100 Will This AI Tech Disrupt Accounting?

Welcome in Today we're talking about what I think will go down as, at.

Least in the short term, the most disruptive AI tech to the accounting profession. That is the thing that will most impact consumer products in a way that maybe changes our sort of midterm strategy as an accounting firm.

It's tech that will ultimately help us as well. But it's a really cool application of.

AI that is on the kind of near term horizon. I want to talk a little bit more about it today.

Build a plan, get an understanding of this stuff so that when it does.

Come, it's not a scary thing and it's something that we could actually lean into.

Let's talk about it. Come on in. It's Jason Daly, Still in Chicago, the Windy City.

That's what it is. I'll be honest.

So far, the name doesn't really check out.

Hasn't been windy at the Bridging the Gap conference.

But today also episode 99.

By the way, almost there, gang. Almost made it. Oops. Teehee. This one was 100.

But today I want to talk more about something we've talked a bit about.

But haven't really gone super deep on.

The notion that AI could help develop.

An avatar of your expertise, specifically your expertise.

But also, what does that look like.

Through the mainstream lens? Why won't somebody else just make this unbelievably good accounting and tax avatar that will gobble up my business and kind of become the advisor that my clients grow to rely on? This stuff is coming, it's here right now in very rudimentary forms. We've already seen like CPA chatbots and stuff like that. And these are like very basic implementations of this stuff. But it's going to keep getting better. So what does it look like? What will the consumer applications look like and what will the advisor applications look like? And how do we just have a plan and not be surprised by any of this? And the biggest sort of thing that is hard to, admittedly hard to get your head around, and this is going to. This kind of overlaps into some of the social media things that will be hard about AI if you've ever seen those old.

There's tools that'll take like an old.

Photo of your ancestor and like bring it to life. Like, it uses deep fake tech to like animate their face and the lip flap so they talk and, and it's like, I feel like this stuff came out a couple years ago and it was this almost this cool, cool kind of novel way to bring your ancestors, you know, back to life and how realistic or accurate that stuff is. Well, it's, it's easy to do with ancestors because they aren't here to say, yikes, that looks nothing like me. It's funny with the AI kind of face replacement stuff like that, the person who is always most critical of that is the person that the replica is being made of. We have a. We are hyper aware of, of what we look like and anything that is unnatural for us. And so we see it and we're like, man, that doesn't look like me at all. But when other people see it, like they have a very different standard for what is realistic or not. But a couple years back, we got these tools you can use with kind of old photos, and it would bring those things to life. And that was interesting, it was novel. But when it comes to your ancestors, you don't have any documentation as to how they spoke or the types of things that they talked about and what they would actually say. So it was all kind of made up. Right now, you and I, boy, we've talked a lot, even if you don't. You know, obviously there's people like me.

Who are very public talkers, but even.

You, there is a huge body of communication for everyone these days, from text messages to emails. Obviously, if you do content like I do, stuff like this, we're very, very well documented people relative to our ancestors. And so in the past, we've talked about how now you can build chatbots that will only reference specific contexts. So if you think about ChatGPT using its general knowledge and telling you stuff from that, you now create catbots, chatbots that do not reference that general knowledge. They just reference the context that you give it and can mimic that tone of voice also. So it is the notion of building a chatbot that will talk just like I do on this podcast and just reference the things that I talk about in this podcast, honestly, that's a pretty trivial, basic thing to build. Another thing that's developed a ton in the past year is the quality of voice cloning. Now, we will still be the biggest critics of something that is trying to clone us, and we will be hyper aware of maybe anything there that sounds unnatural or not quite like how we would see say it. But that is not how everyone else will hear it. It will be much easier to fool those people than yourself.

And then the holy grail just in.

