113 Windows Copilot is Here 🎉 What It Means For Accountants

Windows Copilot by the. When you're listening to this, you may actually already have it. It's rolling out in a Windows Update, which this Windows update absolutely slaps a whole bunch of really cool stuff in it that we're going to run through. But most notably Windows Copilot, an AI companion that lives in a little right hand panel in Windows. Like my mom is going to get this update. So this is news. How does it impact the work that we do? How does it actually impact what we ask of our accounting software? And what's next? What is this laying the groundwork for? Come on in, we're going to talk all about it on Jason Daily. This is really exciting stuff. This is like the realization of some very abstract things that we've talked about for a long time. And, and it doesn't get much more validating than literally building it into the Windows desktop. Like this is a right hand panel thing that you will be able to summon by hitting Windows key C. And I like that it's Windows key C because I think probably the most hammered keyboard shortcut for all of us is Control C if you're a Windows user, or Command C or Apple C if you're a Mac person. So, so Windows KeyC is now gonna pull in this panel on the side that can presumably make all of your wildest dreams come true and your very worst clients go away. So let's cruise through what's been announced and what it looks like it will do. And also they also like renamed a whole bunch of stuff and Microsoft's naming is always supes confusing. So bring you up to speed on that. So I published this on Twitter and LinkedIn on Monday. Kind of a roundup of what we're expecting. I don't care, honestly, like I'm, I'm, I'm actually leaning pretty hard into being a Mac user of late. But this is news for everyone because Windows ships something ultimately like Mac OS will get their own version as well. But if you're familiar with Bing Chat, the panel that'll live on the right hand side looks pretty much the same as Bing Chat or the Chat experience you get in Edge, but it is vastly enriched by like the stuff that's actually on your screen. And unfortunately as accountants we have a very unique set of challenges that we have to navigate because we have so many data integration problems. Getting information from a tax form to a bit of tax software, from a bank statement to an accounting system. Like there's so many situations where what we're doing is ultimately taking Data from place A, applying some sort of logic to it and putting data into place B, which by and large is an integration problem. Like, there isn't a way to directly plug this into that. And we use so many different apps and our clients have so many different systems that, yes, native integrations can make this better, but to be a complete solution, man, we are a long ways from that. So, unfortunately, where I've landed is ultimately how a lot of this work is going to get done is like, via desktop automation, or automation that clicks around and sees your computer screen the same way that you do. Because at least today, really hard to visualize cloud apps and native cloud integrations solving for everything, right? Because there's so many different sources of information. Even native integrations between cloud apps are frankly, big business. Like, as much as we came into the cloud era with this hope for it being this meritocracy and everybody integrating with everybody else, there's a lot of skeevy stuff that happens behind the scenes with native integrations, and people won't build native integrations for other certain apps due to, like, competitive issues and all sorts of reasons. So the notion that that's always just going to be this perfect playground where everything talks to each other isn't realistic. There's a lot of great integrations, and it's a whole lot better than nothing. But in order to automate the vast majority of what an accountant does right now, it's got to happen at the desktop level. And so this is compelling because this is a desktop assistant. It is like the first version of something that can see and use our screen the same way that we do. Which, frankly, for the way a lot of people work, doesn't really matter for accountants is massive because so much of what we're doing is across our 18 monitors and taking things from A to B and all that. Now Windows Copilot is coming with this update that's rolling out a number of things. Bless their heart, they made Microsoft Paint way better. The new OpenAI image generation model, Dall E3 actually looks to now be available in Bing. This isn't really very accountant stuff, but I use this stuff for memes oftentimes. Dall E3 sidebar looks really impressive. You can do things like have an onion talking to a potato and put a speech bubble saying this and that to each of them. And it will, like, actually, like, even generate the text. Like, even. I saw an example where somebody said, respond with a pun, and I, like, responded with a pun. So kind of amazing. But that's now built into Bing Chat, which good golly now lives so many different places. What do we even call it? There's even an enterprise version that you can looks like presumably put client data into. We're going to talk about that as well. But two other cool things coming in this Windows update. A big upgrade to the snipping tool. The built in like screenshot tool. Now when you take a