How Accounting Firms Are Actually Winning With AI (ft. Jan Haugo)

Most accounting firm owners I talk to are somewhere between curious and overwhelmed when it comes to AI. They've heard the noise, maybe they've opened ChatGPT for email or research, but there's a gap between playing with it and actually making sure it impacts your operations. That's why I sit now with Jen Huago. She's an accountant by trade who went deep into AI before most of us knew what a prompt was. She's worked with Intuit to develop their AI certification course and have helped thousands of professionals adopt this stuff. So in this conversation, we get into real reasons AI rollouts fail, The difference between asking AI a question and having it run an operation, what a brand guardian is and why your firm needs one, and the honest conversation between ChatGPT versus Claude that a lot of people are having right now. If you're a firm owner, you're gonna stick for this one. Let's get into it.

Chat and Claude are getting so much traction because of their news and how they're changing everything daily that I think that the enterprise versions don't get the news The way that we work is going to change.

ChatGPT versus Claude specifically, do you have a strong opinion on like which one is better to start with? Jen, you've built and led accounting firms. You're now assisting Intuit with developing their AI certification course, and you've helped thousands of professionals worldwide adopt AI. What led you here?

Yeah, no, thanks for asking. Accountant by trade. I love it. I've been an accountant my entire life, went to school, graduated with that, but I've always been tech forward and very tech curious. Went to the cloud early, and when AI came out, I just thought, you know what, this is an opportunity for us to kind of be on the front end of this ever-changing world that we're in. And, um, I dove headfirst in. So it's one of those things where I want to help my community, um, and I thought being a leader out in advance might give me some, some insight into that to help our community.

Yeah, definitely. So it looks like you really saw that AI in your day-to-day job and decided, hey, I should do this on my own for others.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right. Well, I'm sure you've looked at both successes and failures in attempting to adopt AI. As you think about that, is there anything you see that the firms struggling are doing differently than those that are succeeding?

Yeah, I see a couple things actually. Number one, the Company doesn't have a policy, a rolled-out policy, right? So it's everybody's individually trying AI on their own. Some things are working, some things aren't. Leadership is doing one thing, transactional workers are doing something else. So there's no systems, no communication, and it's just kind of helter-skelter. So that's the first thing I see. The second thing I see is that People are using AI, and I'll say chat, for example, like Google.

Yeah.

Still, they still ask one-off questions. Tell me how to do this. Create my checklist instead of setting up an operations and having it run through an operation like a month-end close or a general ledger error check. And it's— they're asking it rather than having it perform at what it's good at, right? Doing huge analysis. So Those are the 2 differences I see, and that's why adoption is lagging and why people are failing at implementing.

Interesting. And do you believe that— you talked about policy, I'm assuming— is that something you believe has to come from the top, meaning those are the leaders of the company, the owners that really have to think about what that ought to look like? Or could, like, you know, a team member from lower in the organization really be the person to lead and come up with that?

I think that the AI policy needs to come from the top. Do we use free tools? Do we use paid tools? What information do we put in, right? Those are the policies that we need to have at the organization top level down. But then I think in the middle somewhere, we need to have an AI champion or champions that then kind of help with the adoption, help with understanding, troubleshooting, implementing. but being there to kind of guide and ask questions because most of us have never seen this before and we don't know how to, how to use it. And that includes the leaders, right?

Yeah.

So it isn't just a top-down thing. It could be just we all don't know what we're getting into. So for me, this is something where you want that champion to be the person who's helping implement the AI or enthusiastically encourage people. And then you want them to be You know, utilizing the policies that the, the company has set out so that there's an understanding of guardrails of what we need to do. Yeah.

So not letting them, like, use it in whatever way they please, but, like, having some, some guidelines at least to guide their actions.

Okay.

