RPA + AI: How your accounting firm can drive growth through automation

What is agentic AI?

As useful as RPA bots are, many accounting firms discover that these traditional automation tools don't quite meet all their needs. For this reason, many firms are turning to additional AI-powered solutions like agentic AI.

Like RPA bots, AI agents automate specific administrative tasks like data entry and report generation, and they interact with other applications in a human-like manner. But unlike RPA bots, AI agents can reason, make decisions, and take actions based on analysis of both structured and unstructured data. Plus, they can adjust to different, changing situations in real time, allowing the agents to complete tasks without constant human input or supervision.

With agentic automation systems, several agents can also work together at once to achieve broader firm goals. For example, to accelerate the employee onboarding process, a "team" of agents will automatically create an account for the new hire, assign permissions, and add the new hire to the right distribution lists.

Agentic AI uses large language models (LLM), natural language processing (NLP), and generative AI to autonomously execute multi-step workflows - from drafting content like summaries and emails to taking goal-oriented actions like scheduling meetings and analyzing data - saving professionals significant time while reducing the need for constant oversight.

Agentic AI can also reason through complex scenarios and autonomously plan multi-step workflows to achieve specific goals. For example, when tasked with client risk assessment, an agent might automatically extract key client and engagement details from an email, then validate and enhance that data across multiple systems to accelerate acceptance processes and open engagements faster.

Because AI-powered automation solutions can handle complex situations and adapt to a firm's evolving needs, they're extremely valuable to growing accounting firms.