screenshot which you can now do public service announcement with the print screen button on your keyboard. Why has that not been how that worked for the last 15 years? But you hit print screen and it pulls up the snipping tool. But after you select something there will be an option there that says quick redact and quick redact will remove any names or email addresses that it sees on screen. But you can also toggle that so that it highlights all of the text in the entire image and you can just click on that text to quick redact that thing that's on the screen. Man, that's super useful for us. I don't know about you like doing the whole like black Sharpie like thick line over the top of the thing to scribble redact. Stuff like that just stinks. So that's a big upgrade. Another biggie is they're rolling out a whole new version of Outlook on desktop. A couple years ago I switched to the web client of Outlook which used to stink but in the last year or two actually got really good. I know most people I think are probably still using ye olde desktop Outlook client. So what this new version of Outlook looks like, uh, but that's exciting. But let's talk about Windows Copilot, what we know it will do and what's still kind of open ended. And then we'll bring this home by Talking about Microsoft 365 which is the AI across like all of your data and all that stuff, which is a different thing that they have now said will be available to enterprise users on November 1st. Many firms I think actually are enterprise users. If many may not even realize that. But let's get down to it. There's a lot of stuff to cover. So what does Windows Copilot look like it will do for us today? Stuff that they have showed off everything that it does in the browser. So like that's table stakes. It will go out and get information for you and all that. That's great. Things that they've showed off in these razzle dazzle demo videos. There was one image or one part in a video when it says organize my Windows and Like organized all the windows into like one big panel on the left and then like two quadrants on the right. We've seen in the past it will do system settings. So the early build of it that was on like Windows Preview, you could do something like turn on dark mode. And honestly I think that's absolutely gold because Windows system settings are so painful to navigate. So I actually love that. And I think that's a great example of where chat there that implementation of chat is fundamentally better than having to dig through all of the sub menus and those freaking settings to find what you actually want. Also noteworthy here, you can also use voice for any of this stuff. So there's a little microphone in that chat dialog that you can click and tell it to do a thing. I gotta imagine we're get a shortcut if there isn't one already for that as well. Like a keyboard shortcut. Just this last Sunday on the main channel, we published a video about the four horsemen of the AI counting apocalypse and what's actually going to happen over the next two years and how to feel about it and plan for it. And honestly, maybe the hottest take in that video was the notion that we're just going to be talking with our computers more. Well, like here it is. Like the more compelling Windows Copilot gets, I think the more we're probably going to be using that voice functionality to talk about what's happening on our screen. Because at the end of the day there's a reason that I don't come home and type chat messages with my wife. We actually talk. So like there are scenarios where it is fundamentally better to have that conversation via voice than chat. They showed in the video play something to help me focus. And it popped up Spotify and started playing some music. There's another scenario where it said create blah blah blah for Instagram reels or something like that. And it pulled up whatever it is. Adobe Express or like their lightweight like video and animation app, which I thought was a little weird because the worst version of this is like this pay to win sort of thing where the chat bot like points you to all the Microsoft apps or all the partners whose apps they want you to use. So it'll be interesting to see what that looks like. I think we're going to get more granular control on what integrates into it in Microsoft 365. Like the business version of this that we're really excited for and we'll talk more about that. But interestingly, in terms of what it looks like, it will do at launch is it will also summarize stuff that is on screen, presumably in any app. Like the video demos don't show what the app is that they're actually using, presumably to say, this will work on anything that's on your desktop. And so now down at the, at your, in your taskbar, at the very bottom in Windows, just to the right of the search bar, you're gonna have a little copilot icon, which I'm pretty sure is a new icon because, yes, Microsoft needed another new thing. You click on that and it gives you three options that say summarize, explain this, or rewrite. And it looks as if you can do those three options with anything that is on your screen. And when you ask it to do that, it'll pull up the assistant on the right hand side and give you the output. That's pretty cool. That's handy, man. It doesn't feel like long ago that Canopy shipped this for Generative Email in the practice management system. And we were like doing