105 Intuit's New QuickBooks AI Assistant 🤯

It happened. It finally happened. You knew it was going to happen though. Into it finally launched their AI chat assistant. How should we feel about this? Boy, I got some opinions. They came right out and said this chat assistant is going to be great to connect you with the professional. And when they say connect you with a professional, they mean a QuickBooks Live bookkeeping or a TurboTax Professional now like a you professional. So let's talk about what's in the announcement. What are they actually going to roll out? What does it look like? It's actually a pretty meaningful implementation of it. But it's quote unquote rolling out to us customers over the next in quote unquote coming months. So we'll see if they just bet the farm on something they don't actually have their arms around yet or not. But oh, the messaging's interesting. So come on in, let's have an existential crisis and talk about it. So if you follow me on the socials, this is old news but I think it's interesting to dig into how they announced this, some of the features they're talking about, how this aligns with some of the chat with your ledger type stuff that we've already talked about. And does it ultimately signal anything from the Intuit Megacorp about kind of the direction they're heading and how that impacts we lads like you and I who do the accounting thing. So a whole bunch of press around it as far as I can figure. Basically in each of their like content channels they did a little write up about it. So what's relevant to us is in their Firm of the Future blog they have a post about it introducing intuit assist for QuickBooks, a trusted business assistant by your side. And then they also have like a General video on YouTube about it's just kind of a graphical sort of announcement video, kind of like what Microsoft has been doing about every little AI thing that they announced and don't release. So I'll put links to both of those things in the show notes. So let's I guess start with what exactly it does and what they're saying about it. Interesting and most relevant to us I think is the post that they make in the Firm of the Future blog because it's particularly for folks who run accounting firms. It calls out this assistant as you know, it uses the framing of your clients will have access to this and it will make your clients more productive with which is really interesting. It doesn't really call out the advisor so much which gets into the nuance and specifically longer term what chat experiences are for the advisor and what are for the normie SMB owner. We talked about this when Digits launched their Ledger Chat assistant, which is available now and they've been shipping more features on it. You can go out to digits.com, try it for free, connected to a QuickBooks free file and chat with that accounting ledger to your heart's content. Fall in love. Whatever longings you've had for accounting files. I'm sure AI can enable it, but that was something that was really useful. The Digits implementation was something that was really useful for business owners, more so than pros, I think, because it was framing what was happening in the underlying ledger like through the lens of an expert, which you and I know how to do. It's our clients that don't know how to do that and this is more or less doing the same thing. It's just interesting. In the firm of the future blog, the frame streaming is around like this will make your clients more productive. It says. How Intuit Assist works. Once available, your clients will find Intuit assist on their QuickBooks dashboard. Four key ways Intuit Assist will help and support your client's business, including the following 1. Show me it'll help save time and provide insights to give a comprehensive view of where the business stands. I showed the example of like show me the profit loss for the last month and it gives you a like little concise view with a button to go to reports. Pretty simple, like canned stuff like honestly, the QuickBooks assistant they had way back in the day could do that. This is interesting. Number two. Do it for me. Intuit Assist will automate tasks such as drafting invoice reminders. Note that it said drafting not sending saving clients time and allowing them to focus on the bigger picture. Like we all do when we save time, right? We all zoom out, go to the lake and live a better life. Nope. You take one more client, you're back to square one. If a gap in revenue is projected, Intuit Assist will surface those cash flow hotspots and deliver clear personal utilize recommendations to help them close the gap, meet revenue goals. So that that's interesting. Do it for me. That's a totally different level of ambition than most chat assistants have today, where they're like read only and just telling you things. The doing of the things that's important. Although it does just say draft invoice reminders, which is kind of too bad. Ultimately what I want is the thing to do some work. For me, that's where it gets really Time saving is not just telling and talking to me about the work, but actually doing the work. And it looks like they're trying to lean into that. But the only real example they gave was invoice remind. And now I realize it actually says drafting, not sending, which is kind of too bad, but maybe that's something they're working on. That's kind of a, like there's a philosophical argument to be had there, like whether that's something it should be trying and aspiring to do today or not. Because obviously if that goes sideways, it's problematic. If it goes in, it does a bunch of stuff that you didn't intend or didn't want it to do that's bad. So it has to be like of a certain quality and reliability or require some sort of confirmation before it, you know, fires the missiles and sends off the hundred reminders like there needs to be something there that makes sense so