How AI Anxiety is Quietly Disrupting Tax Firm Workflows (And How to Fix It)

For years, tax season has had a familiar rhythm: a slow January, a hopeful February, and then a sudden, inevitable compression where half your workload seems to land in your lap at once.

Year after year, you’ve refined processes, upgraded tools, tightened communication. Yet, the same patterns persist. Clients still drift toward email. Documents still arrive late. Information still trickles in long after it should.

It’s tempting to chalk all of this up to procrastination and assume your clients are busy, distracted, or just not that excited to think about taxes. And sure — sometimes that’s true. Tax prep is nowhere near the top of most people’s fun lists.

But something else is happening now. Something newer, quieter, and easier to misinterpret.

Your clients are hesitating, not procrastinating.

That hesitation is showing up as firms introduce AI-powered tools for the first time. Clients see headlines about data breaches and “learning” algorithms. They don’t distinguish between public AI and the private, secure tools you’re using. To them, it’s all just “AI,” and they’re unsure what happens to their information.

This hesitation rarely shows up as direct objection. Instead, it appears as silence, delays, and requests to use email instead.

This guide explains why AI hesitation is emerging now, how it changes client behavior during tax season, the workflow consequences firms are already feeling, and the practical steps firms can take to close the trust gap before it affects deadlines and morale.

When we built SmartRequestAI, we asked ourselves, our Customer Advisory Council —which included dozens of firms across different practice types — and other industry experts: How will clients feel the first time they see ‘AI’ appear in their tax pro’s workflow?

That’s why we designed SmartRequestAI as private AI from the ground up:

• No training on client data — ever
• Operates entirely within SmartVault’s SOC 2 Type 2-compliant environment
• No external connections or shared learning across users

We recognized early that this shift could mirror the hesitation firms experienced when portals were introduced, and again when the cloud entered the profession. Back then, the pause was mostly about unfamiliarity. Today, the pause is fueled by something bigger: cultural anxiety, confusing headlines, and a sense that AI is dangerous. This whitepaper reflects what we’ve learned about how firms successfully close that gap — not by avoiding AI, but by communicating its safeguards proactively.

Client delays emerging now are tied to something deeper than procrastination: uncertainty about what AI actually does with their information.

In this context, AI anxiety refers to the uncertainty and concern clients feel about how artificial intelligence handles their sensitive financial information, often shaped by headlines and misconceptions rather than the reality of secure, private tools used by tax firms.

Why Clients See AI Differently Than You Do

Artificial intelligence has entered the accounting profession with remarkable speed. Intuit’s 2025 survey found that 64% of firms plan to invest in or upgrade AI this year — up from 57% in 2024 and 48% in 2023. After decades of staffing shortages and rising complexity, AI feels like the long-awaited breakthrough: fewer repetitive tasks, more breathing room, and better accuracy across the board.

And for many firms, those benefits are real. Among accountants already using AI, the overwhelming majority report improvements in accuracy, efficiency, and client service.

Clients, though, aren’t hearing about any of this. They’re not reading industry research or attending webinars. Their understanding comes from somewhere else entirely:

• alarming headlines
• viral stories
• cautionary tales about data “leaks,” “learning models,” and “AI gone wrong”

Public trust in AI has been falling globally — KPMG’s 2025 Global AI Trust report found that only “46% of people are willing to trust AI systems.” So, while your firm has been moving forward with AI, your clients’ feelings about AI have been moving in the opposite direction.

Even if your tool is nothing like the ones in the headlines, the emotional reaction is the same:

To them, AI often translates to: something is happening behind the scenes that I can’t fully see.

Your clients don’t sort through nuance. They don’t distinguish between a public chatbot and a private AI designed for secure, regulated workflows. They just see the word AI, and a small part of them pauses.

Where That Hesitation Comes From

This isn’t the first time clients have hesitated around new tools.

When portals arrived, clients asked if email was “still okay.” They worried about losing documents, forgetting passwords, or clicking the wrong thing. Many defaulted to the familiar, even when the familiar was less secure.

The shift to the cloud brought similar questions “Is this safe? What does this mean for my documents?”

But AI introduces something different: a layer of cultural anxiety that portals and cloud storage never carried. Just hearing “AI” often brings apprehension. It brings uncertainty about how information is being processed, who (or what) is touching it, and whether the system is learning from their personal information. The emotional load is heavier this time, which makes the workflow consequences heavier too.

The Trust Gap Loop

When firms introduce AI without addressing the emotional and cognitive gap clients feel, a predictable pattern emerges, and it happens quietly, long before anyone realizes what’s going on.

1. You introduce new AI-powered tools into your workflow
2. Clients don’t fully understand how those tools handle their information
3. Uncertainty grows
4. Anxiety subtly shapes client behavior
5. Intake slows, fragments, or shifts back to email
6. Work begins to compress later in the season
7. Follow-ups increase and meaningful communication shrinks
8. Clients feel even more uncertain, and the cycle repeats

By the time you feel the effects of AI hesitation, the trust gap has already reshaped your entire workflow. That takes us to where the consequences become visible: inside your calendar.

Hesitation slips into the spaces between requests and responses. Here’s what that pattern looks like and why it compounds.

