The value of a GenAI assistant

If you’re a legal, tax and accounting, or risk and fraud professional, you may already be intrigued by the benefits of generative AI (GenAI). You’re by no means alone. In a recent Thomson Reuters Institute report among legal professionals in corporate departments, 88% believe they can apply GenAI to their work. In comparison, 38% of corporate risk professionals stated they have been educated or trained in proper GenAI usage, and 49% of tax professionals expressed positive sentiments toward the future of this technology.

Given how new this technology is, you may be asking yourself how to get started. One practical approach is seeking a trusted GenAI assistant, a digital tool that handles necessary but time-consuming tasks so professionals can focus on more profitable uses of their time. There’s a wide range of benefits a GenAI assistant can help with, like adding more time, reducing errors and risks, and improving decision making.

Here is the value that a trusted assistant can bring to your work.

Add time and value

In our increasingly complex world, clients or colleagues often urgently need their cases or documents. Time has become ever more in short supply. In this digital age, professionals can retrieve and deliver information quickly. At the same time, a shortage of qualified talent requires many industries to do more with fewer resources.

Another consideration is the value of AI. Professionals offer clients, whether internal or external, unique and valuable expertise. The best use of their time, then, is maximizing the use of that well-honed knowledge. Delivering high-quality guidance and useful insights is one of these professionals' primary motivators; it makes their work engaging and rewarding.

Automating routine tasks

With a GenAI assistant, professionals can add more time and value to their practices by automating routine tasks and jumpstarting work processes.

These tasks can include assembling standard documents and contracts, collating presentations and reports, gathering data, sending informative emails, and even something as simple — yet complex — as determining which tasks need to happen and in what order. Handling grunt work like this is low value and often mundane. However, it still needs to be done — and done right.

In that sense, repetitive tasks do have value. Though they often take up a significant portion of time, they're not where a professional adds the most value for their client. A GenAI assistant can automate tasks like these, generating the needed work quickly and without requiring hours of a professional’s time.

Jumpstarting work processes

There are numerous ways well-designed GenAI technology can streamline workflow for professionals. That’s mainly because the power of GenAI originates not only in digital technology but also in language. AI’s natural-language processing (NLP) capabilities allow digital tools to read text and quickly provide a summary.

Document review is one of the most valuable benefits of GenAI, regardless of profession. AI can search thousands of documents in seconds and identify data and language that any professional is specifically seeking. This ability is something that legal professionals may find particularly helpful since they typically must manage and understand numerous lengthy documents. Legal professionals can also use GenAI to mark up and summarize reference sources for ready use when conducting research and building cases.

In addition, law firms or departments can create a first draft of contracts and agreements. A professional using a GenAI assistant can pull in standard language and customize the terms of the agreement. GenAI can also help in the writing most professionals need to do.

Sometimes, when putting together a report or presentation, a professional can suddenly find themselves facing writer’s block — unsure of what they want or need to say. A good GenAI assistant can help professionals uncover information and insights from professional journals, case law, or other sources appropriate to the profession. It should also be able to identify the source of that information so that they can verify its reliability — and give credit where it’s due.

These automation capabilities allow professionals to quickly and accurately create and review documents while reducing the time to do routine work, thus adding more time to improve client service, minimize human error, and refine decision making.

Reduce errors and risk

Risk takes many forms, depending upon one’s profession. One of the most essential ways to mitigate risk is the ability to access timely, accurate information regarding changes in laws, regulations, court decisions, and best practices. These automated capabilities can limit human errors, another risk source for many professionals. 

Staying current

Professionals in nearly every field must keep track of ever-changing laws, rules, and regulations that their practices, businesses, or clients must address. In our future of professionals report, 90% of respondents surveyed believe that an increasingly regulated world will significantly impact their profession. 

Tax and audit professionals, for instance, must keep current on law changes to ensure regulatory compliance. Failure to do so could result in hefty fines and penalties — and the possibility of losing valuable clients. However, staying informed can be extremely challenging, especially in situations where clients operate across international jurisdictions. 

