Small business owner Kyle Ray doesn’t have the budget to hire an entire executive team.
“Basically my entire management team is AI,” the Geek Window Cleaning founder told Business Insider. “We’re not a big company, so we can’t afford to pay those people. But we can pay Claude and ChatGPT $40 a month.”
This tax season in particular, he’s leaning into AI capabilities, leveraging what he calls an “AI CFO” despite being a CPA.
Ray, who grew Geek from a side hustle to a six-figure business, uses several AI and software tools. However, for tax questions, we turn to ChatGPT.
For one, he is calling for the emergence of tax strategies that can save money. He said AI helped him consider whether some salespeople could qualify as independent contractors rather than W-2 employees.
“As a business owner, you ask yourself, ‘Can this person be a 1099 contractor or does this person have to be a W-2 employee?'” Ray said. He said this structure could be more advantageous from a tax perspective because employers typically don’t have to pay the same payroll taxes to contractors.
We also use AI to prepare for conversations with CPAs. One of his favorite questions for ChatGPT is, “What questions are you not asking that you should be asking?”
He also uses it to double check what he’s paying. Ray said he uses ChatGPT as an assistant to prepare his taxes and compares the results with those prepared by his accountant. From there, I take any differences or new ideas back to my CPA.
“And they’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, I didn’t catch that,’ or ‘Oh, you’re right, you can do that.’ Or they’ll say, ‘No, you can’t do that because x, y, z,'” Ray said. “So this is a good way to test what your expectations are.”
One of the biggest benefits of using AI tools is accessibility, he said. There’s no need to schedule and prepare a call; you’re “always available.”
Still, his CPA has the final say.
“I can’t trust it 110%,” he said of AI. I think it’s always a good idea to have someone look at it.
CPA Amanda Hung said this is especially true as AI moves from explaining tax concepts to providing advice tailored to a specific business.
AI is especially helpful in explaining basic concepts, such as what depreciation is and how an S corporation works, she said. However, if you’re asking, “Is an S corporation good for me? That’s probably still a question for CPAs, not AIs.”
Han said she and other CPAs use AI tools in their respective practices. While it may be useful for tasks such as identifying relevant court cases, it still falls short when it comes to applying that information to individual customer situations, she said.
“Ultimately, being able to apply a particular case to a particular customer is really the unrealized part for AI,” she said. “It still requires a human touch.”
Han said AI is best used for low-risk tasks that don’t require much judgment, such as organizing transactions or helping executives draft questions for CPAs. But people shouldn’t think that’s always true.
“Double-check and always use your own judgment,” she says, adding that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
For Ray, the appeal of AI goes beyond tax help. That means it’s immediately available.
“A CPA’s time is valuable, and tax season is their busiest time,” he says. “So they spend less time sitting there and just holding your hand. And ChatGPT is holding your hand 24/7.”