ENG26VS06. Small Business Spotlights: Banking Agents (Live): The Hours You Save When AI Connects Directly to the Bank

Most firms have added AI with drafting emails, summarizing documents, and using optical character recognition (OCR) for receipts. But the real shift is one layer deeper: AI agents connecting directly to the systems of record where accounting actually happens, starting with the bank. In this 25-minute live session, you’ll see what’s possible when the AI tool your firm uses has secure, real-time access to a client’s transactions, invoices, and bill pay through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This live session will run a complete workflow on stage that will show you how to turn hours of routine bookkeeping into a few natural-language commands — work you can run as often as your firm needs so that closes stop being events and start becoming routine checkpoints. Participants will then unpack what these actually do to firm pricing, capacity, and year-end workload, as well as what it looks like for accountants who use the hours saved to take on more clients and offer higher-value services their practice is capable of delivering. Whether you’re already piloting AI or still deciding on where to start, you’ll leave this session with a clear mental model of “connected agents,” a live reference demonstration, and one concrete step you can run Monday morning while you drink your coffee.

Learning Objectives:

• Recognize “connected agents” and how Model Context Protocol (MCP) enables AI to access banking data securely in real time.
• Recall a live demonstration of a different workflow scenarios and how a single AI prompt can replace hours of monthly bookkeeping tasks across multiple clients.
• Identify the parts of your current workflow best suited for AI automation and what tasks to tackle first.
• Identify a concrete first step to take with AI in order to free up capacity for more clients and higher-value advisory services.