hacky things to build that into Gmail with like third party tools. And then Carbon launched their version. Now this stuff is literally built into Windows. So it's amazing how quickly these things we're talking about are becoming like table stakes. Yet there's still honestly like a shocking number of accountants who are like, they will like not acknowledge a massive change like this just to not have to Pay, you know, $20 a month for GPT plus or something like that. But you're going to have that in your taskbar. And so you can summarize, explain this, rewrite anything on your screen with that. And then interestingly, there's another like inline copilot thing. And what it looks like is basically you click this copilot icon. So let's say you're in a big old text box writing something in on a browser or whatever app it is, it shows like a little copilot icon. And you click that and you get a panel that says draft with copilot. And then you describe what it is you want it to write. You can attach files to it, whatever you want. And then it fills in wherever you are, that thing that it generates. And this is something that would make sense within the Microsoft Suite if this rolled out in the Microsoft Suite. But in the video like promo Steph, they're showing it just on like generic apps as if this works for anything. So on the one hand, that might be actually super handy to have in line anywhere you write. On the other hand, if you've ever had A browser extension that was like way too intrusive and was sticking their logo on all sorts of stuff on the browser. I could also see it being annoying, so I don't know if I want it to show that copilot icon anywhere my mouse goes over where I can type, I don't know. It'll be interesting to see what that implementation actually looks like. 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 accountants 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 this episode. Oh, this episode is sponsored in part by countests. You know what, I don't enjoy spinning the old wheel of does this person I just hired know what the hey they're doing? Because I can tell you that more times than not, the answer was no. Because how in the world do you actually figure out if this person can be productive based on, I don't know, a resume based on the firmness of their handshake? You can't. But account tests, it's gonna give you a little more information than you had about otherwise. So count tests is a super duper simple way of doing skills testing for the people that you're going to hire. Basically, you generate a link. You can run them through these skills tests. It's nothing super sweaty, but you know what it is is information. Information that you wouldn't otherwise have unless you sent them this little quiz. They got tests for accounting stuff for Gap stuff for tax stuff. Whatever you're hiring for, they probably got a test for you. Super cost effective. Because let me tell you, it is a whole heck of a lot cheaper than hiring the wrong person and then training them for months and then realizing I have made a huge mistake and we just wasted months of our time with the wrong person. Boy, do I have a whole closet full of those T shirts. So that's something that keeps you up at night. Check out account test. We'll put a link in the show notes. Seems like just yesterday, honestly, beginning of this year we were monkeying around doing all this same stuff and ChatGPT is now built directly into Windows. Pretty cool. Let's talk about security stuff and then we will talk about Microsoft 365. So security stuff. Get ready to be confused. So Bing Chat Enterprise is a thing that has been available for like a month and a half or something like that. It's available to everyone who uses either an enterprise plan with Microsoft or you uses Business Standard or Business Premium. So for most accounting firms, unless you've got like a mega, mega, mega entry level plan, you should have this. And if you have that level of account when you are logged into Bing right now or logged into the Edge app on mobile, the chat experience that you have should be quote Bing Chat Enterprise. And when it pops up, it looks a little different and it should say Bing Chat Enterprise. And when you have that, there's like a different level of security that is assigned to the work that you're doing. And what they assure us is under Bing Chat Enterprise, all of the user data, like the usage data, only exists within your organization. It's not going anywhere else. No Microsoft employees can see into that stuff. So it is literally siloed within your little Org and those prompts are not used to train the model. So it's like a fundamentally more secure way of doing this where you could presumably like put client data in there just the same way you may put client data into OneDrive or your outlook email or anything like that. Right now, the really important thing to look out for right now, and what makes this a little confusing I think, is my mom can go to bing.com chat and do the chat thing. But if you go there and you're accidentally not logged into your account or something like that, you're just gonna get the vanilla consumer experience. You have to be logged in with your account that has that plan level that gives you access to that in order for it to be quote Bing Chat Enterprise. Now if you're Not a Microsoft. They have said that you'll be able to get a standalone