Getting unstuck by rethinking processes, people, and AI

Samantha Bowling, CPA, CGMA, managing partner of GWCPA, shares how her firm eliminated busy season, limited hours, and improved morale while still meeting client needs. She also explained how thoughtful use of AI can support advisory services, boost efficiency, and help small firms get “unstuck.”

This episode of the JofA podcast was recorded at Digital CPA in National Harbor, Md., in December 2025.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• The steps Bowling’s firm took to eliminate traditional busy season.
• How productivity and morale were affected by limiting hours and weekend work.
• The value the firm has found in “Foresight Fridays.”
• Practical ways AI tools can speed tax research while managing regulatory concerns.
• How custom AI bots can support internal efficiency.
• Why clearer communication and accountability helped the firm solve problems it didn’t know it had.

Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:

— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Neil Amato at Neil.Amato@aicpa-cima.com.

Transcript

Neil Amato: This is Neil Amato with the Journal of Accountancy. Welcome back to the JofA podcast. Recording at Digital CPA in National Harbor, Md. I’m joined by Samantha Bowling, managing partner of GWCPA in the Washington, D.C., area. Samantha or Sam — you go by both — welcome to the JofA podcast.

Samantha Bowling: Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

Amato: First, tell me how long you’ve been the managing partner at GWCPA.

Bowling: I would say having the title of managing partners in two years, but having the role and responsibility has probably been about 15 years. We actually just transformed our firm two years ago, when I became managing partner, we moved our location. We changed our name. We created values and actually have a totally different firm that we were growing 30 years ago. So I’ve been there 32 years. I started out as a staff accountant, and our firm’s been around almost 80 years now.

Amato: Oh, wow. But that was a lot of upheaval in one shot.

Bowling: It was.

Amato: You said something to me in our email discussion about potential topics, and someone like me who doesn’t have a CPA background, I was really intrigued. You mentioned, “How we have eliminated busy season.” I was like, “Whoa. What’s that about?” So tell me more.

Bowling: I’m very supportive of the pipeline issue and understanding that people don’t want to work all these hours. We can’t control the deadlines. We’ve tried to control the deadlines to say, everything’s due March or April. But we don’t really get the information in time to do it that way. So we said, well, we’re just going to put everyone on extension.

Everybody went on extension, for the first time ever in our firm. And then we shifted the work out to September or October. Now, we went to working — instead of saying you have to work a minimum of 55 hours, you can’t work more than 50, was the first year. No weekends, no weekend work. You can’t work more than 50 hours. Our firm, we pay for overtime, but we’re like, if you go over 50 hours, we’re not paying you for overtime.

It’s funny how that motivates people when you’re not going to pay them for it, that they actually stop doing it. We started having people plan vacations during busy season and take off, and we were really scared about how will that impact our clients. Most of the time, if you have really truly advisory services, they don’t really care when their tax return is done because they already know what their tax situation was.

So we built up to this. We had to change our business model to provide services, and then move the compliance work to well, it doesn’t really matter when it gets done, because we’ve already had the conversation with you.

Amato: A lot of innovation. I really like the point about overtime because if you say, don’t work more, then people are going to be more productive. They’re going to be better off in the long run. I don’t know if there’s more to say about that.

Bowling: Well, also, one really cool thing we did to also help with that is we created Foresight Fridays. That’s one of our values, and Foresight Friday is we do eight Fridays a year where we spend four hours in the morning learning a new tool, an AI or something that you’ve never experienced before, or solving a problem. So solving a problem for the company or solving a problem for a client.

Then they get the rest of the day off, paid time off. But we’ve solved more problems and made things more innovative by doing that. So that’s super exciting. That was another part of that innovation part.

Amato: Innovation definitely a topic of your session. To apply it to the listeners to this podcast and to the Digital CPA attendees, what are some of the ways specifically that AI can boost tax efficiency while navigating regulatory considerations?

