Accountancy Practices
It can draft them, and your engagement letters, for a person at your firm to check and send, but the confidentiality judgement stays yours: CPA Ontario lets confidential information into an AI tool only where the environment is verified as secure and compliant, and CPABC encourages keeping it out even then. The AI work behind Autopilot Assistant is processed in the United States.
It is the second week of March and you are typing the same email again. Thank you for these; we are still missing the following. The list is different for every client — a T5 from one bank, the T3 a fund company has not issued yet, the receipt for an RRSP contribution made in February — so it cannot go out as one message to everybody, and before each one you open whatever the client sent at eleven on Sunday night to see which slips you can stop asking for. In January it was the engagement letters, the same two pages a few hundred times with a different name and fee on each. None of this is accounting, and little of it can be billed. All of it goes out under your name, and every one of those emails carries details of a client's money that your Code of Professional Conduct obliges you to keep confidential, which is exactly why none of it has gone anywhere near a public chatbot.
In Ontario, only on a condition, and the condition is yours to meet; British Columbia's position is in the questions below. CPA Ontario's June 2026 guidance on the responsible use of AI puts it in one sentence under Rule 208: members must ensure that no confidential, restricted or personally identifiable information is entered into AI tools unless the environment is verified as secure and compliant with all privacy and professional obligations. We can describe the environment; we cannot do the verifying for you, and we hold no approval from CPA Ontario or any other regulator to lend you. Here is what you would be verifying against: a private virtual machine set up for your firm alone; access only to the mailbox, calendar and Drive you connect, each granted separately; the AI work processed in the United States, with the machine itself in Canada; one memory shared by everyone at the firm; and conversations that, once deleted, are gone from your list but not from the assistant's own copy. If any of that fails your test, it fails before the first slip goes in.
Out of Canada while it is read: the AI work on what the assistant reads is processed in the United States, though the machine and what it keeps are in Canada. Our privacy page sets out what is processed where, what is stored where, and for how long. The guidance to Rule 208 in CPA Ontario's Code already anticipates this: it says the use of cloud or other off-shore computing and storage may increase security requirements and raise concerns about access to information under anti-terrorism legislation in some jurisdictions, and that it may be prudent to tell clients about your storage and security policies. Rule 208.3 also requires a member or firm to limit access to a client's confidential information to those with a legitimate purpose, and to obtain the written agreement of any such person to preserve its confidentiality. Whether a software provider counts as such a person is for you and your regulator to settle, not for us; if you decide it does, raise it with us before any client document goes in, and keep our answer in writing.
Three things, all built from wording your firm already uses. The reminder email, in your words, listing what this client has still to send; because it reads PDFs, once someone has saved the slips that arrived on Sunday night to the Drive you connected, they can come off the list before the draft is written rather than after. The engagement letter, one per client, as a Word document or a PDF, from the template and terms you set. And a spreadsheet of what each client still has to send, which it can rebuild on a schedule so the list is there on Monday morning without anybody asking for it. It keeps the thread across the job, so a second reminder builds on the first instead of starting again from a blank page.
A person, if you keep it that way, and you either way. The assistant needs one permission to read your mailbox and a second, granted separately, to send from it, so a firm can let it read the replies coming in and never let it send a word; every email then leaves by someone's hand. CPA Ontario's guidance is the reason to keep it that way: accountability ultimately rests with CPAs, every AI-generated output must be thoroughly reviewed, verified and fully understood before it is used, and under Rule 205 members are responsible for ensuring that nothing AI-generated in a communication is false or misleading. A reminder that asks for a slip the client sent last week is a small mistake, but it is made in your name, and checking the list against the file is the step that stays with a person.
It should not, and nobody at the firm should ask it to. It is not a research tool, and tax law is exactly what it is not for. When a client replies to a reminder asking whether a parent counts as a dependant, that question goes on an accountant's list. The advice inside your engagement letter and your reminder template is the firm's, written by people who sign their names to it; the assistant is given that wording to reuse, not asked to supply advice of its own. Every figure and date in a draft, whether a deadline, an instalment or a fee, is checked by a person before it goes out.
No. It connects to mail, calendar, file storage (Drive) and code repositories, plus a Telegram thread if you want one, each separately and each yours to switch off, and to nothing else: no tax preparation software, no practice-management system, no CRA service. It is not tax software. Whatever it needs from those systems has to reach it as a file, such as last season's engagement letter or a client's slip checklist saved as a PDF to the Drive you have connected.
