Review of Thomson Reuters Checkpoint Edge – The Accounting Technology Lab Podcast – Sept 2024

Hosts Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA, review Thomson Reuters Checkpoint Edge with CoCounsel. Designed for tax professionals and firms, Checkpoint Edge with CoCounsel is a research platform that includes new AI-assisted research capabilities to help tax professionals get trusted answers to complex tax research questions by using everyday language.

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Transcript (Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  00:00

Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab, sponsored by CPA practice advisor, with your host, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley,

Randy Johnston  00:10

welcome to the accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnston with my co presenter Bryan Tankersley, Now Brian and I have been around tax research a long time, and this will affect many of your practices, because you use checkpoint edge. But we want to talk about the checkpoint edge with CO counsel, which was released on April 24 of 2024 now co counsel is a generative AI assistant for tax research, our theory, and it’s getting proven more and more by various vendors, is that AI will be built into the tools that you use every day, and it won’t be your AI leverage won’t all come from generic tools Like copilot 365, or chatgpt, you will actually benefit from the work that the vendors do inside their platforms. Now this gen AI tool was built on Amazon Web Services, and that does give Thompson the advantage around the world. We know this evolved up through the legal market in their particular instance, but we were waiting for the accounting version to be released. Probably should have covered it with you in a technology lab sooner, but we wanted it to settle down and figure out how the training will work with your firms and other pieces. So Brian, what would you like our listeners to know about checkpoint edge with CO counsel?

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  01:50

Well, I think you know, again, I think anytime you’re working with generative AI, you should know enough about the topic you’re researching to kind of fact check it and for it to have it make sense, but it does an exceptional job of summarizing information from people you know. Again, if you think about the guidance that checkpoint provides, as does, as cch does through their tax research network, it’s, you know, it’s, it’s a, there is some level of summarization in here. Now, what’s different about this is that we’re not in a space where we can tolerate hallucinations. And so I would expect that the folks at Thomson Reuters have have actually tuned these, these AI models on here to to not just make things up. We’ve all heard about generative AI, making things up that just don’t exist. And and again, there’s there have been some, some attorneys that have faced sanctions from courts for turning in briefs they wrote with chat GPT, where it literally made up, not only the brief, but made up cases, fictitious cases, because of this hallucination feature. So I think, I think it’s very important that we, that we acknowledge that this hallucination is a real thing, and it is something that is that can be catastrophic if you’re not looking at at the information. And so these tuned models from folks like TR and from, again, from, from folks like Wolters Kluwer, I think are going to be inherently more trustable for use than than you what you would get if you just use chat GPT or just use the Microsoft models, because, again, I think they’re going to be tuned to take that hallucination out.

Randy Johnston  03:42

Yeah, so it turns out that Thompson Reuters on their website, Paul’s co counsel a professional grade generative AI assistant. And that is true, and it does give you the ability to have simple or complex tax questions answered faster than poring over multiple references or looking through additional resources. You know, so much of the time when Brian and I are consulting, we listen to firms doing Google search and so forth. But the Gen AI assistant also uses some natural language capabilities behind the scenes, and it also does source validation, so the idea of not hallucinating is a big deal, because the citations and links to checkpoint editorial content is inside the searches, and you also have The ability to perhaps let junior staff find trusted answers this way. So all of those things, I think, contribute to these research tools. Now this is in addition to the traditional checkpoint edges, where they’ve got comprehensive and authoritative content and they. Have trusted public sites like irs.gov that they might use, in addition to their daily news and expert insights. So the whole idea of this is to get some time savings out of this now they also have planning and advisory tools that you can look at, including advisory maps. So Brian, in this particular case, you know the advisory maps, what might you comment on those?

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  05:32

Well, effectively, these, these look like they’re basically cookbook for how to, how to advise people and how to, how to figure out, figure out different options for maximizing tax benefits and for taking advantage of deductions. And it’s, it’s actually cookbook. I mean, if you’re, you know, I’ve got this in the video version of our podcast. I’ve actually got the screen showing that actually will, will show one of these maps. But what this does, what it really does is it really kind of reduces it down to a series of steps. And so it effectively is cookbook figuring out how to how to go forward here. And so this is, you know, again, this is this, this idea of having a step by step guidance and implementation aids to help you get this done, means that junior staff can do much more of the legwork than you traditionally might have, might have had, because it’s you have much more structure that you can impose through these these maps. And

Randy Johnston  06:33

you know, I at some risk, since you know, our podcast is produced by CPA practice advisor. I am going to go ahead and call out that this advisory map was named winner of the 2024, accounting today, top new products this advisory map feature and it is, you know, quite worth seeing as well beyond that, then are some of the state tax pieces. So, yeah, Brian, why don’t you take a look at some of the enhanced search results that are out there?

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  07:07

Yeah. So, so as we’re kind of, as we’re kind of looking at this, you can you have, again, concept markers in here, which is, which, again, is designed to give you some dialog based research. So you can resort things to include particular concepts and to summarize things through there. For salt research time, they also have a wide range of state charts that you can use and along with cross links to the state tax reporters and other other research tools, again, that are included in checkpoint, yeah.

Randy Johnston  07:40

So you know, as Brian is calling that out, we we have done other technology labs where we talked about salt sales and use tax types of products, and the charts in here are quite good. And in another technology lab, we’ll actually spend time on the privacy regulations, where so many new privacy regulations are coming along, but I like state charts, which lay out what happens on a state by state basis. Well, you’re kind of getting the drift that this checkpoint edge with CO counsel may do some other things for you. For example, we understand, you will have a lot of detail that you have to look through. But rather than reading a document that’s multi pages for 1520, minutes, 30 minutes an hour, co counsel will actually see very small differences within the documents and summarize it for you citing as well. So it does give you a chance to, you know, parse information intuitively with this generative AI type of approach. So Brian, any parting thoughts for our listeners today?

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  09:00

Well, you know, if I’m, if I’m looking at the AI revolution, you know, that’s it’s come to big companies already. Silicon Valley certainly has a lot of AI out there. I think the reality of where we are today is that for a lot of practitioners, this is one of the first safe products that’s out there. You know, beyond just simple optical character recognition, like you get with payables automation platforms like Bill and seat and expense automation tools like Zoho expense, but this is really one of the ways I think, that you can start to experiment and understand the AI future so that you can, so that you can figure out how to advise your clients on it. You know, this is AI. Is one of those things that you just have to get your feet wet with. And this is a good place where I think, you know, I think the AI. Can save you quite a bit of time, especially during times of the year when you don’t really have time to sell, so that you can maybe have a little bit better work life balance.

Randy Johnston  10:10

You know, Brian, you really just hit on a real key point that I hadn’t even considered before our conversation. This is a way to practice safe, computing safe AI, you know, we’ve talked about safe computing with antivirus and multi factor in prior Technology Labs, but I had not considered how many practitioners are doing unsafe research. They They this using Google, having non sighted resources and so forth, and the hallucinations that you were talking about earlier. This is safe AI using the generative AI checkpoint edge co counsel model. So if you’re not familiar with it, ask your Thomson Reuters representatives about it. Get some education on it. It’ll help you and your entire team. We appreciate you listening in on today’s technology lab. We’ll talk to you again very soon.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  11:07

Thank you for sharing your time with us. We’ll be back next Saturday with a new episode of the technology lab from CPA practice advisor. Have a great week.

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