it's not being done erroneously. Third, it says, guide me. With your expertise, combined with knowledge from our extensive financial data, it will be able to create a fully customized action plan across both QuickBooks and Mailchimp that guides a small business owner's attention to where it's most impactful. And fourth, Intuit Assist will supercharge help and support through your client's journey, answering questions and providing customized support. Blah, blah. So that is the article on the Firm of the Future blog. Interestingly, this whole feature has a dedicated landing page where it has a similar set of four things, but just a little different. See if you can pick up the difference on the main landing page. 1. Show business insights. Be empowered to make smarter and more well informed decisions, et cetera, to do work for you. Up your efficiency by letting into it Assist take care of everything from creating and running reports to setting invoice reminders that you can personalize. 3. Guide your goals. Intuit Assist will help you make goals and work towards them by leveraging, et cetera. And four Help you connect with human experts. Start with Intuit Assist and have your conversation seamlessly transferred to a human expert. And with Intuit Assist's intelligent connections, repeating yourself will be a thing of the past. And in the little screenshot it says connect with assisted bookkeeping we can connect you with someone like David. And there's like a little picture of David, this bookkeeper since 2008 in about five minutes. So I'm going to make sense they're going to connect people who are just using the QuickBooks product with somebody from the QuickBooks Live bookkeeping team. They've been super successful with TurboTax Live and pulling in live experts because hot take, as it turns out, having a live expert involved in the loop is actually a helpful thing. And I don't like, I don't want to dunk on into it like they're making some killer consumer products. You just don't want to set up camp in the place that they're going to. That's just bad. But like they're making like well connected experiences. And I've had people, there's got a good number of folks who like work for live bookkeeping and stuff like that, comment on podcast episodes and YouTube videos and all that. And behind the scenes, it's everything that you would expect it to be. It's hard. It's not always done well. There's not a ton of expertise in the team that's getting the work done. And like, that's not a generalization. There will be phenomenal people there, I'm sure. And you quickly get moved up the pricing scale, like the pricing you see on the landing page, which doesn't usually end up being what you actually pay. Hey, I wanted to tell you, this episode is sponsored in part by the lovely folks at Copilot. You know what keeps me up at night? This is probably going to trigger some of y'. All. What if you move your whole firm to a practice management system, you train the whole team, you move all your organizational data in there, you train all of your clients on how to work with you in the client portal and then you don't like it or they stop developing it or something like that. You know how sticky these things are and what a mountain it will be to retrain your whole staff, that's one thing. But to retrain all of your clients and say, hey, just kidding, we actually want you to come use this system over here now. Yeah, sorry about that. Let me tell you, you know, a solution to that is to separate your client experience from all the systems that you use to manage your firm. Right. Think about it. So Copilot, one of the things they do really well is they are just laser focused on the client experience. They just want to be the client communication layer. And why I can appreciate that the value of that is it gives me the power to change all the paperclips and bubble gum and strings behind the scenes that are holding everything else together. So if there's a super cool new AI this or that, that's going to do my work better for me, I can pull that in without having to change the client experience pretty darn Good argument for the apps that are just that. Client communications layer, right, Copilot. You've probably heard me talk about it before. A super flexible client portal layer where you can like customize what each of the clients see and even embed stuff from other apps into that portal experience. To learn more about Copilot, check out the link in the show notes. Hey. This episode, it's sponsored in part by the fine folks at ClientHub. Thank you, ClientHub. Hey. Last week on Tales from the Hub, super smart accounting firm was super pumped about ClientHub's new vision for how AI gets pulled into the product. They're calling it your firm on GPT and let me tell you, super smart accounting firm. They just joined the beta program for the new email functionality. In a word, they're blown away. Client Hub now connects to email. Platforms like Microsoft and Gmail will pull those emails into the system. They'll take long email threads and summarize them in one click and even take a reply and change the tone of that reply to make it just right before you hit send. Pretty cool. And that is just the email integration feature. Cloud Hub's working on a bunch of cool AI stuff. Gonna be part of that pilot program. Taste the rainbow. Get on board. Check out the link to Client Hub in the show notes. I mean, it's a big deal. What was Intuit's first actual meaningful announcement of what they're gonna ship around AI? Like what was that gonna look like? They'd already had several were non press releases which were kind of non announcements. But I think they actually had their investor day today and this probably came out during that. And so there's a whole bunch of press around this. All the big publications have their own write ups. But an interesting one from Fortune, the title says Intuit