AI Readiness Assessment for CPA Firms

A managing partner walks out of a client meeting and gets asked, almost casually, "So what's your firm doing with AI?" The honest answer is usually some mix of "a few people are using ChatGPT on their own" and "we're looking into Copilot." Neither is a plan. Neither is defensible if the client is a healthcare group asking how their PHI is handled, or a defense subcontractor asking about CUI, or the state board asking how your firm supervises the work product.

That gap between quiet, unofficial AI use and a governed rollout is exactly what an AI readiness assessment for CPA firms is meant to close. It is not a sales pitch dressed up as a workshop. It is a structured look at where your firm actually stands, what would break if you pushed a Copilot license to every seat tomorrow, and which two or three workflows would return real hours if you moved on them this quarter.

The partner meeting question no one has a clean answer to

Most Pittsburgh-area accounting firms we talk with — from Wexford up through Cranberry, into the city, and down through Washington and Peters Township — are in the same spot. Staff are experimenting. Nobody has written down what data can go into which tool. The IT vendor is quiet on the subject, or the internal admin is stretched thin on tax season fires. Meanwhile, the AICPA is publishing guidance, insurance carriers are adding AI questions to renewals, and clients are starting to ask.

The risk in accounting isn't that AI gets adopted too fast, it's that it gets adopted invisibly.

Shadow adoption is the real exposure. A senior associate pasting a client's trial balance into a free consumer chatbot to "just clean up the formatting" is not a hypothetical. It is happening in firms right now, and it is happening because there is no policy, no sanctioned tool, and no training that says here is the right way to do this.

Who this AI readiness assessment for CPA firms is built for

This engagement is designed for accounting practices between roughly 10 and 200 staff, based within about 75 miles of Pittsburgh, that hold sensitive client data under IRS Publication 4557, and often under HIPAA, GLBA, or state privacy rules on top of that. If you serve government contractors, CMMC Level 2 may already be on your radar for a subset of your book.

It fits firms that:

• Run on Microsoft 365 or are moving there, and are weighing Microsoft 365 Copilot licensing
• Have staff already using AI tools informally, with no written acceptable-use policy
• Want a written technology roadmap the partners can actually approve, not a vendor deck

If your firm is a two-person shop, this is heavier than you need. If you are a national top-100, you likely have internal capacity we would just complement. Everyone in between is the sweet spot.

What the assessment actually covers

The work runs about three to four weeks and produces a written report the managing partner can hand to the executive committee, the insurance carrier, or a curious client. It is not a checklist exported from a template.

We start with a data and system inventory: where client files live, how they move between your tax software, workpaper tool, document management, and email, and which of those systems already have AI features that are on or off by default. Then a security and identity review of your Microsoft 365 tenant — conditional access, Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels, DLP, external sharing posture — because Copilot inherits every permission mistake your tenant already has.

TL;DR: Copilot doesn't create new confidentiality risk so much as it magnifies whatever access hygiene you already have, which is why the assessment starts there.

From there we move into workflow selection. Not every process is a good AI candidate. Engagement letter drafting, 1040 organizer intake summarization, workpaper review commentary, and internal knowledge search tend to pay back quickly. Full-population audit sampling and anything touching signed opinions do not. We identify two or three candidates for a pilot, size the expected time savings, and flag where a custom AI application or targeted document automation would beat a generic Copilot prompt.

Finally, the deliverable: a written Copilot readiness report, a draft acceptable-use policy tailored to accounting practice, a training outline for partners and staff at different levels, and a 12-month roadmap with budget ranges. If we find gaps in the underlying IT — patching, backup, endpoint protection — those are called out separately so they don't get tangled up with the AI conversation.

Why firms in the Pittsburgh region work with PGH Networks

There are plenty of national firms that will sell you an AI assessment over Zoom. Very few of them will also be the people picking up the phone when a laptop won't boot the morning of an April 14th extension push. We run managed IT, cybersecurity, and a growing AI advisory practice out of the same team, so the readiness report is written by people who know what your environment can actually support on Monday morning.

We are based in the Pittsburgh metro, we work on-site across Allegheny, Butler, Washington, and Westmoreland counties, and we sit on the same side of the table as your partners — not the software vendor's. When the assessment recommends a vCIO engagement, or doesn't, that call is based on what your firm needs, not on a license quota.

The next step

If the partner meeting question is coming and you would rather have a real answer than a hedge, let's schedule a 30-minute scoping call. Reach us at 724.888.7007 or through the contact form, and we'll take it from there.