You hinted at something there, which is, you know, accountants like routine. They don't like change. They might— it might be an unknown really for them, all of these AI stuff. So as you attempt to get people introduced to the concepts of AI, who use them a little bit more, what are some fears that you come across often and how do you typically address them?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think everyone has fears. First off, it's natural. And when you're dealing with something new and unknown, and it's natural to have those fears. So the biggest thing that I see, number one, is safety. You know, how is this safe? And we as accountants, and the accounting community come in contact with a lot of personal identifiable information, Social Security numbers, tax returns, ID numbers, account numbers, passwords. So we have to be very protective of that. And that is the biggest concern. So when we do any type of training, that's one of our foundational models is how do we address that? How do we handle it? And how do we teach you to handle it in a natural way so you understand, oh, there's information that might be compromised if I put it into the AI? And I kind of look at it like, if this was something that was in a billboard in New York City, would you put it out there? Probably not. And if you wouldn't, then you need to handle it and do whatever you need to do to protect it. Yeah.

A little bit of a technical question, but I'm curious if you would have an answer to something because we get the that question all the time about security, safety. You know, and we'll talk about ChatGPT versus Claude versus Copilot. Would you say that security, it's different across tools, or should people be really thinking about the same principles across all of them?

I mean, I think you have to have a baseline, right? And so that's identifying what is the information that can and can't go in. Everybody needs to understand that this isn't Like we're just saving something to our data files or to, to the cloud or whatever. So you have to be able to identify it and have a certain level of knowledge of saying, okay, this is something that should or shouldn't be in there. So that's the first piece. The second piece is then evaluating the tool that you're using. So when we look at enterprise versions, right, like you and I do, like Google, you know, Community or Microsoft Community, those enterprise-level versions are great. In terms of protection. And that's where people default, should default to when they're looking in terms of putting information in. ChatGPT and Claude are getting so much traction because of their news and how they're changing everything daily that I think that the enterprise versions don't get the news and they kind of fly under the radar. But I think there's a lot of opportunity there to utilize the tools that they have for security to keep things safe.

Part of The way I typically answer that question, I'll be curious to get your take. All of those companies ultimately are interested in getting business from big enterprises that have sometimes 10x more, you know, security protocols that a small accounting firm does. And they are literally incentivized to get those people on board and have gotten a lot of those people on board. You know, I've heard in the news recently, I don't know if it was JP Morgan, like a lot of banks and regulated institutions just adopting this full board. So at least that's part of my, my argument for like, hey, regulated institutions are doing this. I think like there's, there's a way for your small accounting firm to do it too.

I absolutely agree. I think that the only difference is, is I look at it from a little bit different angle where we're dealing with CPAs and licensed professionals, and we have IRS regulations and guidelines that we have to abide by. And Chase Morgan, for example, they're Not as worried about that, right? They're not going to lose their license if something gets out. And I think that that's where I kind of, you know, try to teach on the side of caution, but yet say, look, I agree that enterprise, they're probably pushing and doing everything they can to make us secure, but they have different concerns that we need to look at.

Yeah, that's fair. That's a fair answer. Now, as you think about rolling out AI, you know, it's such a big thing, especially for a larger firm, perhaps has 10, 20, 30, 50 people and hundreds of processes underneath. Do you have a typical suggestion of like how people should go about that? Should they start with one person, one workflow, one at a time, or should this be more of a big initiative? Let's go big this quarter and like implement it all at once.

Yeah, that's a great question. I think you're more in the realm of the more midsize, you know, firms than I am. But I do, I do think that there has to be a rollout of types, and that starts with base-level education knowledge. There's a lot of people that are intimidated by AI and don't want to use it. And you have to bring those naysayers, if you will, up into the culture of this is how we work now. And honestly, to think about it, the way that we work is going to change dramatically. So it isn't that I'm an accountant anymore, that I'm doing an accountant's job. We have to look at those roles and partition them off and say, let's look at the workflows, and then let's segregate out by role, if you will, like accounting manager or accounts receivable or accounts payable. And then let's segment those off and take that repetitive work off of our plates and hand that off to the AI. And that's a huge task and a huge undertaking. And the company needs to sit down and have an honest conversation as a group. to determine how they're gonna roll that out. Because I don't think as an outsider coming in and saying, this is what you have to do. I think AI is perfect for customization and trying to dictate what that looks like at a standard level doesn't work. I think it's very customizable and you have to have a journey and a map and a plan.

