Charles Leikauf tells accountants and bookkeepers how to use AI to increase profit. He argues AI will eliminate compliance work, so shift to advisory roles for e-commerce clients, adopt an AI-first mindset with your team, and spend time finding new tools to integrate.
If you're an accountant or a bookkeeper, AI is going to delete your job. However, here's the way to get around that and partner with AI instead of fight with AI. So one of the things that I help people do is I help people install AI in their accounting, tax and bookkeeping firm and move over to giving advice instead of doing compliance based commodity work. So come over here and I'll show you exactly how to get started with AI. So there's three things that AI can help you do that you need to focus on. So first is move to an advisor role, right? So advisor role. So that's the first thing that you need to do is you need to move over to an advisor role. And I'll go over number two and number three here shortly, but move over to the advisor role. So instead of offering bookkeeping, tax or accounting, all those are good. But moving over to giving advice and letting AI do the work is the most important part. Anybody can go to ChatGPT and ask it a question. The question will probably be wrong and the answer will probably be wrong and there will not be enough context because people don't know what they don't know. But moving to an advisor role, you can guide that whole process. So in my firm and my accounting firm, I own a bookkeeping, tax and accounting and more importantly fractional CFO firm. And we cover specifically white glove service for e commerce businesses. And we do this, we work with a whole bunch of different people, different teams, geographies and all that stuff. But we guide people through the process and it's a white glove service to get them an answer and a result so they don't have to think about it, they don't have to worry about it. And we use AI and other firms to do so. That gives us a strategic leg upper advantage on anyone else and we can charge a lot more and we have to work a whole lot less doing so. So moving over to advisor roles important because with that you can partner with AI instead replaced by AI. So that's number one. Number two is embrace AI. So here's what I mean by embrace AI Everyone in your organization, you will sit down with him the next week and you will print out a piece of paper and says we are an AI first company. That means anytime you do something new, you look to see if you can use AI to do it before doing it manually. Every single time the old people in your business may not get on board and you might have to replace them. The new people, you might have to replace them too. But as new people come into your business and your firm, understand that you are now AI centric, if there's a way to do something, you need to try and use it with AI first. Because there's new tools, new technologies coming out every day. The advances we had in six months are insane. The advancements we'll have in two years will change your life and will change my life. So you need to embrace AI, become an AI first company. So we get everyone to sign a document that says they're an AI first company. And we agree that every time we do something new, we will try to use AI first before using anything else. So to recap, start with number one is move over to the advisor role, selling fractional CFO services. Number two, you embrace AI. And number three, this is constant research. So we're going to go research. If you're looking to partner with AI, there are new tools, there are new technologies. You need to set aside dedicated time every week to learning. Right? We spend so much time doing, we don't spend enough time thinking. And so you need to spend time researching AI, researching the tools, researching how you can grow and develop your business here. Oftentimes people spend their time working in the business instead of on the business. Is research. Time is productive, is only spent focused working on the business. How do I increase operational speed? How I lower the amount of time does it take me to serve a client? How do I get better responses to my client? How I use AI to draft customer service to? How do I set up workflows and automations? You may look at this and realize, oh, man, Charles, this is a large order. This is what the future is. And you can either get left in the dust like horse and buggies, or you can move over to the Model T in the car. And we're pressed airplanes now, right? So there's a natural evolution as far as transportation goes. This absolutely changed everybody's mind. AI is going to do the same, but it's going to be big, bigger and it's going to be faster. So I don't want you to be left behind. If you want to learn more about getting introduced AI growing your accounting, tax or fractional CFO firm, all you have to do is go through all my content here on YouTube and show you exactly how to do that.