cut hundreds of jobs and spent at least $20 billion in a massive bet on AI. Today the company is revealing its new virtual assistant. I should add it's called intuit assist, not QuickBooks assist. And it works. QuickBooks, TurboTax, Mailchimp and Credit Karma they showed in the demo, which in my mind is kind of pulling them more towards this all in one super connected thing. Like they've got the QuickBooks Live bookkeeping, they've got TurboTax Live. We talked on the main YouTube channel about how they're now doing small business tax prep, at least on a trial basis to see how that goes. So the natural progression is just they're an accounting firm and they do all that stuff for people in a very Productized way. But interesting this Fortune article, some quotes from Sasan Gadar. Generally since Sasan came in, was he the first one after Brad Smith? Brad Smith like old into it was very advisor friendly. Like that's how they got the bookkeeping market and how in the US which this isn't the case elsewhere and in North America probably the word QuickBooks is actually like synonymous with an accounting file. Like a lot of people don't say show me your accounting file, they say show me your QuickBooks. Like that's the degree to which QuickBooks has just embedded here, like culturally why they have such a big advantage. And the previous leadership was very advisor centric and that was how they originally really grew. The product was. It was the product that the pros trusted and they were super essential for their success. But some quotes here from Sasan Gadarzi who since coming in has been more focused on consumer products to like big success like TurboTax Live thing was massively profitable for them. I don't know how profitable the QuickBooks Live thing has been, but they've been kind of marching down that path. So the article starts out when he was running into its TurboTax and QuickBooks businesses, Sasan Gadarzi had a startling realization. No matter how much work the company put into helping people calculate their own taxes or keep their own books, they didn't really want to do those things at all. Here's a quote from Sasan. I realized that building out a platform for our customers to do the work was not actually the future, he recalls. The future was it's done for you a little later. He says. At the end of the day, there are certain decisions you have to make good. Arzi says, and the decision I made was as a team, we're going to bet the company on data and AI. And at the very end of the article is another quote from him. We're at the beginning of the journey with AI. He says in the next five to 10 years it will create new economies and destroy some economies. It will create new experiences, fuel new company growth and make certain companies go out of business. That, that was interesting, right? I'll put the article in the show notes. It even calls back to OpenAI's livestream where they use GPT4 to prepare tax returns. And into it says, you know, for now fears that that's going to displace tax prep are unwarranted because right now it's not applying like personal proprietary information about your tax situation to like actually preparing a tax return. And they say like this is our advantage is we have all that data and we can kind of marry those two things. But interesting quotes from Godarzi there around their continued investment in doing it for you. And that was what started an article about AI. And so it's interesting that they're framing of AI as this is furthering their mission of work done for you rather than like a DIY platform to come and do that stuff, which, you know, goes without saying, is at odds with being like a trusted partner of an advisor of an accounting firm. I think it honestly like deepens the rift that's there between there's like intuit, like leadership speak and the direction that they're investing. And then you have the accountant channel, which is like a still channel that makes the company money. Then you have all the people in the accountant channel who like, they're just naturally going to say the things that the accountants want to hear. Right? But like ultimately they feel like this kind of, I don't know, stepchild of like where current leadership seems to be taking the company and like honestly for good reason because they're doing such a good job with consumer products and they're making money hand over fist. It just ends up being a really complex calculation for advisors. So earlier this year I did a, a YouTube video that was like very tongue in cheek. My 2023 guide to into it, stealing your clients. And it wasn't even about into it so much as just running through all the productized services and saying like, here's what Bench does, here's what Pilot does, here's what QuickBooks does, and here's how they price what they do. And if you actually put yourself up on a feature comparison side by side, like we see with software companies now, where you've got the features for this tier and the features for that tier, if you put yourself up there and compare yourself to what these other services do, you realize what you do is wildly different than what these productize services can offer. Like QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping. @ least in the beginning, like you didn't even get a dedicated support person. Like you went into a pool. Like there's no aspect of a person learning about you and about your business. And maybe in simple situations that's not necessary. But it's interesting. We actually, I think when we don't know much about those services, we kind of benchmark what we do against what those companies do on price. And you may see, okay, Bench is doing bookkeeping for X dollars a month and you think that you need to beat that or you need to give people a reason to pay you the same amount as that, when the reality is the level of service that you're offering is astronomically higher