McKonly & Asbury is on a mission to help others thrive. Providing a full range of services—including tax, audit, and business advisory—the firm serves clients across industries like manufacturing and distribution, construction, healthcare, real estate, and more. Delivering McKonly & Asbury’s signature high level of service across so many areas and industries means their team needs to stay sharp across a wide range of tax topics.

Which is why McKonly & Asbury works hard to look after that team. The firm prides itself on its culture. Their mission of helping others thrive doesn’t stop with clients—it extends to their people, too. With more than 150 team members across 4 offices in Pennsylvania, McKonly & Asbury has long invested in creating an environment where professionals can grow and succeed. And this investment hasn’t gone unnoticed, as the firm has been recognized as one of the Best Places to Work in Pennsylvania and named by Accounting Today as one of the Best Accounting Firms to Work For. 

For all the firm’s success, there was one issue they couldn’t seem to move past: tax research.

Legacy Tool Limitations

Before Blue J, McKonly & Asbury’s tax team was doing the right work, but legacy research tools made that work harder than it needed to be. While these tools contained reliable information, using them to answer nuanced questions was often painfully slow and manual. The team found themselves searching across multiple sources and reading through layers of guidance, just to be able to piece together an answer that was usable for client work.

For Mark Heath, Director of Tax Services at McKonly & Asbury, this process put far too much of the burden on team members. As he noted, “You could find the information, but you had to do all the work to connect it yourself.”

When the firm later moved to another legacy research platform in an effort to reduce costs, day-to-day tax research became more challenging.

“With the new tool, it felt like you had to already know the answer before you started searching,” Heath explained. For staff who weren’t already deeply familiar with the topic, this meant it was hard to know where to start or whether the answer was right. But for junior staff, it meant the tool felt completely inaccessible. 

Over time, adoption dropped. Some team members avoided the firm’s legacy tools altogether, instead turning to general web searches or generic AI tools. This is where McKonly & Asbury really started to worry. Because these alternatives aren’t backed by curated, authoritative tax sources, they lead to less reliable, less consistent answers. Ultimately, that inconsistency made it harder to train junior staff and standardize research quality within the firm. 

Facing these legacy tool issues—alongside increasingly complex client needs and an accelerating pace of change—the firm started looking for solutions. With AI-powered tax research, the firm saw that solution. AI could help them reduce the time spent piecing together research, while creating more space for learning, and higher-value advisory work. But knowing the risks that generic AI tools posed, one thing was clear: the firm needed a solution built just for tax, one that could deliver reliable answers quickly, backed by authoritative sources. That search ultimately led them to Blue J.

Bringing Blue J into Their Workflows

The team took a simple approach to evaluating Blue J: try it with a small group first. So, with that approach in mind, they launched a 5-user pilot made up of senior tax professionals who weren’t heavy AI users.

“We just tried it with five people,” Heath explained. “Five old people like me, who aren’t quite as adept with using AI as some of our younger folks.”

The thinking was straightforward. In Heath’s words, “If the five of us can figure this out, and if we think it’s great, then all of our younger team members are going to just dive right in and they’re not going to think twice about it.”

Once the pilot group started using Blue J on real tax research questions, the value was immediately clear, and the firm quickly expanded access across the department.

Better Answers, Faster

For McKonly & Asbury, the biggest shift with Blue J wasn’t just that it let them work faster, but that it let them change how they worked. 

With Blue J, the team could finally move past the old legacy research workflows that had been slowing them down. Instead of crafting tedious search strings, the team could ask a question in plain language, tailored to the client’s facts, and get a structured response back—complete with inline citations and source lists. This meant they were getting complete, defensible answers, without all the work of having to stitch them together manually. For Heath, the time savings were undeniable, describing several early use cases where work that once took hours now took only minutes.

Just as importantly, Blue J helped the team move forward with confidence. As Heath went on to say, “It will give you not just the answer you’re asking, but it will also say, ‘Did you think about this?’” That ability to surface related considerations, explore their implications, and back these expanded research areas with authoritative sources meant McKonly & Asbury was delivering stronger answers than before—as well as faster.

Billing For Value, Not Hours

Blue J didn’t change the value of the work that McKonly & Asbury delivers, but it did change the value of their time. When research that once took hours now takes minutes, McKonly & Asbury could price for the value behind the work, not the time it took to assemble it. Because the true value McKonly & Asbury’s team delivers was never in those hours spent searching. It was always in the expertise, judgment, and clarity behind the final recommendation. 

“We’ve had discussions about how we bill clients for research,” Heath said. “Because stuff that was taking hours previously is now taking minutes.” 

By saving time on research and moving to a value-based billing model, McKonly & Asbury have been able to charge clients less per project, while taking on more projects—a true win-win. 

This shift has also made projects easier to staff efficiently. By making tax research more intuitive, Blue J empowers junior team members to take the work further before bringing in managers or partners. In another win-win for the firm, this approach supports juniors’ learning and development, while also letting McKonly & Asbury reserve senior time and expertise for where it really counts. And the firm is already putting that time to good use, by taking on more of the advisory work they’ve been wanting to do.

Looking Ahead

For McKonly & Asbury, Blue J has become more than a research tool. As Heath sees it, Blue J is an essential part of the firm’s long-term success. “At some point here, it’s going to just become table stakes,” he said. “If you’re not doing it, then you’re gonna be viewed as being behind everybody else.”

With Blue J now rolled out across the firm, McKonly & Asbury is positioned to keep building a tax practice where clients thrive, junior staff grow faster, and high-quality work becomes more scalable for the entire team. As they continue on their mission to help others thrive, Blue J will be right there with them.