Erin Walls on AI and the limits of tax advice
Erin Walls is Director of WallsMan Creative Ltd, which provides accountancy, tax and business services to people and businesses in the creative industries. The conversation looks at how AI is bringing clients to specialist advice, and why human review matters when tax questions are not clear-cut.
AI can help with clear-cut calculations and finding relevant tax references, but its confident answers can miss important context or get grey areas wrong. Check its assumptions and output rather than treating it as a substitute for professional judgement.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
We only work in the creative sectors. Traditionally, creative minds were not getting the sort of down-to-earth, easy-to-digest advice they needed from their accountant, and we stepped in to fill that gap and have grown from there.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Via our website, referrals from existing customers, and referrals from speaking events Erin attends
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
We have run lots of things via AI to see how it deals with it, it’s great with basic compliance or calculations but any areas of the tax legisalation that are grey, and there are a lot of those, we have found lots of issues with AI output. So that’s something we need to do the normal way – applying life experience and knowledge of how HMRC usually reacts to things and how to present something.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
AI has pushed a lot of clients our way as we are specialised so it finds us when people ask about specialist services. Most clients will have run their query past an AI at some point and come to us with a mix of what they were given and what they think. The issue with the AI is that it’s only as good as what you put in. In many cases, we find the client has missed important information, which then changes the advice; they just didn’t know it was important, so they didn’t include it. So we still have room to advise and correct.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
For basic, clear-cut scenarios, AI is good. For heavy calculations and arranging data – it’s also really good. It’s really great as a time saver when you think you know the area of tax but cant remember the actual section or code – it can find that for you without you having to read around. It can also find case law to back up angles and presentation for you…….However anything grey or that has lots of fluffy areas, like tax treatment that can be applied and/or presented in different ways, is more dangerous, and you need to really check what information it’s accounting for. It also seems to want to agree with you, so you need to be critical of the output, as it seems to aim to please, not necessarily get the correct output, yet it sounds confident, which can be misleading when giving answers. Don’t assume because it came out of AI that it’s correct. That is very dangerous; always do a sense check and ask if it includes all the things you think it should. Ask if if had gaps in its process it has needed to guess or estimate. Check as much of the output as possible – we have found some shocking errors presented very confidently as correct.
Thank you to Erin Walls and the team at WallsMan Creative Ltd for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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