because like they have an actual person that they can get on the horn with and talk about. Your level of expertise is likely much, much higher than the people that work in these groups who like side tangents. If these services pull more folks into the pipeline, into the profession, that's awesome. I actually think that's a great benefit. This episode is sponsored in part by the fine folks at Cloud Accountant Staffing. Do you hire accountants? Bless your little heart. Not the best part of the job in my opinion. Not something I ever enjoyed. Well, listen, you can build your accounting dream team with talented offshore accounting in the Philippines that work 100% full time for your firm. Their accountants aren't freelancing or contracting for multiple firms. They're all yours. They work exclusively for you and are incentivized to stay with you and your team long term. They're not gonna get swiped. Cloud account staffing is 100% dedicated to the accounting industry and founded by a former accounting firm owner that understands your business, knows your pain points. They had to hire some accountants and they said, you know what, we're gonna build our own pipeline in the Philippines, gonna pull in some super talented people and then open that up to other firms. Basically that's the story. I've been talking about a lot about staffing, building more resilient staffing pipelines for your firms. I had staff in the Philippines like totally red pilled me to like oh geez, like we need to globalize the way that we get our work done. Check these folks out. Link in the show description Cloud accountantstaffing.com Myself, most traditional tax practices or accounting practices, while an individual can learn a lot, going to work for QuickBooks, Live Bookkeeping or TurboTax or whatever it is. Long term, I think you have more to offer these people than Intuit does. And so if that pulls more people into the profession, like that's awesome. That's I think a net win for everybody. But we see this stuff and we feel the need to compete with these productized services when unless you are a productized service, you don't need to because your approach to all this stuff is very different than their approach. Now I will say if you're trying to play the productized game, that's just going to get harder and harder because there's so much investment and people with way more horsepower. And I mean it says they spent $20 billion on AI. But the people who comment on my ChatGPT videos are mad that ChatGPT is $20. So you don't have this quite the same resources to build like a product solution than like a startup or intuit or something like that. And so it has me really kind of how I've always been like, if you're really trying to nail down this almost like quasi productized approach to doing accounting or running a practice, you may be setting up camp in a place that isn't super safe. Long term, I think you're better off leaning into the human touch and meeting people where they're at. That feels safer longer term. But I've said this a hundred times, AI is going to massively improve the quality of productized solutions. So there's sort of this level where productized bookkeeping is this good right now, right? Or TurboTax is this good and we'll handle tax returns up to this complexity. That's going to get way better. That's going to come way up. I'll be totally honest with you, I think it can't come soon enough because the way I see it right now, and there's exceptions to every rule, but the way I see it is right now there's a huge gap between the quality of what you get with a productized service and what you really need to pay a professional for them to do all that stuff for you. There's a big old gap there. If Bench is coming in and doing, doing bookkeeping at $300 a month, you're going to have a really, really hard time building a profitable accounting practice around 300 to $600 a month. Projects like we got to where we really wouldn't take anything below one and a half or two a month. And there's a lot of firms that would just like scoff at that. That's outrageous. They won't take anything below, you know, 10 or even 100amonth. But there's sort of a like a no man's land right there where there are absolutely accounting firms living. But I think it's because they just haven't learned how to value the work that they do enough yet. Like they should be living somewhere higher. And almost by coming in low, they're associated with those productized services just because they're so cheap. And because when you go low on price like that, what you do is you attract all the cheapskates like naturally. Like that's the reason that they will come to you. If you win on price, you end up Collecting all of the people who just want to pay the least amount possible. Like, I don't mind that the productized services are coming up. I think people are actually like underserved in that little window right now. But there's firms that are living right there that are just going to have to figure out how to come up market. And there's firms that are just starting out who like, will do just about anything for their first client. Like, we've all been there. Take some time to climb out of that to like, find specificity where you can charge more. It may be hardest on those folks. Like, ultimately you just got to make sure that you're not setting up in the same place as those productized solutions and where the place that those things are at, like, that is changing. And it's going to keep changing. I think they're going to keep getting better. There's going to be certain things specifically that they do well and certain things that they don't. And that may shift what then for you makes a great client versus something that you just refer to QuickBooks. But honestly, it's the same thing with like AI tech and all that, like, stuff's changing. You just got to keep curious and like, keep plugged into what's