373 A New AUTOMATION Community for Accounting Firms

Got a treat for you today. Oh, boy, it is friend of the pod, Chad Davis. Today we're geeking out on automation stuff.

He's launched an automation community.

So we're talking AI, talking no code. Always a delight to talk with Chad, the pride of the north. This was a super fun one. We learned a little bit about Chad.

Like outside of the accounting firm, running context. So I think you'll like this one. Come on in.

Okay, Chad, thank you for being here. If anybody hasn't had the pleasure of.

Meeting you, give us the 32nd Chad Davis intro.

No one ever has the pleasure of meeting me. They're stuck with it. The 30 second intro is, I'm Canadian. I have commitment issues and decide to live six months in the US and six months in Canada as I travel with my family. And I have a firm in Canada called Live Cat. But the focus was always on building that until just about four or five months ago when the idea for launching something to do with automation was really front and center. And now we have the Automationtown IO community.

Automationtown. Where did you get that name?

Geez, I wonder where we got that name. Do you. Do you remember, like spending three seasons together just chatting about automation in a podcast, Jason, or is that just so far in your past that it just is just so, so far away?

Honestly, it feels like so long ago if you. Most of the people listening to this won't know what that is. So Chad and I did a podcast called Automation Town. Did three seasons of it. The first season was just two guys piling around talking about automation. The second season, things took a weird turn. And by the third season, it was like a fully scripted audio drama with some automation learning sprinkled in.

It was pretty weird, it was pretty fun. And I got to see writing chops front and center. It was like you getting to build this imaginary world with characters that were locked in basements underground, all because of a make automation failing. Because it went out of operations.

It went out of operations.

Yeah, it was really fun. I had a lot of fun. That was a good three seasons. And yeah, we took the name from that and turned it into this community because there's a lot of potential with the idea of playing with that name of a town where there's different characters or different types of places. So I think there's, there's a lot of opportunity there, you know, over the next couple years to lean into the towniness of, of a community and thought it was the perfect name. So that was really fun.

So nothing to, nothing to do with the podcast, besides just kind of the. The theme of it. But don't we have enough accounting communities these days? Why does. Why did the world need another accounting community? What, like, what? I don't know. What got you over the hump of, like, this is worthwhile and I want to build this?

I don't know. I think if you're in that echo chamber of Twitter where everyone has a. Do we call it X now? Whatever it is, very, very strong opinions, you might feel like it's too much. But I don't know, how about, like, if you feel the same way, but there's lots of cars in the world, there's lots of types of food, there's lots of, like, choice in the world. And just because, you know, a couple communities exist, it doesn't mean that, you know, you can't find the place for you. And, like, it doesn't even need to be an accounting community. Like, there's lifestyle, there's travel, there's, like, family and stuff. There's interests and hobbies. I just find, like, the world is so divided, and being able to, like, be around and see things in a. In a community that just, like, I don't know, warms your heart and challenges you and gets you to think differently about things is pretty fun. So I know the facetious answer is yes, okay, there's too many, but I actually don't think there is. There's always an opportunity for people to find, you know, the right people for them, and being able to select is super important. So I don't. I don't feel the same way as that. And not just because I have a community here, but because there's a huge opportunity to meet a bunch of cool people that are kind of aligned around one thing.

What has been. I don't want to tee this up just for you to talk about realize, but, like, what has been maybe some of the most impactful communities for you, like, personal or business? Like, what gives you the level of conviction to say, like, yes, there should be more of these?

I don't know. So when we started Live ca, which is our firm up in Canada, it started in, like, late 2012, early 2013, and the idea was, like, you go to events and you meet people, and those are like, your people. And it feels like sometimes the same people going to the same groups, and every couple years a few new people come in, or you actually get more comfortable walking outside of your small group that you're at in these events, and you realize that, man, there's a lot of really smart people or interesting people that you, like, are really lucky to meet. And it's, like, happenstance. So, like, this whole idea of, like, putting yourself out online and meeting people is so enriching. And, like, there was a point in time when going to these events was so tiring for me. Like, I didn't. I probably, like, took off three or four years from going to these things just to kind of focus back on the company, but I missed it. And, like, the community of, like, RVing that was super huge. I got to meet people that owned businesses and traveled in different styles. Like those. Those are great communities to be in, Finding people that not just owned firms, but, like, really wanted to change the accounting profession for the better. Those are great places to go, but they were pretty much limited to events or, like, the odd virtual event that you went to. So, like, you. You mentioned teeing. I've realized, like, I'd say that's the most active community that I've ever been in because there was so many people that felt like they were alone and they just wanted people around them to be able to talk to. It doesn't even mean you have to learn from each other or be the smartest person in the room or feel like, you know, everything. I think, like, just the collective quality of good people in a room naturally brings out the inquisitiveness and the curiosity and the, like, the helpfulness and, you know, the bad apples get weeded out pretty quickly. But by all means, like, realize has been a great place for me just to kind of meet new people that kind of feel the same, that there's a lot of opportunity in this industry to do a little bit better.