Bowling: Well, they’ve been talking here about Blue J, which is one of the tax research softwares, which we were one of the [first] firms to start using that in Maryland a couple of years ago. Just testing it out, and the great efficiency with that is you actually can transfer work.

Everybody gets an email that says, “I have a quick question.”

But it feels like only a partner or somebody at a higher level can answer that question. But now because of the technology and how sophisticated it is, you can pass that email onto a staff member and say, ask BlueJ how to do this. Answer this email, and then tell me if you agree or don’t agree.

So with the email, based on your knowledge, and then they give me the response back and it takes — I already knew 90% of the answers, but I can’t write it as fast as that AI, but I can write the response. But I can verify that it’s correct, and I can save time by doing that and actually not be so stressed about coming up with a right or wrong answer.

Amato: Yeah, with AI, there are plenty of examples of it being fast but not altogether accurate. Varied success, right? Any stories on that topic?

Bowling: I think what people don’t realize is that when you speak to AI — when I say prompting is talking to AI. People don’t understand what prompting is, but really just trying to talk to the AI bot, it’s very important to say, where should they reference or what information should they reference? Restrict what they’re looking at.

Tell them who you are, telling them where you want to look for this information. Like, on resources, BlueJ only accesses the Tax Court documents or what’s actually published. It’s a closed network, so it doesn’t bring out anybody else’s information that’s on the Internet. So not that it can’t be wrong, but you specifically have to say, what tax year are you asking about?

Because if you ask it a generic question, it could be a totally different answer depending on what year it is. That’s one thing we had to learn and teach our team to make sure you’re very specific on what you’re asking for when using AI.

Amato: Do you want to go back in time a little bit more and talk about, you’re one of the pioneers of using AI. I think AI in auditing specifically, I think back in 2018?

Bowling: That’s correct. The funny thing is, we don’t do audits anymore. Yeah. That’s another story for another day. But when I saw the transformation with auditing, because I was like, it actually gave us a targeted plan of where to do spend most of our time in auditing and actually became a tool for risk analysis more than it was a tool for me for auditing.

But we saw that the value in AI was going to be in automation for the other services we were providing for our clients. We figured either we got to go all in and just do audits or we got to let that go because it was something we just did in the summertime. If you’re going to move to advisory work and support your clients all year round, you can’t be busy in the summer doing audit and then go back to getting all your clients caught up.

Amato: We talked about eliminating busy season. But also in your speaker bio is, enhance advisory services and upskill the profession. To continue that theme, it says, “Turning transformation into a team powered advantage.” Tell me some about the advisory and upskilling part of using AI.

Bowling: Well, we first realized using AI in small firms. We’re less than 20 people. Like, we didn’t have written SOPs. We didn’t do any of that stuff. We didn’t have time to do any of that stuff, so AI actually helped us do that much quicker. We had all of our team use ChatGPT with their own custom bots, come up with their own SOPs for their departments, and then we took my bot and said, make this language seem like one person and one tone of voice and actually match whatever our values are for our company.

It was able to do that in seconds. Take all these different [ideas] and put it together for us. I said, OK, let me create a booklet. I thought everybody wanted this. I created this 150-page SOP for everything we do, and they’re like, what? Now we have to read this? They were like, thanks for that. They didn’t like it. So then we decided with the AI coming down ChatGPT, we created a custom ChatGPT which really just our own custom scout which reads our own SOP, so it’s closed network.

We have a bot so if anybody wants to ask anything, how we do anything at our company, they just go ask the bot about anything. How do I do my time [sheet]? When do we have off? How do we do a tax return, or how do we do 1099s, whatever you need to do at the company. So then we realize our clients need this help, too, because they don’t know how to innovate or they don’t know how to apply adopted technology.

Now we’ve shifted our model to really getting to know our clients and looking at their systems internally and saying, how can we help them be more efficient and innovative? That’s coming from everybody now, from the marketing team, from the IT team, from our payroll team, everybody is asking, how do we make this better for us and then how do we make it better for our clients?