changing. You only really get turned on your head if you're surprised by change. And like, nobody that's listening to this podcast is going to be surprised by change. I've been talking about this launch for almost a year now. Like, when are we going to get chat on the ledger? Like, we've been thinking through this now. When this rolls out to your clients, what do you do? I honestly think the only thing to do is become an expert in everything that this thing will do and not do. Like, it may even be worth, like running a webinar for your clients to say, like, hey, QuickBooks just rolled out this cool new thing. Here's how to get the most out of it. And I learned this during COVID when there was so much misinformation going around and all that. I think the only thing that you can do to maintain alignment with your clients that is for your clients to see this through the same lens that you do. The only way to get there is just to really proactively communicate your thoughts on the state of things and don't crap on it. Like, don't be like, people expect that. Like, don't be the Debbie Downer about it. Be proactive about, like, hey, here's some cool stuff that it does and some stuff that it doesn't quite do do yet. Because if you don't get proactive about it, you're leaving them to form their own opinions. And so when they're scrolling TikTok and there's a TikTok that's probably already out there that says this just ended, the bookkeeping profession, this assistant, right, it will do your work for you. When they scroll through that and they don't even watch the TikTok, people just learn from headlines, right? And hooks these days, they don't actually read anything. They're going to cruise through that and they're going to be like, I wonder if that changes what I should actually be using. As opposed to if you were proactive about that and you put information in front of them first, they're going to be like, oh yeah, I already know about that. Maybe I even took it for a spin. It's helpful for like running reports and doing this and that right now. But that's about it for now. It's the age old struggle of everybody consumes algorithms these days. Like society has been reduced to a set of algorithms. We all scroll different ones, but we are programmed by what we consume. And everybody. I've said this before, like if you're standing in line at a coffee shop and there's a person that's looking up and looking around, you're like, is something wrong? Like what are they, Is somebody getting robbed right now? Like why are they not looking down at their phone? Like it's almost weird when a person isn't looking down at their phone and those people generally are scrolling algorithms, be it Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, whatever it is. And you can either make the decision to spend a whole bunch of time and energy combating the stuff that's coming through those algorithms that your clients are reading or in your own really lo fi probably basic way, joining in the fun and putting out content and proactively communicating your thoughts on things so that they can get your opinion there where they're already consuming stuff rather than bringing that stupid TikTok back to you and you having to be like, yeah, no, you can't write off your G wagon because of this or that. So I think it's worth being proactive when this comes out. Your clients will probably get like, like marketing communications from intuit about it and the things that it will do. And a lot of the messaging is around advising, like it's around insights and things that are traditionally associated with the stuff that we provide. So I do think you need to have a plan for when it comes out and how to communicate that stuff in a constructive way to clients. In fact, maybe when that comes out, that's even something that we could crowdsource that we could put together and you could leverage, whether it's just an explainer, some copy, or like a, a full blown webinar that you put on for your clients. Maybe that's something that we could pull together and share so that you don't have to build that thing from scratch yourself. That's cool. It's fun day. I'm excited when I see this stuff come out because we knew it was gonna happen. And honestly, when it comes out, there's then less uncertainty around exactly what they have planned. Like now we can be like, oh, this is what this is Intuit's take on this. There's gonna be things we like about it and things we don't like about it. But now at least we know a little more, right? So this will be an interesting one to follow as it rolls out over the coming months about how you get that stuff in front of your clients honestly in a constructive way too. Like, it's okay for this to be helpful. In fact, that's a win for everybody. If it is helpful for your clients. Just don't hide from it. Because if you're hiding under a rock, like, maybe it ultimately changes how you advise your clients or the way that you set up your services. It'll do some stuff here around, like, cash management. Like, I sold a lot of cash reporting in my firm, like short term cash reporting, so that they knew what was coming up. Does that ultimately change how I would position that service? I don't know. Unless I hop in and learn it and know what's there and what it'll do and what it won't do. And at the end of the day, like, that's just part of being a good advisor. It's not like, I don't know, having an awareness of the best tool for every job that's out there, rather than just trying to shoehorn people into your service. Because that's what you sell, right? Like, you don't want to end up just doing that. So I'll put some more links to Intuit Assist and all this stuff that we've talked about in the show Notes. Thanks for coming and hanging. We'd love to hear your thoughts, any little things you picked up from this announcement down in the comments and I'll see you in the next one.