You do not need a custom-built AI system, a subscription to six different tools, or a weekend course to get your first real hours back. You need three specific tasks off your desk by Friday, and every one of them is something AI already does well today, for free or close to it.
Most tax pros I talk to are stuck at the exact same starting point. They have opened a chat tool once or twice, asked it something vague, gotten a mediocre answer, and quietly decided AI is not for their kind of work. That verdict says more about asking it something vague than it does about AI itself. Give it a real, specific task and it earns its keep in a single afternoon.
Here are the three to start with this week, in order, plus the one hard rule that comes with all of it: what never goes anywhere near client data.
Start Here, Not With the Complicated Stuff
Ignore anything you have heard about building an AI agent, automating your intake, or running unattended workflows. That is real, and it is coming, but it is not week one. Week one is simply using AI on purpose, a few times a day, for real tasks, until reaching for it becomes as automatic as reaching for your tax software. Everything else builds on that habit.
The First Thing: Draft Client Emails in Plain Language
Every tax pro writes the same handful of explanations over and over: what a notice means, why a refund is delayed, what happens next in a case, why an extension does not extend the payment deadline. Instead of writing each one from scratch, describe the situation to AI in a sentence or two and ask it to draft the explanation in plain, calm, client-facing language. You edit the two or three sentences that carry your actual judgment, and you send it. What used to take fifteen minutes takes three.
The Second Thing: Summarize Guidance Before You Read It Cold
A new Revenue Procedure, a Notice, an update to the Internal Revenue Manual. You still have to read the source and confirm it yourself, no exceptions there. But asking AI to summarize what changed and why it might matter to your practice before you dive into the full document turns an hour of cold reading into fifteen minutes of focused reading. You are not outsourcing the judgment. You are outsourcing the first pass.
The Third Thing: Build Document Request Lists Instead of Writing Them From Memory
Describe the case type, unfiled years, a payroll tax issue, an offer in compromise, and ask AI to build the full document request list for that specific situation. You review it against your own checklist and send it. This is the exact kind of task that eats a chunk of your week without ever requiring your license, and it is one of the best first wins because the output is quick to check against what you already know.
The Prompt That Actually Works
The difference between a useless AI answer and a genuinely useful one usually comes down to four things you tell it up front. Give it a role: act as an enrolled agent with fifteen years of collections experience. Give it the context: here is the client’s situation, in plain terms. Give it the command: your task is to draft, summarize, or list, stated exactly. And give it the format: a table, a short letter, a checklist, whatever you actually need to use.
“Help me with an offer in compromise” gets you a generic answer. Role, context, command, and format, in that order, gets you something you can actually use in the next ten minutes.
What Never Goes to AI
Here is the part that matters more for us than for almost anyone else teaching AI right now. Section 7216 of the Internal Revenue Code governs how a return preparer discloses and uses taxpayer information, and pasting a client’s return data, transcript, or personal identifying information into a consumer AI tool is a disclosure question, not a convenience question. The FTC Safeguards Rule and IRS Publication 4557 both expect a written information security plan, and AI tools belong inside that plan with named approved uses and named prohibited ones.
The practical rule is short. Redact names and identifying numbers before you paste anything. Never upload a complete return or a full transcript set to a consumer-tier tool. Use business or enterprise tiers that do not train on your data when the work is genuinely client-facing. And remember that anything AI drafts is a first pass, never a filing position. Your judgment, and your Circular 230 responsibility, do not transfer to a machine no matter how good the draft looks.
The good news is that the three tasks above need none of that risk. Drafting a generic explanation, summarizing public guidance, and building a checklist all work perfectly well without a shred of client data ever touching the tool.
What to Do This Week
Pick one of the three. Just one. Use it on three real tasks this week, with the four-part prompt format, and notice how much time comes back. Then add the second one next week, and the third the week after. This is not a weekend project. It is a habit, built one real task at a time, and it compounds faster than almost anything else you could spend a Saturday learning.
I am on a mission to improve the lives of licensed tax professionals by showing them there are more options in IRS representation, so you can improve client quality, increase revenue, cut the hours, and get your life back. AI, used carefully and with the confidentiality rules respected, is one of the fastest levers available to get there.
Reply and tell me which of the three you are trying first. I read every one.
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Here’s to working smarter, not harder!
And a brighter future for your tax practice!
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I hope this helps.
If you have any questions, please reach out to us.
Have a GREAT day,
With Love,
Dan
Dan Henn, CPA, CTR™
Co-Founder, Tax Resolution Academy®
Managing Member
Tax Pro Academy, LLC
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