The accounting AI market has never had more tools competing for your attention. Here's what practitioners are actually running — not what vendors are selling.
Every year since 2022, someone has declared that AI is about to transform accounting practice. Every year, those predictions have been partially right and mostly early. In 2026, something shifted.
The shift isn't dramatic — it's operational. Firms that were piloting AI tools in 2023 and 2024 are now running them in production. The question isn't whether to try AI anymore. It's which tools are worth the integration headache and which ones are still more demo than delivery.
Here's where practitioners are actually seeing results:
Tax preparation automation.
The clearest wins are in document processing and draft preparation. SurePrep (now part of Thomson Reuters) ingests source documents, applies prior-year context, and produces draft returns ready for professional review. Firms using it report cutting review time per return from two to three hours down to thirty to forty minutes on straightforward individual returns. That math matters when you're running three hundred returns a season with the same staff you had two years ago.
Research and drafting.
Thomson Reuters CoCounsel, built on Checkpoint Edge, handles research and memo drafting inside existing tax workflows. If your firm subscribes to Checkpoint, you may already have access. The practical use case: asking it to summarize recent rulings relevant to a specific client situation or draft a first-pass tax memo takes minutes instead of hours. It's not a replacement for tax judgment. It's a replacement for the first two hours of grunt work.
Bookkeeping automation.
Botkeeper and Vic.ai are the two names you'll hear most often from firms that have gone beyond standard platform automation. Botkeeper's value: it automates transaction categorization and reconciliation, letting one bookkeeper manage forty to fifty clients instead of fifteen to twenty. The honest caveat is that it works best when client data is clean. Messy data upstream means messy categorization downstream — and someone still has to clean it up.
Practice management assistance.
CPA Pilot and similar tools are showing up in larger firms for client communication and workflow management — drafting client-facing memos, summarizing meeting notes, generating standardized deliverable language. Not glamorous. Very time-saving.
What's not working yet: anything that promises to replace professional judgment. AI that "handles advisory conversations," autonomous tax planning agents, tools that claim to file on your behalf without meaningful review. The liability question — covered in a future issue — makes that category a hard pass for any firm that cares about its standing.
The pattern across tools that are working is consistent: they handle high-volume tasks with clear rules. They struggle with ambiguity, client-specific context, and anything requiring professional judgment. That's not a criticism — it's a useful frame for deciding what belongs in your practice.
MYCPE ONE launched AI-powered peer benchmarking for CPA firms — lets you compare your firm’s metrics against anonymized cohorts in real time. Worth a look if you do any peer benchmarking or need to make the case for staffing decisions.
Xero’s JAX AI integration now lets users complete accounting tasks through conversational requests, reducing the menu-drilling that frustrates new staff and clients. In expanded beta as of this issue.
The IRS expanded its AI use cases from 54 in 2024 to 129 in early 2026. What that means for your clients’ returns is the focus of Issue #2.
Only 37% of accounting firms are actively investing in AI training for their employees, per Karbon’s State of AI in Accounting survey. Firms that are training have a real near-term advantage — and a recruiting one.
The share of accounting firms actively investing in AI training for employees, according to Karbon's State of AI in Accounting survey. That means 63% are not — while their competitors are building the capability.
What it is: An AI research and drafting assistant built into Checkpoint Edge, Thomson Reuters' tax research platform. It's an add-on or integrated feature depending on your existing plan — not a standalone subscription.
What it does well: Tax and legal research retrieval is fast and accurate within the Thomson Reuters knowledge base. Memo drafting from research results is genuinely useful. Saves real time on the first-orientation work where you spend an hour just getting oriented to a new issue before you can actually advise on it.
What it doesn't do well: It's bounded by the Thomson Reuters ecosystem. If your answer isn't in Checkpoint, CoCounsel won't find it. Treat it like a first-year associate: capable and fast, but not ready to sign the memo.
Pricing: Included in some TR enterprise plans; add-on pricing varies. Call your TR rep — pricing has been in flux as they integrate SurePrep and expand AI features.
If your firm subscribes to Thomson Reuters Checkpoint: Log in and look for the CoCounsel tab. Run a research query on something you handled recently. Compare its answer to what you already know. Fifteen minutes will tell you whether it's ready for your workflow.
If you're not a TR subscriber: open Botkeeper's free demo (botkeeper.com). Run through their sample client workflow. The categorization demo is realistic enough to tell you if it fits your client mix.