Its memory, first. What the assistant remembers is shared by everyone at the firm rather than kept private to the person who asked, and the guidance to Rule 208 in CPA Ontario's Code, written about conflicts of interest, shows why that is not a detail: there is a general legal presumption that what one person in an organisation knows is shared with the others, which a firm may rebut by showing that effective institutional mechanisms limit the sharing. A memory common to everyone is not one of those mechanisms. If you prepare returns for both spouses in a separation, or for two businesses in a dispute with each other, keep those files out of it. Second, deleting a conversation clears it from your list, not from the assistant's own copy. Third, the United States, set out above.
An illustration. The firm, the client and every detail below are invented; nothing here describes a customer. Picture Halyard Street Accounting, two partners and a bookkeeper preparing a few hundred personal returns each spring. Before the season they give the assistant two documents and two connections. The documents are last year's engagement letter and the slips reminder the senior partner rewrote twice until it sounded like her. The connections are a Drive that holds only this season's client documents, and the tax mailbox with permission to read but not to send. In January the assistant produces a Word engagement letter for each returning client from the template and that client's details in the Drive, carrying one new paragraph the partners wrote themselves: that the firm uses an assistant whose processing happens in the United States. A partner reads every letter against the client's file before it is signed. In March an invented client, Ms Okafor, emails four PDFs late on a Sunday: a T4, two T5s and a charitable donation receipt. The bookkeeper saves them to the Drive, where last year's checklist for Ms Okafor also lists a T3 from a mutual fund and an RRSP contribution receipt. The assistant reads the four PDFs and drafts a reply in the firm's words: thank you for these four, and we are still missing the T3 and the RRSP receipt. On Monday the bookkeeper deletes the RRSP line, because she remembers Ms Okafor saying she had stopped contributing; nothing in the Drive said so, and the assistant had no way of knowing. She sends the rest from her own mailbox and tells the assistant, so the next reminder does not ask for it again. Ms Okafor's answer asks whether she can claim her mother as a dependant. Nobody puts that to the assistant; it goes on a partner's list. Every Monday the assistant rebuilds the spreadsheet of what each client still has to send, so both partners start the week from the same list. What the illustration leaves out on purpose: any number of hours saved, any regulator's approval, and anyone skipping the read before sending.
It may be. CPABC's June 2025 review of its Code and AI tools says registrants should ensure no confidential information is included in what they give an AI tool, should find out how the tool uses and stores it, and, even after checking the tool's operation and its compliance with privacy legislation, are highly encouraged to refrain from including confidential information in their queries. Taken at its word, that leaves the assistant your firm's wording and none of your clients: redrafting the reminder template, tightening the engagement letter, building the blank checklist, with every name, number and slip kept out. That is a much smaller job than the one described above, and for a BC firm that follows its regulator's encouragement it is the honest version. This page quotes only CPA Ontario and CPABC; if your firm is regulated elsewhere, read what your own provincial body has said.
Both sources that speak to it point the same way. The guidance to Rule 208 in CPA Ontario's Code says it may be prudent to disclose storage and security policies to clients. The federal Privacy Commissioner's guidelines on processing across borders, which explain PIPEDA rather than any provincial privacy law, treat sending information to a third party for processing as a use rather than a disclosure, so fresh consent is not needed where the purpose is unchanged, but they still require transparency: telling clients their information may be processed in another jurisdiction and, while there, may be accessed by its courts, law enforcement and national security authorities. The firm also stays responsible for that information and must use contractual or other means to give it comparable protection while it is processed. If your engagement letter reaches every client before the season starts, it is the obvious place; the assistant can draft the paragraph, and what it says is your decision. None of this is legal advice.
It can be set to do work later, on a schedule, and sending is a permission you grant or withhold on its own. With sending withheld, a schedule means the week's reminders are drafted and waiting for someone to read and send. With sending granted, the assistant could send them itself; weigh that against the CPA Ontario guidance quoted above, which says every AI-generated output must be reviewed, verified and understood before it is used.
No. A person sets Autopilot up with you, and there is no form to sign up through: we build the machine, talk through what it ought to know about the firm, and connect the accounts you pick and no others. For a first tax season, a Drive that holds only that season's client documents, and permission to read, but not send from, the mailbox the slips arrive in, is a narrow place to start.
Setting this up is our work, not a form you fill in. We go through your wording with you, and you can change any of it afterwards.
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