The last few months that has gotten massively better is visually cloning a person. So, hey, Gen H e Y g e N is probably the leader here and they've got a new version of their model and the founder has been showing some demos the last few weeks. It's unbelievably good at it. Has the person do like hand gestures and the way that their, their head moves with their mouth moving, all that stuff, it's extremely convincing. Again, you will be the, the most critical critic of a clone of yourself, but other people will not be so discerning. And if you watch these, these videos he's been showing the last couple of weeks from the new version of the model, we're to the point where you're just genuinely not going to be able to tell. And this is the worst that it will ever be. But like six months from now you're going to be able to make, I could make a clone of myself and the video and the audio and people that tune into this podcast and maybe see and hear me every single day, maybe some of those people will be able to identify that it isn't real. But my relatives who don't see and listen to me every day, anybody else out there in the world who like doesn't watch a ton of what I do, they will absolutely not be able to tell. And so this is, you know, we've, I've kind of got work brain engaged right now and we're thinking of this through the lens of content creation and all of that. But bigger picture socially. Your grandparents are the last generation of people for whom you won't be able to make a startlingly accurate replica both.

Visually audio ly and even like contextually.

Like how they talk and what they talk about. Your grandparents are the last generation for whom you won't be able to create a really, really realistic avatar. So my kids, long beyond when I'm here, will be able to interact with an avatar of me that is sounds really true to life, that looks and sounds just like me. They'll be able to talk to a 30 year old version of me, a 50 year old version of me, a 70 year old version of me. And those avatars, let's call them avatars because they're kind of a, a representation of someone and their identity, but not the real thing. Right? That stuff's just gonna keep getting better and better and better and it's shocking how good it is right now. But 20 years from now it's gonna be on a whole other level. It's gonna kick off a lot of really weird social stuff. I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but right now there are like, there's there are people who are building, like genuinely building relationships with AI and like that is a thing that is just gonna become more and more common. Character AI. It's probably the main place where this is happening now. And it has an unbelievable number of users. The average user session on character AI is seven hours. And character AI is just there are these characters there and you can interact with them and they will remember what you talk about. You can create your own custom characters. But people interact with these things for a lot of reasons, be it loneliness or whatever. And we're going to be up against.

A lot of really weird social issues.

When it comes to do AIs start getting rights in society. Which sounds ridiculous in many ways, right? But it's absolutely gonna be abused too. Let's say that Facebook has all the messaging data and all that stuff of a loved one and they can create avatars of those loved ones. I've been close to loss in my family and people leaving unexpectedly and the notion of being able to communicate with a loved one that's maybe no longer with you, keeping those lines of communication open potentially for decades. What's somebody gonna do if that AI gets turned off? Man? Stuff's gonna get really weird, really complex, really messy. And honestly, there's going to be this blurring between the reality of these avatars and the real people.

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Show description Cloud accountantstaffing.com this episode is sponsored in part by Copilot Gang. I like tech as much as the next guy. I like finding new apps, plugging new stuff into my stack. But you know what I won't stand for is a scattered client experience. Imagine this dream world where a client can log into one thing and get access to all the things. Easier said than done right now, right? Because you got all these different tools with magic links and log into this login to that. To get like all of that stuff out of a single portal is really hard right now. Oh that was until Copilot.

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To be odd socially. And I'm like that's, I'm not the person to, you know, get to the bottom of how best to manage all of that stuff. This feels really sci fi right now. But professionally you're gonna have this around advisory as well. So this stuff will keep getting better. But what does that do for me, the advisor? Does it displace me as an advisor? Does it mean that I myself as an advisor need to clone myself to be this always on thing that has this contextual knowledge in order for that to be valuable for my clients. So specifically how this impacts the ways that we work as human advisors. That is interesting to me. And so if we think about what the consumer facing mass market version of this looks like. And so that is like for tax work, a turbo tax or insert big company intuit zero, whatever. If someone is going to build this sort of mega avatar that can get hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, we talked about what was it? Is it anthropic we talked about PI, the AI assistant a few weeks back. And that as a real time voice to voice AI assistant that you can talk with, definitely has its shortcomings. For now, that's gotten $1.3 billion in investment to develop that. But when you talk with it, it's incredibly novel because there's no latency there. It talks back and forth with you and it's like, oh, wow, okay, if, if there was actually just a little bit more intelligence behind this thing that I'm talking about. You see how different voice is when you're talking with it than like chatting? Like, it's just a fundamentally different experience. What happens when somebody pumps a billion dollars into an advisor bot? What does that look like? Who does it help and where does it leave space for me or not leave space for me? And I think the answer is if you saw a mainstream application of this.