Yeah, definitely. It's not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Not at all. At all.

Now, a term that I really saw on your, on your website that caught my attention. And I'll be curious to dive into it. It's the term Brand Guardian. I think I understand kind of where it comes from. It seems to be this idea of like an accounting firm brand giving access to AI to the various tools you use. But could you help us better understand what that means and why it matters for accounting firms?

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, if you look at your firm and you look at my firm, the difference there we both do very similar things, right? Like, you come in and you do a fantastic job of automating and building out workflows and designing a procedure and processes to help with that firm, right? And that's, that's absolutely needed. It's a must-have. You have to have that mapping. You have to have that done. I look at it from the point of you take mine plus yours, and now you've got a complete picture. So the Brand Guardian is is just that. It is your brand. In this world where AI is everywhere and we look at it and everybody says, oh, that's AI, that's AI, that's AI.

Yeah.

Everybody can identify it. But if they— you wrote an article or I wrote an article, I want them to say that's Isaac or that's Jan, right? And that's where the Brand Guardian comes in. It's a, it's a system that we've trained. Could be a GPT, could be a project, it could be a skill. And we train it heavy on your information, how you speak, how you talk, how you walk, how you laugh. And when you run any type of system through that Brand Guardian, so the systems you create, run it through the Brand Guardian, it comes out sounding like you and your firm, not like the next guy.

Interesting. So you're kind of like baking it into the different skills and projects that you're kind of implementing. Another thing that I've, at least we've experienced internally, we're actually rolling out Claude for our entire team and we have really heavily relied on connectors to have that, I guess, internal sauce of how Opsur does things because we, for example, to give you a sense, we connected Notion that has all SOPs, we connected ClickUp that has all of our tasks, we connected like our meeting transcripts and several other tools like I guess what role would connectors play in this whole brand guardian concept from your perspective, if any?

So it depends. I mean, if you're running Claude through, you know, and you're connecting it to your Notion and it goes into your SOPs, you know, it's probably an internal, internal task. But if you're saying, hey, I want you to go into our Notion and I have mine connected to my Notion, I have it connected to my Asana. My Google Drive, all of the things, right? Because you want that data, which is gold, to be available to Claude. It runs it through. So if I was doing like a marketing landing page or some marketing advertising, it would go look in Asana, grab my marketing content that we've looked at or that we've got set up, would run it through Claude with our marketing coach using our Brand Guardian voice, and then push it out. into LinkedIn or Facebook or wherever we're putting that. So that's how it works. It works in conjunction with the connectors to give the voice and the style. So right now it would be great if it was a project, which is how I have them set up. But it's even better as a skill because you can have a connector and a skill put together and then push it through. And it, it's amazing.

Yeah.

How it just makes your voice and mostly the brand is for external, but not always. If you're writing an email to a customer or doing a proposal or engagement letter, you want it to sound like your company. So your Brand Guardian will come into play.

It's interesting how all these features overlap. I see how it can be confusing for a new person because like projects, skills, connectors, like how does it all fit in? Now let me ask you something. And I'd love for us to dive deep into this to the degree that we can. ChatGPT has been the favorite tool. I think it was really the one that opened up the aperture back in, you know, 2022 with ChatGPT-3. In the last probably 4 to 8 weeks, many of us have experienced or have started hearing about sentiment changing around the tool. A lot of people migrating over to Claude or other tools. Others are still big ChatGPT believers. But as you think about like ChatGPT versus Claude specifically, do you have a strong opinion on like which one's better to start with at this point?

I mean, I think everybody knows Chat, and I think it's a good place to start. I liken it, and you probably would too. You wouldn't go in and do a pivot table in a Word doc, right? And you wouldn't write out any type of letter that you need in Excel. So it's the right tool for the right time.

Right.

ChatGPT to me is a great way to start because it gets people understanding the power of what AI is. And then when you start to define what that role and what you need it to do, then you start looking at other tools. If you're a writer, if you're doing any kind of branding, marketing, sales writing, I like Claude. I like Claude for that because it's so much more humanistic.

