By Meg Flippin, Benzinga
DETROIT, MICHIGAN - September 22, 2025 (NEWMEDIAWIRE) - AI is everywhere and while businesses are clamoring to implement it, CohnReznick, the over-a-century-old accounting and tax consulting firm, advises clients to take a slow approach. Instead of rushing out and adopting AI for the sake of AI, identify the problem and then see if AI is the right tool to fix it.
“In 2025, we are guiding businesses through challenges using everything at our disposal, including AI,” Sabrina Quinn, national sales director at CohnReznick, told Benzina in a recent interview. The goal is to “enable them to make better decisions for their businesses.”
With AI constantly evolving and new technologies coming to market, companies that rush to roll out AI without a strategy could be vulnerable to evolving cyber threats, changing regulations and compliance issues. But that doesn’t mean they should ignore AI either. It just needs to be a thought-out approach, says Quinn.
Against the backdrop of a dynamic and rapidly advancing environment heavily influenced by what’s being dubbed the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Benzinga sat down with Quinn to discuss CohnReznick’s approach to AI and how companies can leverage it and other technologies to grow and streamline their businesses. It comes from good authority. CohnReznick has been providing accounting, risk management and digital transformation services to companies across finance, healthcare, retail and manufacturing for decades. The company helps businesses optimize performance, manage risk and maximize value through its accounting, advisory and tax services.
Why AI Alone Isn’t Enough: CohnReznick’s Strategy For Stronger Business Impact
Go With What You Know
For companies thinking about jumping into AI, CohnReznick is a big proponent of starting with the apps they already use. Whether it's customer relationship management software or a project management app, most applications have built-in AI that businesses can leverage to boost productivity. Will they be highly transformative? Probably not. Will they help the business? Definitely yes. And that, says Quinn, is how businesses should view AI.
“It’s not hitting you over the head with a hammer of, this is AI. Whether it's customers' success or performance metrics, it's embedding it into use cases day by day,” says Quinn. “Think of it as the admin by your side if you are using Copilot… or building in all the existing functionality from the various tools we already use.”
CohnReznick practices what it preaches and is currently in the midst of what Quinn calls a use case hackathon among the sales and marketing team. They are tasked with identifying day-to-day and week-to-week areas that have challenges, and then leveraging AI to improve those things. That may be a hard sell for veteran sales people who are often used to doing something a certain way, but Quinn says when they see how it can make them more efficient or boost their interactions with customers they are sold.
AI is also being used across time zones and regions within the sales and marketing department. With a finite number of people in the organization, Quinn said the company is using AI to be as prepared as possible when they meet with clients.
Managing Risk With AI
One real-world example of how CohnReznick is leveraging AI to help clients is through its RQ Trim tool. The company serves a lot of manufacturing and distribution, life sciences, private equity and financial companies – all of which have been struggling to make sense of the impact of tariffs, inflation and supply chain volatility will have on their future business. To help them manage risk, CohnReznick developed the AI-powered tool that delivers actionable strategies and executive-ready insights on tariffs, inflation and the supply chain, empowering industries and PE portfolios to quantify risks, mitigate impacts and optimize performance.
Customers fill out a roughly twelve-minute survey using their financial inputs, and the AI model does the rest. “You go from business stagnation to business acceleration,” says Quinn. “That is just one of the ways we are trying to help clients because when you say risk management, there are a lot of different question marks that appear. What we are trying to do is give people the period, the comma and the exclamation mark so they feel they can move forward and do so in a differentiated way.”
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