Becoming the Agentic Accountant

Stop prompting, start delegating – put AI agents to work in your firm

For the past three years accountants have been learning to prompt. We have asked chatbots to summarise a document, draft a client email or explain a tax ruling, then copied the answer back into our own workflow. That era is ending. The tools now landing on our desks are agentic: they hold a goal, plan the steps, use software on our behalf, check their own work and hand back a finished output rather than a paragraph of text. The question for firms is no longer “what can I ask it?” but “what can I hand over, and how do I know it was done properly?”

This session shows what that shift actually looks like inside an accounting practice. Nick Beaugeard will demonstrate live agents working across the jobs firms really do – reconciliations and month-end queries, workpaper preparation, client onboarding, research and file reviews – and will be candid about where agents earn their keep and where they still fail. Just as importantly, we will cover the controls: how to scope an agent narrowly, keep a human in the loop at the right point, evidence what the agent did, and satisfy your professional obligations, privacy duties and PI insurer. Attendees will leave with a practical starting map for their own firm, not a list of apps.

What You’ll Learn:

• What “agentic” actually means – the difference between a chatbot, an assistant, a copilot and an agent, in plain language

• The firm work agents are genuinely good at today – and the work you should not hand over yet

• Live demonstrations across bookkeeping, compliance preparation, advisory research and internal admin

• How to design a safe agent – narrow scope, defined tools, human checkpoints and a reviewable audit trail

• Data, privacy and confidentiality – what leaves your firm, what does not, and what to put in your engagement terms

• Supervision, quality and professional standards – who is responsible when an agent gets it wrong

• Pricing, capacity and staffing – what agents do to the billable hour and to the graduate pipeline

• A 90-day starting plan you can run in your own practice next week

Why Attend?

• See real agents running on real accounting tasks, not vendor marketing videos

• Get an honest account of the failures and near-misses as well as the wins

• Walk away with a governance checklist you can take straight to your partners

• Understand the commercial shift early, while it is still a competitive advantage

Case Studies:

Yes. The session includes de-identified case studies from Australian practices that have deployed agents in production, covering what was automated, what it saved, what went wrong and how the firm responded.

Nature of the Content:

Practical and demonstration-led, pitched from foundation through to intermediate. No technical or coding background is required, but attendees who have already used ChatGPT, Claude or Microsoft Copilot in their day-to-day work will get the most from the second half of the session.

Learning Outcomes:

By the end of this webinar, attendees will:

1. Understand what makes an AI system “agentic”

• Distinguish between chatbots, assistants, copilots and true agents, and explain the difference to colleagues and clients.
• Describe the four capabilities that define an agent: goals, planning, tool use and self-checking.

2. Identify the accounting work that can be delegated today

• Map at least six tasks in a typical practice – from bank reconciliation queries to workpaper drafting – against an agent-readiness test.
• Recognise the tasks that must stay with a qualified human, and articulate why.

3. Evaluate agentic tools against firm requirements

• Apply a simple selection framework covering integration, data residency, cost, auditability and vendor stability.
• Compare general-purpose agents with ledger-native and practice-management-native agents.

4. Design an agent workflow with appropriate controls

• Scope an agent narrowly, define the tools and data it may touch, and place human checkpoints where the risk actually sits.
• Specify the evidence an agent must leave behind so its work can be reviewed and defended.

5. Apply professional, privacy and confidentiality obligations to agent use

• Assess client data handling against the Australian Privacy Principles and firm confidentiality duties.
• Address supervision and quality control expectations, engagement letter wording and PI insurance considerations.

6. Assess the commercial impact on the practice

• Evaluate what agent-assisted delivery does to pricing models, capacity planning and realisation rates.
• Consider the effect on junior roles and how to keep building technical judgement in a team that reviews more than it prepares.

7. Build a practical 90-day adoption plan

• Select one target workflow, define success measures, and run a controlled pilot with a defined rollback point.
• Establish the minimum internal policy, training and register a firm needs before agents touch client work.

Suited to:

This session is designed for accounting, tax and advisory professionals who want to move beyond experimenting with chatbots and start delegating real work to AI agents, safely and defensibly.

It is ideal for:

• Partners & Firm Owners – assessing where agentic AI changes capacity, pricing and firm risk.

• Accountants & Auditors – looking to automate preparation and review work without compromising quality or evidence.

• Tax Professionals – wanting agents for research, document preparation and client correspondence, with appropriate oversight.

• Practice Managers & Operations Leads – responsible for workflow, onboarding, tooling and internal efficiency.

• Business Advisors & Virtual CFOs – using agents for analysis, reporting and client-ready insight.

• Finance Teams in Industry – applying the same techniques to month-end, reporting and internal controls.

The content suits sole practitioners through to large firms. No technical or coding knowledge is assumed; some prior exposure to ChatGPT, Claude or Microsoft Copilot will be helpful but is not required.

You will also be provided with: 

• Access to watch the Live Webinar 
• Opportunities to ask real time questions to the presenter/s
• Poll questions to test your knowledge 
• Access to On Demand recording, which can be viewed multiple times, for as long as required 
• Presenters contact details for follow up questions 
• CPD Quiz (for On Demand recordings)
• CPD Certificate 
• CPD Report – Logged automatically 
• PowerPoint Presentation
• Verbatim Transcript, with Searchability
• Supporting Documentation