You can kind of think of it.

As like at least the version one, as like what ChatGPT is right now. Somebody's bound to do it. It's going to happen. It's just a matter of time. And in the beginning it's going to be this sort of general knowledge. And I think absolutely AI is going to increase the quality of productized services, your turbo taxes of the world, your like fully automated products that will do accounting and will do tax returns and stuff like that. Those are going to continue, get better and better and keep coming up market. Which is why it's really important today that you're not setting your prices the same way those companies do. Building services around things that are increasingly being commoditized. Like that's why you can't set up camp there right now because that stuff will just keep getting better.

But when one of those companies ships.

An avatar, what it will be best at is the general stuff. Like it's going to be really good at like the stuff Chat GP can. Chat GPT can do. Right now it'll probably be better than that because this is the worst that Chat GPT is ever going to be. And if you're actually building it as an advisor, it's going to have context within certain domains that will make it much, much better within those domains, stuff like tax and accounting. But it's still going to be a general solution. And so like the, the defense to me is as with many things, specificity, it is having a deep understanding of the problems and the pains that a specific type of person in a domain feels. It's one thing to, to dish out like general tax advice and Accounting wisdom and talk about systems and that sort of thing. It's another thing to have a super, super nuanced understanding of, you know, what that means for interior designers and you know, dtc, E, comm, sellers and stuff like that. And the more nuanced know you you can get, the more into the weeds you can get, the more protected you are from those general tools continuing to come up market and get better and better. But a couple, a couple avenues here that, that will be great for advisors. One is the notion that your expertise can also be layered into an avatar or a chat experience avatar. The whole notion of a visual avatar is as really off putting I think for people. So let's just, let's just assume this is a chat experience because that, that feels the most impersonal. I think that's the easiest thing to have a reasonable conversation about is this chat experience because as soon as you put my face up there, my voice and stuff like that, there's a whole lot of like creepy things that complicate that conversation. But the notion that your expertise can get layered into a bot like that, that's an interesting thing to be thinking about. If you benchmark two accounting firms against each other, if one accounting firm will give you 24 access, 24, 7 access to an expert that is an AI chatbot and the other firm doesn't, I think that reflects well on the firm that will. Now you're not going to frame this as a replacement for a one on one conversation with a human being, but you know as well As I do, 80% of the questions that we field are same old, same old questions that maybe are not really even that hard to find an answer to. The other 20% may be specific to that person's situation.

But there's a lot of those questions.

That a good advisor bot could handle just fine.

And in practicality what that will look.

Like long term today if I were to build that, I would use a service like chat thing and probably upload all my transcripts from the daily pod to it and I'd have to build that whole thing from scratch myself.

Long term, what that probably looks like.

Is you have these chatbot services that let you layer in various different sources of context. So one source of context could be my blog.

Another source of context could be QuickBooks training that I licensed from Hector Garcia.

Right. Like Hector's done a ton of QuickBooks training, got a ton of data out there already. I know he's played with like a, like a QuickBooks training bot and the scope of like your bot and what you stand up to be to face your clients, it can actually be any.

Number of bodies of context.

There could be a general tax knowledge body of context that you license from your tax research partner, could be QuickBooks that you license from Hector.

Could be all these different things layered.