version of this at $5 per user per month quote in the future. Which feels like the kind of thing that maybe they'll ship someday, maybe they won't ever ship. But frankly, five bucks per month per user, that's pretty gosh darn cheap if you compare. Especially if you Compare it to OpenAI's $20 a month for GPT Plus. I will say in the wild, I still use ChatGPT because for whatever reason I just haven't had as good of an experience trying to do stuff in Bing. And I don't know if it's because it's just trying so darn hard to like pull in stuff from the web and doing all these kind of like processing on the stuff that comes from the language model as opposed to ChatGPT, which is just like raw dogging it, throwing that text straight to the language model. And that is maybe more straightforward or something. But my results admittedly have been mixed with Bing. That being said, with it being built straight into Windows, I imagine I'll use be using it a whole heck of a lot more, but particularly around the context of like summarize this thing or write this thing. As we're like looking at stuff on your desktop, it's obviously gonna have client information. What isn't 100% clear right now is Windows Copilot. When this is on your right hand panel for business users. I don't know if by default everybody's gonna get this or if like your IT nerd has to enable it. It also isn't clear if what you're going to get in that panel is vanilla Bing Chat, because this will be coming out to consumer YouTube or consumer Windows machines also. So it's not 100% clear if what that panel is going to be is the consumer experience or if I am logged in to my my Enterprise or my business Microsoft account. If that panel will be Bing Chat Enterprise, it ought to be Bing Chat Enterprise. And honestly I'll be really disappointed if it isn't. In fact, there's almost like a degree of like it's almost kind of irresponsible if it is a business user for them to then give you the Bing Chat experience where prompts are trained into the model and they're constantly encouraging you to integrate this into your workflow based on the stuff that's on screen. I would kind of be shocked if it wasn't Bing Chat Enterprise specifically that is that chat experience on the right. But Something to pay attention to. But along with all this hubbub of the new Windows update a couple days ago and, and all the information and new naming conventions to come from that was more information on Microsoft 365 copilot. Lot of copilots flying around right now. So that was Windows Copilot, as in the Windows operating system. Let's Talk about Microsoft 365 Copilot. Microsoft 365 is the like suite of apps and all that stuff that, that you're subscribed to if you're a Microsoft user. And Copilot for that will now be available November 1st to enterprise customers. Now, it's not a huge pricing jump from business to enterprise per user per month, so it could be worth checking whether this is the thing that you have or not. No word yet on when the business tier people get it, so it's kind of hard to know what to do. Like if the business tier folks get it the next month, then I'm going to be super bummed that I just upgraded to the enterprise version, you know, just to get that. But if they eventually, six months down the road, say no, you have to have Enterprise to get this, then it's like, well, maybe I pull the trigger on that right away. But they have absolutely been pushed into this move by Google releasing this functionality already across workspaces. Now I don't know ultimately whose implementation will be better, but at this point you can already use Bard, Google's chatbot, and it can see into your Google Docs and your sheets and your files and stuff like that. And that's pretty darn cool. Now Microsoft announced all this stuff in like February, March and so we've been waiting a hot minute, which is kind of too bad. And I know a lot of people look at the tools in the accounting space and they're like, well, we're never going to get this stuff. It's going to take forever. Like to their credit, man, like Carbon and Canopy shipped generative email before Gmail did. Like, I mean we still don't really have that on Outlook Financial Sense Client Hub, like Pixie, like there's been a lot of PMs doing cool generative AI stuff. So people are absolutely moving on this in our space. But on the subject of Microsoft365 and exactly what that is going to look like. So in the past they've shown assistants, like built into the app. So for example, in early access you had Excel and then there was a right hand panel in Excel that was this little chat Assistant that you could talk with. I think that's what Microsoft Teams Premium looks like right now as well. The version of Microsoft Teams that has this little chat assistant that's hanging out over on the side, it's just a little panel on the right. But Microsoft said they have a new and I quote, hero experience and that is this dedicated like standalone chat app. And they called it something else when they announced it back earlier this year. But now they're calling it Microsoft 365 Chat, not Copilot, not Microsoft 365 Copilot. The app is called Microsoft 365 Chat and as far as I can tell it's a standalone application that is a chat app that can see into all of your Microsoft 365 data. So your emails, your Microsoft Word, Excel, all that stuff. And when you pull it up there's a bunch of