Yeah, definitely. What would you recommend for like more like analysis accounting type work?

Yeah, it depends, but I like to, I like to layer my AIs. So I start in chat. I will do that analysis in chat and, and I will run it through that chat. And if I'm in Gemini or Copilot, I'll work within those tools first and anonymize that data, and then I'll put it out into Claude. And then Claude gives me a different perspective and a more human voice and a different layer of thinking. Don't you see that?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I, I really appreciate too the, the more visual elements of Claude that, at least for me, are just easier to, like, grasp, especially if you're putting a lot of data into it. Its interactive charts are just like out of the world.

Insane.

Yeah. Another, I wanna run this opinion by you. You know, ChatGPT versus Claude, I think that's a question that people have in their mind right now. I have the perspective that in the long term, I don't think that would matter that much. I get the impression that AI will be a commodity like electricity is. And, you know, most people 5 years from now might not necessarily be caring about which model runs it, because I think all of them will be good enough that you'll be able to do whatever with them. What do you think about that?

No, I think you're right. I, I, I think there's a huge race right now who can build it the fastest. I, I think it feels like every 4 days somebody's got some new, you know, add-on that they put onto their, their LLM. And it's hard to keep up that pace mentally as someone in what we do, learning, but also training. It's hard to keep up with, you know, something I built 6 months ago is no longer relevant because Claude just now built it in and it's automatic. Chat's not far behind. Chat's doing skills the way that you can upload things you can copy and paste in rather than having to upload a document. So I'm with you. I think in 5 years, 10 years, 10 years, I think it's just standard, just like you said. But I think in 5 years, the choices become one and you just, it just runs things.

Yeah.

That makes sense.

Yeah, definitely.

Okay.

That's fair. Anything, any other comments on like ChatGPT versus Spot?

You know, I ran a masterclass series back in December and we did a deep dive on chat was our first day and went through that and then The second class was a deep dive on Claude. And most people back in, I think it was December, hadn't really heard about Claude. And so by the third day, I said, which team are you on? And these are people who'd been on ChatGPT, and they all came back and said, we're Team Claude now. So if you haven't heard from Claude, if you haven't checked it out, get in and play around with it. I think it's like night and day. In terms of what you get back. And I think it's a preference thing. Do you like your coffee with cream, or do you like it black? Like, what, you know, how do you like things? So I do think it is a preference thing right now. It's a choice that you can make. But as we're talking in the future, I'm not sure it will be.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I said that of like 5 years from now wouldn't matter. But right now we're team claw too. I was never compelled to actually get each of our team members a ChatGPT account, but we're rolling out Claude now for everybody and we have a lot more initiatives because it's gotten so good, at least in my, in my personal experience. Well, if someone was an accounting firm owner or team member within one and they wanted to start rolling out AI in their firm, what do you think, like, realistically their first, you know, 30 to 90 days would look like and what would you recommend them? As like their first few steps?

Well, I mean, obviously I'm going to say come to one of my boot camps or attend, attend any of my trainings. I think that there's so much information out there and I love it that people are going out and finding YouTube and, you know, all kinds of, you know, videos and things that are out there. I think the journey starts with getting a feel of what kind of information that you're looking for. I think your first 30 days is really just doing that research. You know, get a free account, free account not to put at work, but free account to just run personal things through it. And then I think your next 30 days is getting in some kind of training. And I, I like my training. I love your training because we both focus on accountants, right?

Yeah.

We focus, we know their workflows, we know how things work, we know the intimate details. And so the difference between what you and I do versus a random YouTube is that we know the accounting space. So when I tailor, you know, a 1099 audit, you know, a GPT, I know that it's going to be working for accountants. And so that's the focus. And same for you. You're gonna build workflows that are using the tools that we use every day. So I think you find the people like you and I that are specialists in the accounting field and start searching out the things that we're doing and joining those classes and, you know, reading up on what we're doing because that's where you're going to go deep. And that would be your next 90— your next 30 days is where you start to deep dive and build things and learn how to get your work done faster. There is no reason you should not be using AI to do some of your work. And I think Maybe a year ago, people were embarrassed to say that. I don't think that it's like that anymore.

