124 Could Accountants Unionize Against AI?

Oh, my gosh, it's Friday.

You made it.

If you do tax in the U.S. bless your heart, you are almost there. Can I be that person? Got any plans for the weekend? No, of course I don't because there's.

A deadline on Monday.

Okay, enough of that. We just saw Hollywood writers go on strike around the usage of AI and it's really interesting.

They just reached an agreement and it's.

The first example and like white collar work again, of somebody taking a stance against the man using AI to automate what they do. And it's actually, I think, a pretty profound, I don't know, first point of.

Reference that we have for how all.

This stuff impacts work. Like, should workers have rights that prevents.

Their employer from using AI to replace them? And what does that look like in the work that we do? We're gonna talk about that.

A few thoughts on AI wearables and what that stuff could look like in.

The context of an accounting firm. My thoughts on the FreshBooks collaborative accounting announcement that you saw absolutely everywhere.

Why has the programming been so different for Jason Daly this week?

And a few great marketing ideas I've seen to kind of round out what we've talked about this week.

So come on in, let's talk about it. It's a Q and A on Jason Daly. So after a five month strike, the.

Writers Guild of America reached a deal with the studios to end the writers str. Interestingly, it was a strike that kind of started around residuals and how writers get paid for residuals on streaming content, but by the end was like kind of taken over by the role of AI in writing for television, for films. And the fact they came to an agreement with some restrictions is really interesting and kind of sets a precedent that you may actually end up seeing this in other industries as well. So some of the stuff that's covered in the deal, residual payments on streaming content, minimum writers room staffing. So the teams that they've been of writers that they've been plugging into different situations have been getting more and more lean over the years. And now there's actually minimums as to how many people need to be involved in those projects and then notably limitations around how AI is able to be used.

So specifically, AI cannot be used to write or rewrite scripts, and AI generated writing cannot be considered source material for.

The purposes of determining who has paid out residuals for something that's been produced. And come back to that in a second.

On an individual level, writers can choose.

To use AI tools if they desire. However, a Company cannot make them use AI tools. And the companies, the studios have to disclose if they're giving any AI generated materials to the writers as part of the project. So in short, studios can't just pump out AI generated stuff and run with that. The writers themselves can use as much AI over in the course of their work as they want, but can't be forced to do so. Now, interesting here is like the aspect of attribution, the fact that they can't attribute any part of that production to AI in order to reduce the residuals of the other people involved in the project. And this is super fascinating to me because it's still so, so early on all this stuff. And a big fear with AI is like, how does this not ultimately just lead to mega rich people getting mega richer? And so what would an extreme version of this in accounting look like? It's probably some sort of stipulation around actual human beings need to be needing to be involved in projects like taking a test engagement. Let's say you had AI software that could do all of this stuff in a really convincing way and man, we're actually really close to having this. It could produce a tax return in a really convincing way or a financial statement in a really convincing way. Should a human ultimately still be required to review its output? Obviously there's a lot of these things that a human has to actually sign. But if in this case the firms are the studios and the accountants are the writers, what rights do the accountants have and what types of people need to still be involved in a project? So for example, if AI knocks out all of the like staff level stuff and then expects staff to be a reviewer and that's it, like is that realistic? If fewer and fewer human people are tasked to these engagements as the firms are using AI more and more, does that become unfair to the accountants? I don't know. It's really interesting. Obviously a Hollywood production is very different than preparing a tax return or doing an audit or something like that. I just think it's a fascinating exploration of ultimately who's going to pay the price? Like if AI is as powerful as we think it will be, is it going to leave people hanging out to dry? So do you then ultimately have to like manufacture certain protections for people who are most at risk by this stuff? I don't know. Obviously it's a, it's a huge conversation that is much bigger and more complex than we're going to be able to reasonably cover here. But I would not at all be surprised if we see more of These types of conversations and limitations on the application of AI in situations where it can be problematic for the folks otherwise doing that task. And that's, that's the point of confusion, is like, what is problematic is the fact that a computer can just do that thing. Now, is that okay or is that not okay? Whose responsibility. If this stuff grows really, really fast and displaces a bunch of people, whose responsibility is it to take care of them? Is it the company who just implemented that stuff to displace that person? Is it, you know, the, the government responsibility? Like, does that bring you closer to like this UBI kind of universal basic income sort of thing? If a bunch of folks are being displaced? I don't know. But I think this, how this whole strike evolved into a discussion around AI, I think is fascinating and it'll be really interesting to see what that entire, like, I don't know, the rights of the worker, like, how that conversation develops around AI. Okay, AI wearables super hot right now. We talked about it earlier this week. Joan Ivy, old Apple like legendary Apple developer, partnering with Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO to build the iPhone of AI hardware. At the same time, we have like now a pendant that's coming out that is like this AI pendant, this thing that you wear around your neck that records everything you ever say or hear combined with this rewind that's done this combined with their desktop tool that records everything you ever see on your desktop, presumably giving you an interface where you could search for literally anything you've ever seen on your computer or anything you've ever heard or said, like, all within a single search box. People simultaneously super creeped out about that. Or while spouses are also very excited about it, so that they can use this to say, no, I told you that. I told you that. Finally we have the technology to settle that debate. AI wearables definitely feel uncomfortable at the moment because it's like a whole new level of surveillance. But can you point to a single example in history where there wasn't this new level of surveillance that we were uncomfortable with that ultimately got normalized? Like, I don't know.