suggested actions there which I think is going to be really helpful for people getting started. Not too dissimilar to like the suggested questions you see when you get into ChatGPT, but these suggested questions are more contextual to your data which is actually really cool. So like summarize the spiciest things from my 20 unread emails. Summarize all of my unread messages in Microsoft Teams. Stuff like that that you can actually click on from the ui. So it's like suggesting helpful things to you. But then there's also a chat box where you can pound in just more open ended stuff like explain to me what's happening and and then they showed forward slash and a file name and then they actually did a second one and said and forward slash another file or I think it said like create an event. This like an event guide or something like that for some sort of like event they were planning using a couple of the documents that they put together for the event. Another one where they pulled in some contextual data from a file or a teams conversation or something like that. And then it said draft, draft an email to X person and it drafts the email within this chat app and then there's a button at the bottom that says Edit in Outlook and you click that button and it pulls you over to Outlook in a compose panel to send that message. And this is kind of interesting and we've talked about this a bit around ChatGPT is ultimately where do we end up working long term. You know your Bill Gates of the world say user interfaces are going away, just going to talk with our computer devices, we're going to chat with them but nobody wants to voice, talk and chat with every single app that we use, which is what's happening right now. Salesforce just rolled out their chat. Intuit's got assist coming in the next few months. And what absolutely none of us want to do is go have these chat conversations in a kajillion different places. Which is why ChatGPT kind of bet on plugins, the notion that maybe then ChatGPT is the place where we do all of our work and that system just connects with every other system we use. And that kind of aligns with the notion of reducing the user interfaces that we work with and it becoming more just about chat and voice. And that's kind of, I think, what this app is trying to achieve. This quote unquote, hero experience that is like a unification of all of your Microsoft stuff into a single new app. And so it's interesting. How much work can you get done there versus having to, say, edit an Outlook? How many times are you pulled out of that experience? Because, I mean, there's 100 examples of situations where people said, oh, no, this one more thing, this one more thing will be the solution for how we unify all the other things. And most of the time it just ends up being one more thing on top of all of the other things. And so it's hard to know if it's going to be that or if this is if we're like, now, baby, stepping into the future of a more unified, like, just chatty way of getting work done. And I'm all for unification because, like, we're definitely in this fragmented work hell right now, where we have so many apps and stuff fragmented across so many bits of software. And if you think about all this stuff that bing Chat and ChatGPT and the Suite of Microsoft Tools will do now, like, one of the cool examples they did was, you know, create a blog post about xyz and they're pulling in some organizational data and at the very end they just said, create a header image. And it's like, oh, yeah, of course it can do that because it can use Dall E3 and you've got the whole document right there. And it's just like, create a header image so it can see all the stuff that's in there and create a visual that makes sense for the context of the article. And it's like, dang, that's actually pretty darn impressive. Like, think how much work went into each of the individual components of that write up before compared to now. Hey, let me just record this Podcast not I can't because my computer's broken. It isn't really broken, but if it was and I was in an accounting firm, you know who I call Tech Guru. That's right. This episode is sponsored in part by Tech Guru IT for accounting firms. Because you got better stuff to do than fix your broken computer. Now if you don't have a partner yet for managing this stuff for you, buddy, I don't know what to tell you. You're doing it wrong. And the nice thing about finding a IT group that works specifically with accounting firms is they understand like the actual tools that we use. When you show them your tax software, they're not like, what is this absolute poc. I spent myself a lot of money training non accounting firm IT groups on how to understand things like CCH engagement. Whereas if you go to a group like Tech Guru that actually works with accountants, they already understand this stuff. They know to leave UTF alone during busy season. And so like the cadence of how they plan and strategize with you is actually catered to your firm. And like the cycles that your firm goes through, check out Tech Guru. Put a link in the show notes because you got better stuff to do. Okay, this episode is sponsored in part by Copilot. Okay, everybody gather round. Take, take one another's hands. Now we can all agree the way that we exchange information with clients, very important, can be a massive time waster if you don't nail it. But I get