Yeah. I almost feel like until we are to the point where the bulk of firm owners don't have a bunch of friends who are firm owners and, you know, aren't. Aren't. I think the vast majority of accounting firm owners in all likelihood, are not friends with other firm owners. Like, they may be pleasant with them and they may bump into them from time to time, but they don't, like, actually have relationships with other firms where they talk about what they do and they share ideas and. And kind of the energy that you can get from that. And I almost feel an obligation to, like, cram community down people's throats until they realize, like, stop trying to do everything yourself. Like, we're all doing the same thing. Can we not help each other out?

I mean, I'm not. I could be your. Your. Your hype man here. You don't need it. But that's what I love about your PM stuff. It's like you started with this massive problem that is at the root of almost every single firm issue, almost, which is how do you organize your work? How do you show up to work every day and decide what to do? You're like, yeah, let's tackle that. So I actually, I'm loving following what you're doing with that and getting your lists and the do's and the don'ts and the ones to stay away from, because even that in its simplest form, which is a list, shows people that there's other people out there that are caring about what the industry is using. And yes, there might be some bias or something, but good, because there's just been too many, too many years where we just accept really bad tools and just say that that's normal. And I guess it does take a certain person to challenge that. And I'm realizing that it's not just firm owners, it's people in the leadership team of those firms. It's the people that care about their fellow colleagues that don't want them to have to do something that should have taken 2 minutes 25 or vice versa. It's really good what you're doing. And I, I, I hope that there's more like that that comes down the, down the pipe for helping other people.

I hope so too. I hope more people jump in on that. Okay, automation, what do you, what does that actually mean? There's a, there's a good percentage of people here and I think everybody loves the idea of automation. And everyone's like, oh yeah, no, we're going to automate this workflow that when you say automation and you create a, a community for automation, is it specifically accounting related automation?

Accounting related work? Yeah. So this, this community is specifically for enjoying work a little bit more by doing a little bit less. So not having to do the things manually that you've grown up with or been trained on, but to question and to decide, you know, maybe there's another way that we can do this. So your content for years has been, it has been pretty heavy on automation and tech and then it's, it's kind of morphed into helpful content and everything that's related to it morphed into, morphed into helpful content. It's morphed into different areas of helpful content there.

Okay, that sounds, thank you.

And what I love about it is like you realize that the world isn't solved by one view or one thing. Right? Just because you have A good business model doesn't mean you're going to have the best people or the best, you know, way that you collect things or the way that you work. And just because you have great tech doesn't mean that your business is going to work. That's why I love like you're hitting on all the important things about running firms, which is that it's interconnected. And the more you realize that there's no silver bullet to fixing your firm, the better off you'll be. So that's what I love about your stuff. On the automation side, one element of enjoying work is not doing the really crappy stuff. And automation by its default is computers doing what computers should be doing and humans doing what humans should be doing and building those together in this sort of harmonious system where you're prioritizing what you should be automating and you're living with the things that aren't as important as those. So to me, automation really is that decision matrix of what you prioritize. And is it programmatic, which is repeatable and it's the same all the time, or is there this element of interpretation? And like, that's kind of where I can kind of come into it. So. So merging automation and AI into this one place where you can decide how you want to do work a little bit better with a whole bunch of peers figuring this stuff out is why Automation Town exists. It's just for that sliver of trying to enjoy work a little bit more.

And from a practical standpoint, is automation creating an Outlook inbox rule? Is it SQL database prompting is like, what is what? How would, how do you think of that?