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In the show notes gang. I get it. I choosing a practice management system that.

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The show notes I don't know if you saw Facebook launched or announced these AR glasses, they're like Ray Ban glasses that look totally like normal glasses. They're actually going to be coming out next month and they're like, they look pretty darn cool and they do like a little screen on the glasses. Kind of like what Google Glass was back in the day. But Google Glass was just like so far ahead of the curve and like, way before people were ready to, I don't know, embrace that sort of tech. Facebook's pushing into that big time now with this launch next month. That seems like actually solid consumer technology. Like, the notion of having this display on your glasses feels maybe feasible for the first time. So, like in all of the, you know, wearables and all the different forms this AI hardware takes, ultimately where is this going? Like, what is the final answer? Honestly, I kind of feel like where this is all headed is the thing we already have the guy that's walking around with his Bluetooth headset on all day long on his ear. I kind of think that's where we're headed. And so like the final version of that, people talk about like this sort of inner ear device that isn't visible in the same way that, you know, like an AirPod is. But ultimately, if you think about what ChatGPT does right now and pie and how good some of those assistants are, that's going to get built into our voice assistants on our phones at a certain point. And so that stuff will then also work on that device in your ear. And once we get Generative AI plugged into our phone assistance, that's going to be huge because like all of a sudden that gets it in the hands of literally everybody. Everybody with a smart device that is. But I have to think it comes back to like the in ear device. Like, this just seems to make the most sense to me. Anything that is something that you don't always have on you feels imperfect. So you've got like smart speakers, right? And I feel like those kind of came and, and now their ultimate utility is like, well, they're, they're just kind of speakers at the end of the day now, because you probably have a better smart assistant on your phone than is built into that speaker. So even in the business context, let's say you had like a conference room sort of hub thing and you have that now with like, I don't know if you've ever seen like the owl that will look around and like move the camera to the person that's actively speaking and You've got kind of these conferencing tools, but any version of this, it seems like it's going to be inferior to the one that you have on your phone, like on your personal device, Right. So I feel like the future of AI wearables is just that thing in your ear. And maybe the one thing that that doesn't capture is there's going to be situations where it's easier to see like a screen. And interestingly, the AI pendant by a company called Humane, that's part of their approach is they have this little baby built in projector so you can project things onto your own hand to presumably capture like any visual stuff that you need to capture. But what I'm really interested in is, you know, we've talked about on this pod quite a bit about how there's smart folks that say AI right now is taking us away from displays and monitors and user interfaces and we're just going to do everything over voice now. And in some situations that makes sense. In other situations that's really hard to imagine. But some other examples of this is like a decade ago smartwatches, like weren't a thing, right? And now you think about how many people in the world have Apple watches and how many people have Android watches and wish they had Apple watches and how you now have like cellular plans like built into your watch so that you can actually leave your phone so you can like talk to somebody over the phone, but on your watch. So if you're going to go for a run or something like that, you don't need to bring your phone with you. I love that the watch has sort of challenged the situations where do I need my phone with me? And I would super love the notion of a better like in ear AI assistant challenging when you need to bring your phone or when you need to bring your watch. Because presumably if we can do some more stuff just over voice, then you don't need that screen and you may not necessarily always need to have your phone with you anymore, which honestly I would kind of love. So there's a bad version of this always with you assistant, like it's portrayed in the movie her, where it's like everyone is passively having this conversation with somebody who's not really there and that removes them from the moment. But don't we kind of already have that with smartphones and you're looking at the thing. So I kind of like the idea of AI wearables ultimately taking us away from maybe always having to be tied to a screen. Like I Kind of like that, but we'll see.

I don't know, I can tell you.

Integrations in an age of AI becomes wildly important. Like if my voice assistant is super, super good, I want it to be able to do stuff in all the tools that I use, from, you know, Instagram to the personal tools that I use to the tools that I use in my business. I really want that stuff to kind of work seamlessly. And so integrations are going to become a huge thing because it's not realistic for every single one of these companies to build killer AI like voice chat experiences. Like that's just not going to be a thing, right? Seems like a lot of this is going to consolidate around a really good AI chat assistant that can then talk to these other systems and you just plug the 10 tools that you use into it and that is what it is.