it. The fear of training clients on a portal system, right? What if you end up not liking it? What if you train a whole pile of people on this giant system and then you're like, turns out this actually isn't the one for me. Or this new super cool AI rocket ship platform just took off and now I gotta get all my clients to move. Here's the thing that is the best argument for why your client portal experience ought to be separate from your workflow management tool. You getting what I'm saying, Copilot man, all they want to touch is that client experience. Just the portal giving you a mega flexible platform for how you want to work with your clients. So that if the workflow stuff changes, if you want to pull in a different tool for that, you can without changing the client experience. Pretty smart. Especially in these scary changing times of AI. Right? Right. Actually got a demo day coming up on the main YouTube channel from Copilot in the next week or two where we actually get hands on with it. You can see, see even, even more about it if you're looking for a cool modern client portal experience. Check out Copilot link in the show notes. So that's going to be really interesting to see what that centralized workspace look like looks like. In the one of the videos they showed a pop up quote plugin panel where you could toggle on. The apps they showed were like Jira, which is like a ticketing system for developers generally and some other Adobe marketing thing. But they indicated basically that you'll have plugins that you can control. So what other apps are plugging into this chat experience? And we have that with ChatGPT right now and some of it's okay and some of it stinks, but from a business standpoint it looks like there you will have that controllable extendability of what apps do you want to pull into this? And what apps do you not want to pull into this? Which brings us to a really interesting question that people have been grappling with all year. Where does this leave tech in the accounting space? Are they just going to absolutely crush this and is it engineered on a level that you can never reasonably expect a company in the accounting space to do so? So we should all bail on the tools that we use that are from the accounting space and I'll get onto these mass platforms that implement the AI thing really, really well. Right, like what's the right answer there? And my context is I used to be a general tech guy, like for a decade. I was like, why would I use tools in the accounting space? And I'm talking about the tools we use to manage our firms. Obviously accounting ledgers are accounting ledgers. But why would I go and use a like practice management system when we have these mainstream tools like your trellos and stuff like that that are fantastic and way more people use them and they're just much more mature products that are developed and have, you know, way more engineering that go into those things. And honestly that probably was still like, I think that was an entirely justified thing to say maybe up to like four or five years ago, because at the time there's a long time there where the workflow, like practice management solutions we had were all made by our tax vendors and those things are just piping hot disappointment, let's call it that. But now like our own internal tool category like has grown and even in the last two or three years the practice management systems have gotten so much better from where they were. But are they ever gonna implement this cool stuff that now Microsoft's given us or are we at this inflection Point right now where it feels super, super novel, but really soon it will be table stakes. And a good example of one of those things is like generative email. Like the fact that I did a. I mean, I did a virtual conference thing like last summer about a tool called Jasper where you could generate blog posts and copy and all that stuff. And this was before ChatGPT. And the whole premise of that talk was, did this just put copywriters out of work? Because inevitably we're gonna get the same thing for accountants, and people are gonna say, is this gonna put accountants out of work? And that was so novel back then. Even earlier this year, generative email, like that was all super, super novel. But now it's literally like generating writing is literally built str to windows like my mom can do it. That's hardly novel. If there's any novelty left there it is the skill to get good output from it, because not everyone can get the same quality of output from it. But that's just a thing that's like proliferated. Everything now the ability to just generate email. So what's a better version of that? Obviously, the version that can see into the message that I'm replying to, that's an upgrade. Carbon supports that now. Like, it sees the reply and that informs how you reply. The version that can see all of my past communications with that person because I talk with them with a specific tone. Right. That's really valuable. The version that can see into my file system and say, oh, you've got these past files or these past meeting transcripts or these projects in the pipeline. These should inform how I reply. Like, that's all really important stuff. And this is all stuff that our practice management systems can do because they can also see into that information. And where I still stand on this, like, what is the place of the accounting