Amato: I love how you said that you can use AI to, like, figure out when company holidays are.

Bowling: Right.

Amato: Do you know how many emails are wasted on just that? Like, Hey, are we off next? Is this a holiday for us?

Bowling: Exactly. I don’t want to get my admin team, or my HR one person doesn’t want to get a million emails about when are we going to get off or what is whatever our holidays are or do I have to turn my time ticket in if they’re doing time, or is there time on this? Is it a fixed fee or whatever that is. How do we figure it out? Yeah, it’s saved a ton of time for us.

Amato: I think that’s a great practical example, because it’s a nonaccounting example that resonates with me, thanks for that.

Bowling: Yeah.

Amato: You used the word in our email conversation, “unstuck.” Getting unstuck. In what ways was GWCPA previously stuck?

Bowling: I would say it all comes down to communication. We did all this great work. We moved our location closer to our team. We changed the structure of our firm, we changed the hours of our firm, we increased everybody’s compensation, and we had people still leaving. I’m like, why are people leaving? We’ve done everything we said we’re going to do, and they’re still leaving.

What we found was we didn’t have the right people in the right seats. I know people have talked about EOS. We tried to implement EOS, the entrepreneur operating system, ourselves over the years, like bits and pieces of it. We could never just get it right. We’re like, OK, it’s all about accountability. So we actually hired an external person to get us unstuck.

Because it’s like, why are people so unhappy, and what are their real issues? Because like nobody’s communicating what the real issues were. A lot of it really just stemmed around communication and processes, because some people were doing things different than other people, and we didn’t know that. So you don’t know what you don’t know.

Then we decide, well, we need to change the structures and say, OK, we need to have one person dedicated to tax oversight, which is really hard in small firms, everybody does everything. But we said, you know what? You’re going to be in charge of tax and making sure that everybody is exactly the same way. I took over a test, to make sure it was done exactly the same way for everyone.

We learned that it was not done the same way. So it was a hard lesson. But now we feel like we’re positioned because we had that conversation. We have structured meetings about talking about the issues, and now I feel like we’re actually moving forward. Now we’re solving problems that we didn’t even know we had, so.

Amato: That’s great. This has been a great conversation. Speaking of great conversations, I got to hear some of Zack Kass’s presentation yesterday at Digital CPA. Again, we’re recording there in mid-December. Did you hear him speak? And if so, what about his message stood out to you?

Bowling: I did hear him speak, and there was really so many things, but I would say the most encouraging thing is I was really happy that he ended on a positive, optimistic side of the conversation, because so many people are talking about the negative aspects of AI. And yes, there’s always bad players, but it’s really like 9% of the population. They’re going to do bad, they’re going to do bad anyway.

The really encouraging thing is the cost of AI. I’ve noticed that the cost has gone down dramatically. So there actually is now a ChatGPT that will run on a desktop that doesn’t need the internet, which blew my mind. So that means that’s going to be available, and I don’t know how that works. I have no idea, but I think it’s Version 5 of ChatGPT can run on a computer without having access to the internet.

But just think about the possibilities that opens to everybody to have access to this technology, which is what I’ve always wanted is for everybody to have access, and everybody’s lives should be better because of the technology and not just the big corporations that are getting the benefits. It’s going to be available to everybody.

That to me, it was the most moving thing. Yeah, scary things for people about changing how you do things and what you do. But really, it’s going to elevate what you do and help you probably be more valuable to your clients because you can be more responsive faster.

Amato: That’s great. Samantha, would you like to add anything else in closing?

Bowling: I just appreciate the time and the opportunity to speak with you, and super excited. I’m just really fortunate that this AI came out, the ChatGPT’s generative AI came before I retired. Because if this would have come out after I retired, I would have been really mad that I didn’t have the opportunity to work with it.

Amato: Samantha Bowling, thank you very much.

Bowling: You’re welcome. Thank you.