Keeping up with legislation and regulations has historically required time-consuming research for relevant, authoritative sources; applying the results to a specific situation; and then formulating the conclusion to present to the client or colleague. To identify and thus mitigate compliance risk and human error related to noncompliance, professionals can use AI as part of tax compliance work. An AI assistant can also help monitor these changes and ensure the client maintains compliance. Furthermore, risk professionals can identify risks using AI to safeguard their organization.

Speaking of risk, it's worth pointing out that AI tools have risks of their own to keep in mind. Since it is a relatively new and continuously evolving technology, organizations will want to establish transparency, privacy, and data security protocols. They also should be sure that their GenAI assistant's information originates from reliable sources. 

Another critical point is that AI algorithms continuously undergo machine learning, improving as the professional and the GenAI assistant spend time collaborating. One of the benefits that GenAI provides in this regard is the ability to adapt to changing regulations, legislation, court decisions, and emerging precedents — all in real time as new and crucial information becomes available.

Powering research

We’ve talked about how GenAI can turbo-charge tasks such as document reading, financial audit reviewing, and public records research, all while streamlining a professional’s workflow. A GenAI assistant — if it has proven itself reliable — can allow professionals to research a topic quickly so they can focus on strategic analysis and other added-value benefits.

This advantage of research with GenAI helps professionals reduce the amount of time needed to do mundane tasks. In return, they can use their valuable expertise to determine which part of their research will be used or discover new learnings they may have not been able to before.

Improve decision making

By helping professionals plow through large amounts of data and identify potential risks, an AI assistant’s value also comes from its ability to boost decision making. It can sort through evidence and detail to make quick, reliable determinations regarding the direction of a case, a potential instance of fraudulent activity, or changes in domestic or international regulations that could significantly impact a business’s operations.

Uncovering insights

Since every profession is awash in data, every professional needs to separate the wheat from the chaff via data analytics to identify the information that’s truly valuable to their work. With its capabilities of rapidly analyzing millions of documents and data points, a GenAI tool can reveal patterns, historical trends, and past cases that can help the professional develop insights to shed light on current cases and audits. 

Case in point: by providing these kinds of data analytics, a GenAI assistant can allow a tax and accounting professional involved with audit engagement to focus on applying their higher-value expertise to complex analyses, long-range strategies, and other decision-making circumstances. For government agencies involved in uncovering fraud, GenAI can pore through vast amounts of public records to identify patterns that could signify fraudulent activity or false positive alerts.

Forecasting scenarios

AI isn’t only useful for revealing past insights; it can also help illuminate future possibilities. It’s impossible to predict the future with certainty, of course. But, by identifying past patterns and noting real-time changes in laws and other sources of information, decision-makers can plot out more plausible future scenarios that can help them anticipate potential risks that their firms, businesses, or clients might need to plan for.

Choosing an AI assistant

There are so many benefits professionals should look for when considering a GenAI assistant. It's crucial for professionals to use an AI assistant created by experts with deep domain knowledge, as the assistant can inherently understand a professional’s industry-specific nuances and needs. A truly valuable AI assistant should access only reliable information when the professional’s needs involve trends, data, and other types of research. 

The company providing an AI assistant should have a continuous plan for innovation to ensure the tool will become even more helpful, accurate, and efficient in the future, evolving as one’s profession evolves. A question any professional should ask should be, will this tool help me uncover insights and meet challenges for situations that have yet to arise? With the latest technology, you should be able to clarify the complex. 

Legal, tax and accounting, and risk and fraud professionals need a GenAI assistant that can help them in their everyday work. Let us show you CoCounsel, our trusted GenAI assistant. It can perform entire workflows; complete sophisticated research tasks; and analyze dense, voluminous information — then deliver reliable, accurate, and thorough answers as quickly as you need them. 

CoCounsel should stand out for professionals seeking a professional-grade GenAI solution. Unlike other AI tools that focus on single tasks, we’ve designed it to manage entire workflows, providing seamless integration and enhanced productivity. Its advanced learning capabilities ensure that it continuously evolves, understanding the intricacies of work and keeping pace with industry changes. CoCounsel serves as a true assistant, streamlining current tasks while also anticipating future needs — making it an indispensable partner in clarifying the complexities of your professional landscape.

A reliable GenAI assistant will prove invaluable — regardless of your profession. We are continuously innovating and developing AI technology like CoCounsel so you can know today and navigate tomorrow with unwavering confidence.