But I kind of, I'm kind of.

Like optimistic as, like, could there be an AI device that actually could take me away from my phone? Like, I kind of like the idea of that.

Couple people had asked thoughts on the.

FreshBooks collaborative accounting stuff. If you somehow missed it. They ran like a week long social media campaign with a whole bunch of people sharing stuff that they, that FreshBooks mailed to them. And it all led up to this big announcement of this new sort of methodology they call collaborative accounting, which is presumably like a different approach to doing accounting with your clients. In platform stuff that I liked about it, that I think they did well, that was probably the, the most impactful social media campaign I've seen anybody do in our space. They had all sorts of people sharing stuff every single day and it was genuinely unavoidable. Like if you're on social media at all, you knew this event was happening. They did a great job promoting it. I'm all for like people finding new approaches to this thing. Especially the ledgers in their current state like feel kind of stale.

What I didn't like about it, I.

Don'T think we've seen anything from the actual product yet. Like, I'm a very practical person. Like, show me how you're going to make this better. But the biggest thing that I do like about the whole conversation is accounting ledgers. I think need to be thinking more about how can they become the most profitable place to run an accounting practice, not just be an accounting ledger. Because the whole bank reconciliation and the classification of transactions, you know, when that stuff first got built like it was before, bank feeds were super solid and you had to create bank rules for all these things. And AI is making classifications more automated than ever, and the whole notion of building a product around bank reconciliation is starting to feel a little old timey. And it's just going to keep going that way. Foreign.

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So when you have an accounting ledger that isn't built around the bank reconciliation, well, what is it built around? Right? And it probably depends on who you're trying to sell to. A small business or an advisor. But me as an advisor, what I want to buy is not an accounting ledger, but like the best productivity suite for managing month end closes for my clients. And so like that's something that Keeper, for example, has leaned into. They're more like a month end close solution that connects to the ledgers. But for the incumbent ledger folks, what I would really stress is as the ledger kind of becomes table stakes, like take one step up from that kind of zoom out. And Intuit actually invested in this to a degree with QuickBooks and their QuickBooks online accountant stuff. Some really light month end close functionality that they introduced a couple years ago. Haven't seen any more developments on that. But to get back to FreshBooks, you know, Cloud practice management systems right now in our space are exploding, growing really, really fast. I can absolutely see ledgers moving more in that direction where, you know, handling things like uncategorized expenses and managing and collecting the documents that you need to finish the month end close and offer a little bit more of a, like a project management system around the month end close rather than just being the debits and credits of the ledger. And while I don't ultimately know like what is it the FreshBooks is actually shipping to achieve this, I do like the dialogue to how can we actually make the process of collaborating with the client and getting all the information that we need more seamless. Because right now it's not the accounting that's hard, it's the gathering of the information and getting the questions answered. Like that is the aspect of it that's hard. All those sort of start stop things. So we'll see. I'm eager to see what they what they actually ship as part of the product. Okay, two more things.

Some folks had asked what's what the heck is going on with my Jason Daly programming this week? We did like a news roundup on Monday and then yesterday we did a.

Thing I had shot with my buddy Chad Davis that was a really fun.

Conversation and I got feedback that liked.

That and didn't like that. I'll just be totally honest and transparent. Like we've seen what the first hundred episodes of what this pod was and I'm just kind of thinking through like what does the next hundred episodes of this look like, is it the exact same as it was? I don't know.

So we're just trying out some different.

Stuff and it's absolutely not all going to stick. I think something I would enjoy doing a bit of, and we may end up doing this once a week is just like a news roundup. And I will probably ultimately end up doing that myself. That is one bit of feedback that I heard was people come to the podcast to hear from me and they want to hear from me on this feed. And I totally get that. So I'm thinking about once a week maybe just doing like a highlights of stuff that's in the news and what that stuff means to me. It's something that I don't really talk about all that much. But then I would also like to start pulling in more like smart people that I respect that can speak to a very, very specific thing. Like, so for example, I'm going to pull Logan in and just have a conversation around, why is it worth your while to invest in YouTube? Like people who are doing a very specific thing that's a little different in our space.

Not like a get to know you.