I think people are proud to say it now.

Absolutely, right? Yeah, I totally agree. So I think that's your first 30, 60, 90 days.

So it looks like from your perspective, heavy on research, getting their hands dirty, and just like starting to experiment would be like the first few steps there.

For sure. Absolutely.

And typically once people do so, for the people that perhaps are listening to this that haven't done so yet, I like to call it the AI rabbit hole. Like there's no going back. Once you start experimenting with it, like, like you're, you're a believer and there's no going back from there.

Yeah. I, I don't actually call it a rabbit hole anymore. I call it the Grand Canyon.

Interesting.

It is not, it is not a bitty rabbit hole, right? There's just so much.

Yeah. There's so much there for sure.

I would love to hear how you got into the AI, how you started to, because like you said, you didn't start rolling that out to chat and your chat to your team. So How, how did you start and where did you land? And now you're on Team Claude, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, I feel like a big part of what made me a believer, it's part of what you mentioned earlier, the idea of it not only answering your questions, but doing useful things for you. Like the moment I started to use it to, I'll give you one example. I use it now to prioritize my week. So as a founder, and I'm sure a lot of the firm owners listening to this, They have like a million tasks on their to-do list that they never get to. Um, you know, their job changes every 6 months, especially if you're growing. And I found, you know, I went through a week where I do feel I wasn't as productive. I was like, what couldn't I use Claude? Because I have like our goals for the company in our project management system. I have all the tasks I'm supposed to do. And I just told it, hey, go ahead and look at all of my tasks and prioritize my week. look at my calendar and even, and even, and I even told it ignore due dates and priorities that I might've set and just think about what's gonna be the best for us to grow the company and what I should be doing personally. And it came with like, I have that weekly task now at the top of my, like where I go to like check in my work and it literally tells me do this, you can delay this and you can delegate these things to these people. Um, so that's an example of something that was like, wow, It's become very powerful. Just an example of a use case that made me a believer there.

I love it. And do you find that that's helping, like that shift? Because it's, it's also a repetition thing where, you know, that habit forming if you get into that habit. So how are you feeling with it now that you've—

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely given me a lot of clarity of like what to focus on. I don't always agree with what it says, but the fact that at least gives me a draft I can edit things. Oh, I probably should be doing this this week. And that clarity is super helpful as a founder, as an owner.

Yeah.

Excellent. Well, Jen, where should people find you? And do you have any goodies for them that they should go ahead and take after watching this?

Oh, thanks. Well, always my website, smartaccount.ai, although I feel like it's so old, which it's only like 9 months old. But if you, if you look at for masterclass, my Smart Accountant Masterclass, I'm I'm always doing one every month, and this one we're doing April 16th, and we're going to look at what— well, it's called the damage that the tax season did to you that you don't know about. And it should be a good overview of clients you put off, of engagements that you didn't start, of clients that are on extension. So it's a really good overview of kind of the things that get put on the back burner during tax season that don't really need to be and giving you insight into that. So every month, look for that masterclass.

Perfect. Is that a regular?

It's a regular one. Yep, I do it. It's 90 minutes, and most people aren't prepared for 90 minutes, but I kind of feel like you, you can't get everything done in 60 minutes. And I'm very hands-on, so when you come in, know that you're going to be playing, you're going to be watching, we're going to deep— be deep diving. That's It's not a presentation, it's an activity actually.

Yeah, yeah. And I can tell, I was part of one of your 90-minute workshops the other day. I can definitely tell it's very practical. It's not like this fancy slides, it's just like, hey, this is Claude, this is what I'm doing. And I definitely saw a lot of good feedback from the people that attended that they were mind-blown. So I'm sure that the people in the audience, the people watching this video, smartaccounting.ai to see Jen's work. And with that, Jen, thanks for making it today.

All right. Thanks so much for having me, Isaac. So good to see you.

Excellent.

Take care.