A few weeks ago, we published a piece on AccountingWEB laying out our thinking on AI (Beyond the hype, how bright is building AI). We talked about principles, augmentation, not replacement, trust as a foundation, solving real problems rather than chasing headlines. We talked about what we were building.
We said: watch this space.
So here’s the update. The space is no longer empty.
What We Said We’d Build, And What We’ve Built
When we wrote about AI last time, Bright was deliberate about not over-promising. We’d seen too many vendors announce AI roadmaps that amounted to little more than a chatbot bolted onto an existing product. We weren’t going to do that.
Instead, Bright committed to something harder: ship AI that solves real problems in workflows that actually matter, or don’t ship it at all.
Here’s where we are.
BrightWorkers: The Control Layer Your Practice Actually Needs
Every Bright AI agent lives inside BrightWorkers, our AI agent management interface. Before we talk about any individual agent, this matters: BrightWorkers is the answer to the question every accountant should be asking any AI vendor.
“If AI is doing work on my behalf, how do I know what it’s doing?”
BrightWorkers surfaces everything. Every conversation. Every job in progress. Every point where the system needs a human decision before it proceeds. The dashboard shows you hours saved, jobs completed, average completion time, and value processed, not because we like dashboards, but because you deserve to see the return on what you’re paying for.
It’s the command centre for your AI-powered practice. Oversight without friction.
Oscar: Employee Onboarding That Runs Itself
In our last article, we described the employee onboarding problem in detail — the 8pm client calls, the scattered information, the 30-45 minutes of manual data entry that shouldn’t fall on your desk.
Oscar is the answer.
The moment you add a new starter in BrightPay, Oscar reaches out to them via WhatsApp. It collects everything needed for payroll setup — personal details, tax codes, pension information, right-to-work documentation — without your team lifting a finger. It handles chasing. It handles follow-ups. And when it’s done, it presents the complete, verified data to you for a single approval step before anything is committed to BrightPay.
No black box. No autonomous decisions without your sign-off. Just the drudgery gone, and your judgment intact.
For bureaus and practices, this opens something new: employee onboarding as a standalone, chargeable service. A recurring revenue line that grows with your clients’ headcount. The admin burden doesn’t just disappear, it becomes a product.
Charlie: Client Onboarding, End-to-End
New client enquiries are an opportunity, but they’re also a risk. Leave them too long and they go cold. Chase them with the wrong information and you look unprepared. Start the compliance clock before you’ve completed due diligence and you’re exposed.
Charlie handles the entire new client journey from first contact.
When an enquiry lands, Charlie reaches out immediately via WhatsApp, before anyone in your team picks up the phone, to understand the prospect’s business, required services, and urgency. In the background, it researches the company using publicly available data, filing history, and risk indicators, and produces a full business intelligence report before you’ve even spoken to them.
When you accept the lead, Charlie manages the rest: information gathering, Director ID verification, AML checks, and provisioning the new client across your practice management products.
You walk into the first meeting as a trusted adviser with full context, not another firm quoting for compliance work.
BrightIntelligence: Know Your Prospect Before the First Meeting
Separate from the onboarding workflow, BrightIntelligence is available directly within your existing Bright products — BrightManager, BrightTax, Inform Direct, and others.
Enter any company. In minutes, you receive a structured business intelligence report drawing on Companies House data and up to three years of publicly accessible financial statements. Turnover. Net assets. Red flags. Director changes. Outstanding charges. Adverse signals.
Due diligence that used to take hours, delivered automatically.
For practices actively winning new clients, or for any accountant who wants to walk into a client meeting with real insight rather than filed numbers, this changes the preparation conversation entirely.
BrightAP — Business Performance Report: From Compliance to Advisory
Here’s a pattern we see constantly in accounting practices: the data to have a genuinely valuable advisory conversation with a client already exists. It’s sitting in the nominal ledger. But turning six years of figures into a coherent, presentable narrative takes time that most practices don’t have.
The Business Performance Report inside BrightAP does that automatically.
It analyses up to six years of nominal ledger data, generates year-on-year comparisons, flags material variances, and produces AI-generated commentary in plain English, commentary that accountants can review, edit, and share directly with clients. And if you want to go deeper, you can interrogate the data conversationally: ask questions against the figures and get instant answers.
The gap between compliance and advisory doesn’t require a strategic transformation programme. It requires the right tool at the right moment.
What Comes Next: Bright Insights
We mentioned in our last article that we’re integrating Bright’s product expertise with IPASS, Ireland’s leading payroll and professional tax training provider. That work is on track.
By summer 2026, Bright Insights will combine Bright’s deep product knowledge with IPASS’s constantly updated payroll and taxation expertise, delivering answers to the questions your clients actually ask, at the moment they ask them, not three days later.
We’re building this alongside accountants, using the questions you’re really asked every day to shape what the system prioritises. Not AI for AI’s sake. AI that reduces mean time to answer from hours to seconds, on the topics that matter most.
What We’re Asking For
We’re running an Early Access Programme across all of these products, and we want the right participants.
Not just people who are curious about AI. Practices and bureaus with real workflows, real clients, and a genuine appetite to test whether this delivers on what we’re claiming.
If you managed employee onboarding last month and thought there has to be a better way, Oscar is ready for you. If you’re actively winning new clients and want to walk into every first meeting better prepared, BrightIntelligence is for you. If your BrightAP data has been sitting there and you haven’t had time to turn it into client conversations, the Business Performance Report changes that.
Get in touch. Join the waitlist. Tell us which problem matters most.
We built it. Now we want to prove it.
Seamus Moore, Chief Marketing Officer, Bright