Or anything like that. And then not even like to me, a traditional sort of interview. Meet this person and get their story. I want to drill into you are doing this. Why is this worth your while? What are we all missing here? Try to keep that like hyper valuable because those are the conversations that I love having with people who are doing something a little bit different. And I'm like, every time you have those conversations, I feel like it's like, okay, I can see it. And these tidbits made sense for me and these tidbits didn't make sense for me. But coming out of it, I have like a more holistic view of what it would look like to, you know, say, create content or whatever the subject matter is going to be. So I'm thinking about doing something like that once a week while also just doing like a high level discussion of what's been going on in the news. But we'll see what sticks, what people get excited about, a lot of new folks coming and listening in, which is super cool, super appreciate it and always love to hear your thoughts. Okay, marketing. Couple marketing things I saw to kind of round out the things we talked about this week around clarifying your online messaging. A lot of my thought right now is just going into finding the better client who will pay you more and how that's ultimately the answer to almost all of the things that a accounting firms. In fact, Sunday's main channel video is going to be that no. Yes this coming Sunday and two other things that I saw that helped drive this home for me even further. So Brandon Hall's newsletter, really good. I'll put a link to it in the show Notes if you're not subscribed. His most recent newsletter For Marketing Mistakes Accountants make first he highlights it's really hard to learn a new skill. Marketing is not in our DNA, right? Like no accountant goes into the business of accounting to do marketing and so common mistakes that we end up getting stuck on. We market sporadically and lack consistency. Boy, that probably hits home, right? Not understanding distribution channels, failing to track data and make data driven decisions and not understanding who you are targeting. So the next big point from him is defining your client avatar, which we've talked about quite a bit, to have a really, really deep understanding of what their pains are, what scares them, what sort of things they get excited about. And that's really the next one he's got here is develop a deep understanding of all of the pains that your clients have. And the secret is, I've been talking about this a lot. This is what got me excited. The secret is oftentimes the best thing you can do is identify the non tax and accounting pains that they have and how to solve them. It's actually a killer opportunity. And then he says last, pick one channel to create content on and do it consistently for six months. Consistency is key and narrowing your focus will help. It really is like a habit thing. I can't tell you how many times people will send me a DM or something. They're like, oh man, who's your video editor? Like your stuff is so great. Like why is this so good? And I'm like, it's because I do it more than anybody else does it and I've spent more time on it and I've probably spent more money on it than anybody else is an extremely not sexy answer. And they're like, were you natural on.

Camera in the beginning?

And I'm like, no, not, not even slightly. This game is so much about consistency and just turning up more than anybody else, right? Which in some ways is frustrating and feels exhausting. In other ways is actually encouraging though. Like if you think about the social media machine and just how it churns things through at this unbelievable rate and then 48 hours later it's as if those things never happened. If there's something positive to be taken from that it is, the most important thing is that you're just playing the game like, you don't have to set the world on fire every single day. And we get sucked up in these, like, viral moments. But the reality is, like, if you're speaking to a certain type of entrepreneur, more important than anything else is just that you're there and having that conversation every single day. That's how you find people. That's how you build trust over time. The other email that I got that was like, oh, man, this is so relevant to the podcast that we just did from Justin Welsh. I'll put a link to his newsletter down below as well. Really good one about writing online, this most recent newsletter. What is your unique selling proposition? And that's basically what Wednesday's episode was about. Like, what is that? How are you identifying yourself online? And so the example he gives is of, of someone that does SEO and most of us online, you just say the equivalent of I do SEO or this is my role within company that does SEO. And you're not giving them any compelling reason to choose you over all the other folks that do the same thing or to help them understand why you are more suited specifically for their needs than somebody else. Right. And so he frames this as the goal of your USP is ultimately to one, target a specific demographic to justify your pricing strategy. And in this example, it was he's telling you how much money he will generate for you so that when he tells you his pricing, it hurts a little bit less. Three, build a strong brand identity, four, gain a competitive advantage. And five, differentiate his business from others that do the same thing. He says the best thing you can do is kind of do a self assessment of what are your skills, what are the things you're capable of, and where is the Venn diagram where that overlaps with the most painful pains that those people feel? And that makes sense. I usually think of it just through the lens of, like, what pains these people most. But ultimately you also need to, like, actually want to support them there. He said the biggest three traps he sees people falling into. Just picking something. He says if you just pick a.

Usp, it doesn't make it something that.

You'Re actually good at. I think this one isn't super relevant to us because we're usually picking stuff within our domain where we actually know something about it. We're already experts. He said, number two is being too vague. Avoid terms like best quality, excellent service, I help businesses or I help people. These aren't differentiators. They're broad, vague and meaningless. And then three, don't overcomplicate it should be easy for somebody to understand and communicate your unique selling proposition. What is your firm's unique selling proposition? It's the kind of thing you have as like the hero statement on your website. The kind of thing that is that one liner statement on your LinkedIn. What do you achieve for people and how do you make it for a very specific type of person who will pay you really well for what you do? Right. I'm hot on that stuff right now.

Hey, thanks for coming and hanging this week.

We'll be back next week and I'll see you then. Sam.