Can accounting firms use AI safely?

Yes, for drafting, summarising and first-pass work, with a person verifying before anything is relied upon. What firms should not do is paste client financial information into public consumer tools, where it leaves your control and your obligations entirely.

The useful applications are ordinary rather than transformative, which is a point in their favour. Drafting the client letter that explains a position. Summarising a long document or a piece of guidance to orient yourself before reading properly. Turning rough notes into a structured file note. Explaining an unfamiliar area at a starting level. Each saves minutes on work that happens constantly, and each produces a draft that a person then makes correct.

The risk is specific and worth naming precisely: these tools generate confident, plausible text and will sometimes assert things that are simply wrong. In accounting that could be a misstated threshold, a superseded rule or a calculation approach that sounds right. That is entirely manageable when the output is treated as a first draft checked by someone who knows the answer, and it becomes a professional problem the moment it is treated as work product.

The governance side is where to start. Give people a sanctioned tool operating under business terms inside your own environment, so the useful thing has an approved home and client information is not leaving your control. Write three sentences covering what may never be pasted anywhere. And tidy your document permissions before deploying anything that answers from your own files, since a tool that surfaces whatever a user can already open will find whatever your access control has quietly permitted. If you want it set up with the guardrails first, call 1800 456 567.