How AI Is Changing the Way CPAs Build Business

Art Kuesel President, Kuesel Consulting
Moving Your Firm Forward

Dean Quiambao, CPA, is a partner and regional technology industry leader for Armanino, a top 20 accounting and consulting firm in Silicon Valley, and even he marvels at how quickly artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing.

Referencing a comment made by Michelle Valentine, co-founder and CEO of Anrok, an AI tax compliance platform, Quiambao says the most underrated statement in the age of AI is: “How fast are you willing to let go of your prior beliefs?”

He and his colleague Sam Coursey, who leads Armanino’s business development and sales team, are quickly trying to implement as much change as possible into their firm’s business development process. Like Quiambao and Coursey, other certified public accounting (CPA) firms are doing the same, finding that AI tools can help uncover new opportunities, speed up research, and personalize outreach in ways that weren’t possible a year ago.

To explore how AI is reshaping CPA business development, I interviewed four experts who are putting these tools to work every day to stay competitive in an increasingly AI-driven marketplace: John Atkinson, founder of GrowthLogik; Neil Barrow, founder of EnabledBD; and Coursey and Quiambao.

To what extent has AI affected, changed, or influenced your business development processes?

Atkinson: AI allows me to do the work of literally four people. I have a client that had 30 business development activities he wanted to do, and within seconds, I built a prioritized roadmap for the client. It’s also made it easier for me to research and prepare questions when meeting with a new firm.

Barrow: AI allows us to more easily do research, iterate ideas, build ideal client profiles, create business development plans, and understand the market and the problems our clients may be dealing with. However, with that comes the need for more effective communication with our clients and prospects.

Coursey: Our sales and business development processes haven’t fundamentally changed with AI, but it’s helped us get better answers faster, get higher-quality touchpoints with clients, move more quickly, and remove administrative burdens.

What impact do you expect AI to have on the future of business development?

Atkinson: It’s certainly going to have a massive impact on the way firms go to market. Also, AI is reducing the number of billable hours and very soon that’ll free up practitioners’ time, allowing them to be a true trusted advisor for more clients.

Barrow: What’s coming is all the possibilities around relationship intelligence. For instance, I currently use BD Buddy, an AI-powered recruitment platform, which sits in on calls and helps make connections.

Quiambao: Most accounting and finance professionals (about 80%) are using large language models (LLMs) to help them with the basics (e.g., writing emails). But people like Coursey are building things from the ground up. While AI’s impact is going to be great, it’s going to take a very large upskilling for all of us to use it to its full potential.

What tools do you or your clients use, and how do they help?

Atkinson: I use the GrowBIG AI tool by Mo Bunnell, a former actuary who writes a lot of books on business development and professional services. He’s taken all his content, notes, books, podcast episodes, everything, and dumped it into this LLM—and it’s free for anyone to use. I also use Beautiful.ai, ChatGPT, Clay, HubSpot, Propense.ai, Salesforce, Unify, and many others. There are a zillion tools out there, and because there are so many, I think the bottom line is that firms need to carefully think about how they can slowly adopt the right tools to make them more effective.

Barrow: There are some great tools being developed, such as Navi, a recording software that you can ask questions related to business development. There are also some great tools already out there, like Introhive and Propense.ai, which can help suggest conversations and actions to take with clients. For example, the tool might suggest a client or prospect that would be a strong candidate for client accounting services. These tools are accelerating because they integrate with LLMs—like ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity—to connect the dots (e.g., create a business development follow-up script). I’ve been testing Google NotebookLM to dump all my transcripts, trainings, and other projects and communications with clients into a folder and ask it questions.

Quiambao: Coursey built us an agent called Wingman. He’s trained the agent to be able to suggest the types of questions we should ask and what information we should know before a client meeting. It’s the most-used agent in the firm. We’re also using Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI. We also encourage our vendor partners to use AI to help solve our problems. An example of this is our relationship with LinkedIn and their Sales Navigator tool.

What are some downsides business developers should watch out for?

Atkinson: It’s important to get clarity to avoid getting overwhelmed. Don’t look for the perfect tool when a really good one is right in front of you. Also, face-to-face conversations will never be replaced—clients like to work with people, not computers. Those fundamentals have to stay in place.

Barrow: Relying too much on automation is a potential downside. We’re starting to be able to tell when writing is done with AI, especially on LinkedIn. When ChatGPT was first coming out, I was using it to build tools for my job, but I noticed I didn’t like how it made me feel when I got the results—I feel like it made me dumber, and I’d have to start over. However, I did find it helpful to ideate, so that’s where I get the most value. Overall, picking up the phone and going to in-person events are still going to be important in the future (if not more so) because if everybody’s going to be trying to automate relationship development, then it’s no longer going to be a differentiator or accelerant to building better relationships.

Coursey: I think you always have to be cautious of your LLM getting tripped up over requests. It doesn’t do you any good to be really fast but wrong.

While AI offers CPA firms tremendous business development potential, it comes with a learning curve and requires a thoughtful balance between technology and human touch that enables trusting client relationships. After all, as these four experts highlight, the best business developers aren’t being replaced by AI—they’re the ones embracing it and learning how to use it wisely.

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