tool space versus the general tools is the day that copilot launches. And I've been saying this for six months, so this isn't new. The day that copilot launches, it's gonna be freaking ba. It's gonna be so cool. And it is going to be the best thing that there is on launch day. But ultimately, you and I have very specific problems and things that we do for clients. And so the ceiling for what category specific tools can do for us is much higher. You think about something as simple as being authenticated into the accounting ledger and how much that can inform how you do anything. I send somebody a message, how you write an email, like, that's. That to me is a really practical example of how a tool specific application can go further. Even even project management. Like if you try to use frigging Microsoft stuff for your project management right now, it's a nightmare. There's a lot of accountant specific aspects of those workflows that cloud practice management systems now handle really well. And part of what part of this whole problem of like, well, is my vendor going to lean into it or not? Stems from just how fast this is happening right now and how fast it's good. Like I guess that's the big thing is like how is this is kind of like a step change or it feels like it will be a step change in productivity to be able to turn up on a Monday on Voice on your Microsoft Edge app or on. On your whatever mobile app for Microsoft 365 be able to say, summarize everything I missed over the weekend. So everything. Summarize everything I missed when I was gone on vacation for the last week. Think about how much work that is from a VA to pull in all that stuff from your unread teams messages to your unread emails, to updates that have been made to documents that you've worked on in the past. To be able to concisely summarize all that stuff and then use that as a jumping off point to write generative replies to all of those things. Okay, I saw this message from Steve. Let's get working. Like draft a reply kind of along these lines. The ability to do that stuff over voice like man, that's a really big step in a short amount of time. And I think that's the only reason we're having this conversation. Cause if the same thing had played out over five or 10 years and had gotten good slowly, there would have been more time for everybody else to keep up and kind of have feature parody there. Because inevitably you will. Unless things are growing so fast that it's like holy geez, this has got this cool feature and for the next six months I absolutely can't live without it. And we honestly don't know. There's a lot of talk around AI sort of plateauing this current model of like current approach to generative AI and transformer models. And like it's. It's probably a misconception to think that we're on this exponential thing and it'll keep getting better and better and better and better. Software companies are still catching up with what's possible today. And like there's some re engineering that has to happen to make the most of it, but it's not to say we're gonna be on this pace like forever. So for me still, as dope as this stuff is and as cool as this is gonna be on the day it drops, and I think that whole Microsoft 365 chat app is gonna be super, super cool as like a unifying thing that can see all of your other Microsoft stuff. As cool as that is, I still think ultimately the coolest version of all of this stuff is the accountant channel specific version of it. And that's not only because of like the nuance around how we manage projects and the client relationship and all that, but, but the nuance of the stuff that happens on your computer screen that doesn't happen on anybody else's computer screen. Nobody else is having to use these awful, awful tax prep softwares. Nobody else is having to like manage data coming into QuickBooks and like all these very specific to us things to where ultimately there still needs to be tools for specifically the jobs that we do now. It's possible that how those tools impact our work changes down the road. And like where maybe that's actually a plugin now rather than the standalone app or maybe a plugin version of something that was an app in the past is just better because now can live alongside like the work that I do and a plugin just on the right hand side. I mean imagine a plugin Windows plugin as simple as do something with a selected bit of text, push that to the the accounting ledger or something like that. That honestly is like not complex but is very accountant specific. So if you enable that plugin it opens up that new functionality. Same thing with this Microsoft 365 chat. If I'm a pick a practice management system, if I'm a Carbon user, is the future of my work happening in the Carbon app? Or is the future of Carbon a plugin where inside the Microsoft 365 chat experience now it can see into all the projects and all the emails and all that stuff that are set up in Carbon. And that's just that Microsoft app is kind of my unifying chat experience. I don't know, but it'll probably be different. It's not a foregone conclusion that everybody that's been successful thus far will also be most successful kind of in this sort of new AI paradigm. But I'm not ready to jump ship on the accounting tech space ultimately I think that's a short sighted thing to do because there's just so many aspects of the ways that we work that are