative AI for tax and accounting professionals
Generative AI has already begun changing how tax and accounting professionals work. Using large language models, generative AI can create content, analyze data, draft documents, and provide conversational assistance. For tax professionals, this means faster access to research, the ability to summarize complex regulations, and help drafting client communications.
Practical uses of generative AI in your daily work include:
Research assistance: Quickly summarizing tax code changes or finding relevant guidance
Document drafting: Creating first drafts of memos, client letters, or technical analyses
Data analysis: Identifying patterns in financial data or flagging unusual transactions
Knowledge retrieval: Answering questions about technical accounting or tax treatments
These capabilities make generative AI valuable for tax and accounting professionals who need to work faster without sacrificing accuracy.
Agentic AI: The next step on the continuum
Agentic AI leverages generative AI and large language models to autonomously plan, reason, and execute multi-step processes. While advanced tax technology and automation are nothing new for most accounting firms, agentic AI redefines what we classify as a “mundane” task.
The key distinction is autonomy. Where generative AI responds to your questions and prompts, agentic AI takes action. It doesn’t just tell you what to do. It can do it for you, working through complex workflows, making decisions based on predefined goals, and adapting to changing circumstances.
Unlike traditional AI, which is typically reactive and limited to predefined tasks (such as rule-based automation or predictive analytics), agentic AI can dynamically adapt to changing circumstances, proactively seek information, and refine its outputs without constant human intervention. It understands context, learns from feedback, and operates with a level of independence that fundamentally changes what accountants can automate.
From compliance-focused to client-focused advisory relationships
For years, automation has eliminated the need for tax professionals to spend their days steeped in manual data entry, searching for blank fields or numbers that don’t add up. With agentic AI, accountants can automate complex pieces of the tax return process. This shift transforms the value proposition of accounting firms, making what was once the centerpiece of a firm’s offering a byproduct of a deeper client-focused relationship built on strategic planning and personalized advisory services.
Agentic AI presents an opportunity to significantly elevate the role of accountants from once-a-year tax preparers to year-round tax consultants. When agentic AI automates compliance work, you free up time for the high-value advisory work that clients need and are willing to pay premium fees for.
What are the practical applications of agentic AI in accounting?
By operating autonomously, agentic AI can make decisions and take actions based on goals, constraints, and real-world feedback. Here are the practical use cases transforming how accounting firms work:
Tax compliance and reporting automation
Agentic AI can automate tax compliance and reporting by continuously monitoring tax law changes, analyzing financial data, and proactively identifying potential compliance risks. It can autonomously gather and categorize transaction data, apply accurate tax treatments, and help users throughout the tax filing process, alerting you when anomalies or strategic decisions require experienced input.
In practice: Thomson Reuters Ready to Review uses agentic capabilities to intelligently review tax returns, automatically identifying discrepancies, catching common errors, and flagging items that need professional attention. Rather than manually checking every line item, accountants can focus their expertise on the issues that truly require professional judgment.
Strategic tax planning and advisory
Agentic AI in accounting extends beyond compliance to proactive tax planning. By analyzing client data throughout the year and comparing it against various tax scenarios, agentic AI can surface opportunities for tax savings, alert you to potential risks before they become problems, and recommend strategic actions based on changing regulations or life events.
Real-world application: Thomson Reuters Ready to Advise leverages agentic AI to proactively surface tax planning opportunities throughout the year, analyzing client data against tax scenarios to recommend strategic actions. This transforms your relationship with clients from reactive (filing returns) to proactive (ongoing strategic guidance).
Research and complex workflow automation
Tax and accounting professionals spend significant time researching technical questions, navigating vast knowledge bases, and synthesizing information from multiple sources. Agentic AI can autonomously conduct this research, understand the context of your question, navigate relevant sources, extract the most pertinent information, and provide cited answers you can trust.
In practice: Thomson Reuters CoCounsel Tax demonstrates agentic AI’s research capabilities by autonomously navigating the Thomson Reuters Checkpoint knowledge base extracting relevant information, and providing plain-language, cited answers to complex tax questions. It eliminates manual searching and accelerates research from hours to minutes.
Purpose-built agentic AI solutions for tax and accounting professionals
To successfully apply agentic AI, accountants need a broadly capable solution that is purpose-built for tax, audit and accounting professionals. Thomson Reuters developed an integrated ecosystem of agentic AI solutions that specifically serves the unique needs of tax and accounting firms.
CoCounsel for tax, audit, and accounting: The intelligent core
Thomson Reuters built CoCounsel for Tax, Audit and Accounting specifically for the profession, bringing the power of agentic AI to your most critical workflows.
CoCounsel can help your firm:
Automate workflows, make decisions, and complete tasks independently, handling multi-step processes without constant oversight
Accelerate research by integrating Thomson Reuters Checkpoint knowledge base, eliminating the need for manual searches
Conduct large-scale document analysis, so you can process and assess high volumes of information quickly and accurately
Deliver precise, plain-language answers to complex accounting queries, making technical information more accessible
Customize knowledge using your firm’s guidance, policies, and client documents for personalized insights
Embed citations for all answers, allowing you to verify information and maintain compliance with industry standards
Beyond efficiency gains, agentic AI elevates your professional capabilities, enabling you to tackle more sophisticated advisory work that enhances your expertise and market value while positioning you as a strategic advisor rather than just a compliance processor.
CoCounsel also brings specific capabilities like reading and processing Excel and PDF files, extracting both structured and unstructured data precisely, and utilizing AI accounting templates that standardize work processes across teams.
Working alongside Ready to Review and Ready to Advise, CoCounsel forms part of an integrated agentic AI approach that covers the full spectrum of your firm’s needs, from compliance automation to strategic advisory support.
The future of accounting is agentic
As client expectations shift toward year-round strategic guidance and competitors adopt AI-powered workflows, agentic AI is becoming essential for maintaining competitive positioning. Firms embracing agentic AI in accounting today will position themselves as tomorrow’s advisory leaders, delivering exceptional client value while building more profitable, sustainable practices.
The question is no longer whether agentic AI will transform the accounting profession. The question is how quickly your firm will adopt it, and how strategically you’ll deploy it to create competitive advantage.
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