How Hesitation Disrupts the Rhythm of Your Work

The accounting workflow depends on client collaboration. Clients need to respond to requests, share documents, answer questions, and review things on time. The system only works when both sides are moving.

When they feel uncertain about a tool — even slightly — their behavior shifts:

• They wait longer to get started.
• They upload only part of what you asked for.
• They ask if email is “still fine for now.”
• They stall until the last possible moment.
• They go quiet.

From your vantage point, it looks like disorganization or procrastination. But the behavior matches something more psychological: a pause driven by uncertainty.

We’re not claiming this is the only reason clients are slow. Client-facing AI tools are still new enough that the research hasn’t caught up. But the logic tracks, the anecdotal evidence is hard to ignore, and it’s a pattern worth paying attention to as AI becomes more visible on the client side of your workflow.

What This Looks Like Week by Week

Every pause creates drag. Here’s how hesitation compounds:

• Week 1: You send out your “AI-powered” intake tool. Some clients see the requests, don’t think twice about it, and move quickly. Others see the phrase “powered by AI” and pause.
• Week 2: You send reminders. A few hesitant clients work up the confidence to engage. But many still wait. The follow-up list grows.
• Week 3: The silence continues. You start pulling time away from the clients who did respond, shifting your attention toward the ones who didn’t. Momentum slows on both sides.
• Week 4: You’ve had conversations now reassuring clients that the tool is private, secure, and not the kind of AI they’ve been reading about. Once they understand it, they move. The problem is that those conversations are happening in Week 4 instead of before Week 1.
• Weeks 5–6: Everything compresses. Your team feels squeezed. Clients feel rushed. A workflow that should have been steady becomes the same old tax-season crunch.

This is why firms using SmartRequestAI proactively explain how it works in their initial outreach: “We’re using a private tool that organizes your documents. It doesn’t learn from your data, doesn’t share anything externally, and operates in the same secure environment we’ve always used.”

The Hidden Costs Inside Your Firm

When hesitation affects dozens of clients at once, the effects ripple:

• Quality suffers when work piles up.
• Morale drops when hoped-for efficiency gains don’t materialize.
• Client relationships strain when every touchpoint becomes a chase.
• Strategic work gets squeezed out by follow-ups.

Hesitation isn’t permanent. It’s addressable through clear communication about how your AI actually works, which is what the next chapter covers.

This chapter gives you the big-picture framework — the same one leading firms use — and shows you how to apply it in small, practical ways. The firms with smooth AI adoption share one thing: they communicate proactively about how their tools work. Here’s the framework they use.

What Firms with Smooth Transitions Have in Common

Firms with smooth transitions address AI uncertainty proactively. This clarity falls into three levers:

The Three Levers of Trust in Client-Facing AI

1. Visibility: People Trust What They Can See
   Clients aren’t asking for technical detail. They just want to understand, at a high level, what happens when they share information or a document:
   • Where does it go?
   • Who sees it?
   • What happens next?

   Outline the journey in plain language. Something like:
   “You’ll upload your documents here. We review everything inside the same secure environment we’ve always used. Nothing leaves our system, and nothing is used to train anything. You’ll see each request as you complete it, so you always know where things stand.”

   This can be as simple as adding a short “how this works” paragraph to your engagement letter or portal welcome message.

2. Agency: Clients Need to Feel Their Information Is Still Theirs
   Clients aren’t typically anti-AI. They must feel informed enough to move forward confidently. It can be as simple as saying:
   “We use a private, secure tool that helps us organize your documents. It doesn’t learn from your information, and nothing you upload is shared or used outside your return.”

   You could send a short email before you send your first AI-powered request, so clients know what to expect and what hasn’t changed.

3. Assurance: Clients Want to Know You’ve Thought This Through
   Clients need reassurance that you’ve chosen carefully and intentionally. This is why phrases like:
   • “We evaluated several tools before choosing this one.”
   • “We chose this system specifically because it keeps your information contained.”
   • “We’ve already asked the questions you’re thinking about.”

   …go further than any technical explanation ever could.

In practice, this is often a 60-second conversation during onboarding or your first call of the season — not a long explanation, just a quick window into the care you took in choosing your tools.

You already know what it feels like when clients hesitate. You’ve felt it for years: the slow starts, the reminders, the late rush.

This year is different.

Clients are reacting to a word — “AI” — and everything they’ve heard about it. They want clarity and reassurance. They want to know that the tools you’re using were chosen thoughtfully, with their privacy and comfort in mind.

The firms who talk openly with clients about what’s changing, why it’s changing, and how it protects them will have a very different tax season from the firms who assume clients will simply adjust.

When clients feel comfortable, they move with you, and your entire workflow moves more smoothly with them.

Get Your Clients Onboard with Your AI Tool This Busy Season

Our companion guide — The Tax Professional’s Guide to Talking About AI (When Clients Think It’s Risky) — gives you practical language, templates, and examples to put it into action.

Inside, you’ll get:

• Scripts for the most common client concerns
• A simple AI statement you can share with clients
• A positioning framework to help your firm communicate clearly
• Ways to make transparency feel natural, not forced

Download your copy today.

Looking for a client-facing AI tool designed with trust in mind? See how SmartVault supports secure, private client collaboration with SmartRequestAI.