In with your specific domain expertise. And this is something that clients can communicate with. And honestly, I think that's a good thing. Like you're able to deliver value at a, at a higher scale. It's possible that the general use case advisors maybe cheapen that because as more, more things go AI and more of the things that we talk with every day are not real, it'll put an increasing premium on those human experiences, I think. So that AI conversation, while it can be really powerful and knock out a lot of the work that we do right now, I do think that it will be cheapened because we're going to be having these AI conversations everywhere. But for me and the things that I do every day, there's value in that as, as almost like a first line of defense. And it's probably going to be the same technology that is making your generative email replies smarter too, right? So the same tech where you could tell a client to go to a chatbot and ask that first, but many of them won't. They're still going to send you an email. The same tech that's sitting behind that chat bot is probably going to be the tech that is making the suggested email reply intelligent also. And like linking out to that IRS publication or the Intuit support article or whatever it is, one way or another, you're going to be using this technology to support your clients and that's a win like that. Like I don't have a problem with that. I don't need to reinvent the wheel with every single client communication that I have. Hey.

Today's episode is sponsored in part by Financial Sense and I am very excited to share. Financial Sense is putting on a virtual conference called WorkflowCon and yours truly will be there talking about how to use AI for workflow stuff. Conferences happen in late October.

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Star cast of speakers. Don Brolin, Ryan Lazanis, Kelly Parks, Now Carter Gray, Veronica Wasek, Allison Baltrell Turner, Nicole Davis. Whole bunch of super smart people use the link in the show notes to sign up for free. Yep, I said it for free. They've got all the sessions organized into tracks, so you can pick something that makes the most sense for you. You know how I feel about conferences. It is the best way to get out of your kind of group Think tunnel vision that we all have within our firms. Come check this one out. Hit the link in the show notes for more information. Hey. This episode sponsored in part by firm360. I know you were just about to ask firm 360 practice management system that gives you a 360 degree view of your firm. All that stuff all in one tool. And if you listen to me talk software much, you know that I'm an.

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One other interesting application of this and how this will be helpful for us.

Advisors is the advisor to the advisor. If you think about all of the.

Research tools that we pay for right now and all that and how just how much work goes into researching things on different sites and having to pull together a whole bunch of resources to come to a conclusion yourself to get to like a client specific answer. The process of how we do that right now can be massively improved. Right now it's manual. Most of these systems just use text based search. So actually trying to find what you really want to get to is a whole project in and of itself. And then you have all these gamungus documents and you have to make sense of all the general stuff in there and how it applies to a specific client's situation. AI is going to be able to be a big help there. Not to answer all the questions for us but to do the work as an a, as a human researcher would of gathering all of that stuff and specifically pointing out, here's the aspects of these documents that are relevant to your situation. AI is going to be a big help there. So while we will have these advisors at a, at a mainstream level that will be helpful to the consumer and those are the things that I would get ready for another, you know, three to five years of doom and gloom stories about these advisors replacing tax pros, replacing accountants and all of that. While there will be consumer facing versions of these that honestly are pretty darn good, there will also be advisor facing versions of these. And this is another area where we need to champion for our tech partners AI tooling that is helpful for us. So while those advisors are helping entrepreneurs, especially entry level entrepreneurs with, with general information, those advisors can also be a really helpful interface for us to do research more efficiently and be a helpful resource for us. Something I said around that PI voice assistant that felt like a hot take to some people was this might be the future of accounting technology. You know, a lot of smart people say that user interfaces are going away because computers can now understand the things that I say. So why do you need a user interface? And I think that'll be the case for some software. It's harder to get my head around for other software. But if this advisor to the advisor can also be like, hey dummy, you need to work on this next. I see that you're doing this thing, I see that you're scrolling X, I see that you got sucked into this client email. But what you actually have to get done is that tax return that you promised for tomorrow. You need to come work on this. And you're like cool, thanks Jeeves. Can you reschedule my four o' clock appointment? And he's like cool, yeah, let me push that out a few days and before you know it, you've got this super helpful personal assistant that is taking on more and more for you. Now does that go as far as like being a practice management system? Does it, does that become the backbone of how your firm operates? Like very possibly. Like that's not shocking to me. It doesn't mean that you won't have reports and views and dashboards and UIs, but I mean we're already seeing with code interpreter for example and chat GPT. If I ask it some quantitative stuff, it it gives me charts to visualize all that stuff for me without me even asking. So your AI assistant can absolutely do that too. But it will be interesting to see how the, the advisor for the advisor is a new, like more helpful thing for us than we ever had before. And potential even consumes some of the applications that we use right now as well into a more consolidated, simplified experience. This is a pretty sci fi episode, but this stuff is, it's closer than as comfortable. And that's a big, a big issue here is it takes our monkey brains sometimes more time to adapt to what's changing. The change is happening faster than we can really adapt to it. And especially in our profession, I mean we still got people that are building firms around desktop based stuff and there's a few situations where that makes sense, but most of the time it doesn't. And honestly most of those firms are still doing just fine. So like, as much as we talk about certain things being imperative, like there's a whole lot of firms that are still running in very old fashioned ways and doing just fine.