very specific to us. One Other thing I'm really excited about and then we'll wrap this up. We are just baby tippy tappy toeing our way into AI assistant driven desktop automation. And so I've always said imagine a version of ChatGPT that can see everything on your desktop. I don't think this is quite there today. I don't. I'm actually really interested to see this. Can I just message it and be like can you tell me about more about this thing that's on my browser? And like can it see that? I don't know because marrying how good GPT4 is that language model with the stuff that is on our screen? Like we've already seen that you can OCR a whole bank statement and just chuck all the text in there, no structure required at all and say give me a CSV in this specific format with all the transactions and it will give it to you flawlessly. So you better believe that when it can see all of the text that is on your screen and even be informed by like the help documentation for all the apps that are up on screen, you better believe that that language model is going to be able to infer if you're trying to do X task, the next thing to do is to click this button. Like it's absolutely going to be able to do that. If we think about how you like prepare tax return based on source documentation, if we think about how we reconcile a month end in QuickBooks with, you know, a bank statement, being able to annotate that and like make sure everything checks off there, these are not going to be hard tasks for it to like think its way through. The blocker right now is being able to see everything that's on your desktop and being able to layer in the context of that specific app. And this is where agents, these are, these would be technically desktop AI agents get super, super exciting. And if you've been listening to anything I've been saying the last, you know, three to six months, this is the thing that really changes the way that we work and can automate like big meaty tasks that have to be manual right now, the notion that an agent can see what's happening on your desktop and click around and type stuff in and all that. We got a really cool browser based version of this now with hyperrite. In fact they just added PDF support. So that agent which you chat with like chatgpt and then it opens a Chrome tab in the background and we'll try to complete that task. Talked about it in this last Sunday's Main channel video. If you haven't seen that yet, that app now supports PDFs inside of Chrome and they're working on multitab support. So we're not far from the reality of in QuickBooks, going to the Reconcile screen and going through the bank statement like line by line in the PDF and then on the other tab, like actually reconciling that inside of QuickBooks, like, man, that stuff's, that stuff's really close. But the holy grail is for accountants, unfortunately. Desk, the desktop based version of that. Because we have desktop applications that we still use, we still have integration problems. Getting information from App A to App Bay and Windows Copilot is like the first baby steps into that. And with Windows Copilot you're going to have an ecosystem of plugins where people can build stuff where that, that may be an app that you never even log into, like maybe doesn't even have a UI or you never use it in the browser. All it is, is a plugin. But when we start getting like accountant specific plugins that make us more efficient and enrich that, the way that AI works just for us, whether it's in chat and voice or whether it is in manipulating actual things on the screen and the ways that you do your work, oh buddy, that is, that's going to get real exciting. And so I love that we're, we're now, we're now stepping into that with a desktop based assistant. Like, it's there. It has now trojan horsed its way onto every Windows machine there is. And that is the first step to doing some really cool, powerful desktop automation stuff. Pretty wild times, man. It's exciting. Can you tell? Uh, there's a lot of stuff popping off right now though. OpenAI just announced image processing capabilities for ChatGPT, which boy, like in the, one of the very first episodes on this podcast, we dedicated a whole, whole episode to that because the language model, being able to see like source documentation and reason through like what stuff matters. Put that stuff into a work paper for me. When we have desktop agents, put that into tax software, like that whole ChatGPT thing, maybe we'll do the next episode on that. That's a really big deal that just came out. There's a lot of stuff happening right now. I'm in New York the rest of the week for the AICPA Executive Roundtable. That's going to be a bunch of fun. If you're going to be there and you listen to this, let's hang. I'm going to bring my stuff I think we'll probably shoot while we're there. Anything you're seeing in the news cycle you want to talk about? Any questions you have specific to this AI questions you're afraid to ask, how this impacts maybe a specific workflow? Please drop that stuff in the comments. I know it's a lot and it's take some time to process all this, but please put those questions out there because you won't be the only one to have them. By asking those questions, you are. You're making everybody else better along the way. And that's kind of what this is all about. So thanks for coming and hanging. I'll see you in the next one.