Every vendor at every conference now has an AI story. Most of it is a search box with better marketing. Here is where it actually earns its keep in a small or mid sized firm, and where it does not.
Where it genuinely helps
Drafting the things nobody enjoys writing. Engagement letters, client update emails, explanations of a technical position in plain language. You still review and sign, but the blank page problem goes away.
Summarising long documents. A hundred page agreement, a batch of correspondence, a client meeting transcript. Getting to the three things that matter is a real saving.
First pass document classification. Sorting what a client dumped into the portal into something ordered.
Research shortcuts. Finding the right area quickly, then verifying properly. The verification step is not optional.
Where it does not, yet
Anything where being confidently wrong is expensive. Tax positions, calculations, citations. These tools produce plausible answers, and plausible is precisely the failure mode you cannot spot at a glance.
Judgment. The reason clients pay you is that you decide things. That has not moved.
The question almost nobody asks
Where does the client data go.
If you paste a client return, a bank statement or a set of financials into a general purpose AI tool, you have sent client financial information to a third party. Under the FTC Safeguards Rule you are required to select service providers capable of maintaining appropriate safeguards and to oversee them contractually. A free tool somebody signed up for on a Tuesday is not that.
The practical position: decide which tools are approved, check what their terms say about training on your input, and tell your staff which ones they may use. Firms that skip this end up with client data in half a dozen services nobody chose.
The realistic advice
Pick two or three uses where the output is reviewed by a human anyway, approve specific tools, write down which ones, and revisit in six months. That is a sensible position. Both wholesale adoption and a blanket ban are worse, because the ban just moves the usage somewhere you cannot see it.