This feels like a faster change. Like this feels like something that will accelerate things.

Uh, but we'll see. One thing's for sure, if it's been hard for people to transition for the cloud over the course of a decade, man, it's gonna be exceptionally hard for them to move into AI over the course of a few years and kind of rebuild their business around that. But as we're closing in on our hundredth episode, I can tell you the.

People who are gonna be most plugged.

Into this stuff is gonna be you lovely people who are here listening to this stuff. I said it for all this AI stuff.

It doesn't mean you won't have to change.

You just don't want to be surprised by the change. And I like with the work we do around AI, I think this group will be among the least surprised accountants who are going to be like, yeah, no, we're actually talking about that stuff like a year ago. I'm not scared of it because I've already thought through this kind of mental framework about what this is going to look like. And here's how I've positioned my firm accordingly. One way or another. Something I'm really confident on right now is today the way that we support clients is either super, super high fidelity, one on one, human to human, or it is very low fidelity. Here are my blog posts. Nothing specific to the client and there is a version in the middle there that AI will enable easier access to your expertise. Clients are going to love that. The notion that for certain things they can get immediate answers. That's going to be really handy in the short term. Where is the software Opportunities, obviously the advisors that we've been talking about. But right now there's an opportunity with the practice management systems to enable those chat experiences within specific client data sets. So as the mainstream advisors get super, super good, what are the few things that I have left that only I have and nobody else? It's specific expertise, finding more specificity and it is the history and the documentation that I have with my client that nobody else has. Right now with the practice management system we already have a portal where clients can come into that and see files and past email. Well, the system sees the past email history with that client, but that's everything that you need to build a high context chat experience with that client. And it'll be really interesting to see whether it's the client communication focused companies like Lisio, whether it's the practice management companies that have client facing portals. It'll be really interesting to see who is the first to lean into a, like a AI chat experience for the client in the portal that already exists, that they already use, that can see into the documents that are there to the status of the projects that are there. That'll be interesting because that's kicking off a whole different methodology to servicing a client where then that chat experience can be enriched by other sources of context like all of the IRS publications like Intuit, QuickBooks support, like how do you make that thing even smarter so that you can genuinely serve clients in your sleep but also layer in the contextual data that only you have access to because you've got your tax filings, you've got a connection to their ledger, can see into that. That's gonna be really interesting. But of all of the things that AI is changing, these sort of mainstream.

Like mega advisors and ChatGPT is probably.

The first example of this. But you know, if into it tomorrow ships this kind of mega big brain tax pro AI expert that's going to sit at the core of the TurboTax product or something like that. How should we feel about this? It's something that we need to be thinking about because it's going to be coming one way or another. And this is one of the near term things that is going to kick off maybe more doom and gloom articles than anything else. We just got to have a plan for it and make sure that we aren't set up camp in the same spaces where these tools are going to come and, and honestly help people. You just got to find your own way of layering in that, that human level support with greater specificity around the expertise that you have. Was that helpful?

Thanks for coming.

And hanging Today, episode 99. We got 100 coming up. That's going to be a fun one. Whoops.

Thanks for coming.

I'll see you in the next one.