I mean, you've probably done a hundred videos on this too about like automation stuff. So I know you know the answer for yourself. And I think that's the thing. It's like you don't have to have a definition that's attributable to every single person. The way I think about automation is like it's a repeatable thing that you no longer have to do manually. It could involve some AI, but it's programmatic, it's recurring. So yeah, it could be a rule or a filter, but it also could be grabbing all your QBO reports for your client into some place that automatically does a bunch of analysis and spits you out some to do list. I don't know, could be, and everything in between. So for me it's, it's more about the programmatic stuff. And then when you start layering in AI, there becomes a Little bit more human involved today and then who knows where that goes in the future. But that's, that's how I feel about automation. It's fun too. It's, it's so fun taking a really crappy process and like not having to do 80% of it.

Yeah, that is nice for people coming in and like thinking about joining. Is there a what, like, what level of expertise is it suited for? A specific level of expertise. I like, I imagine a lot of folks have like this automation dysmorphia and they see people who are always ahead of them and they're like, well, then this probably isn't for me because I'm not as good as that person over there. Like, what level? What, like, is this brown belt? Is this black belt? What level is this?

If you know me, there's no belts on this. This guy, no skills. But what I'm, what I'm thinking is like, this is not just for firm owners. And in fact, it's built for every accountant in the whole industry. It's built for your, you know, your, your ops person. It's built for your head of tax who's curious about how to deal with organizers. Again. It's, it's for your, your, your business partner who might want to see the benefits of automation. It's, it's for the bookkeeper who hates doing this one thing all the time and just wants to see what other people are doing. So we have two distinct groups and there'll be more sort of programming related to this coming up. But there's beginners, which is, I'm excited, but I know almost absolutely nothing and have no experience with this. And then there's non beginners. The non beginners help the beginners. And then there's different programming that relates to both of those two different types of streams.

This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow.

This is the season, the season of giving thanks.

And you know who I'm thankful for? Live Flow. Live Flow was one of the very first sponsors I ever had on my content and they've kind of been with.

Us from the beginning.

I'll be honest, I don't know why people must be going to lifflow from our content, which is great, but I'm thankful they've been there since the beginning because it's brands like that that honestly.

Like, keep this content coming.

Now, Live Flow, they started out as like a killer spreadsheet plugin for your Google sheets, your Excel sync data out.

From your QuickBooks files, your Xero files.

Now they've got like a whole dashboarding platform where you can do the same thing, connect it up to the ledger, make these quick little dashboards can be either super basic, even mobile friendly or.

Like big, comprehensive, you know, multitab sort of monstrosities.

It's pretty cool. Pretty easy to set up too, like unintimidating.

We did a demo day video maybe.

A couple months now on their new dashboard functionality.

It's actually got a load of views.

But check that one out if that sounds interesting. And thank you to Live Flow for.

Being a friend of the podcast.

Today's episode is sponsored in part by Ramp. Do you know Ramp is. Maybe you maybe do, maybe you don't. Ramp is a spend management platform. Do you know what a spend management platform is? Maybe you do, maybe you don't. These are kind of cropped up in the last like three to five years and I actually think accountants are extremely well suited to bring spend management platforms to small businesses for the first time. And it is all about like better card hygiene, not using one card for everything, not having an office card, you know, that, that Jimmy runs out and uses for donuts. It's about using virtual cards, putting budgets on cards, how you manage those budgets across your team members. It is about enablement of your team members to give them greater flexibility to go out and do what they need to do, spend money with boundaries. And Ramp rolls all that stuff into a super tidy platform. And in the last year or so they've been investing in their account accountants channel big time.

You'll see them at all the conferences.

Super mature product. Now sometimes we're afraid to like put.

That new thing in front of a client because it may embarrass us. Ramp is like triple a very, very.

Nice product if that's a problem for your clients.

Also, spoiler alert unlocks a whole bunch of bookkeeping automation opportunities as well.

We've done a demo day for Ramp.

If you want to see like a.

Five minute demo on my YouTube channel. Otherwise, learn more about Ramp down at.

The link in the video description within. Within the context of a firm. And you, you hit on this a bit. But I think what people often get blocked by is like, is automation somebody's job or is it, is it like water? You know, like you are, you are a, you're a big time nerd and you got a lot of people that work for you.

Should automation be the job of a chief automation officer?

Or is it like this is the things that is just what a professional needs to know. Like my children will be Very comfortable with chat, GPT and AI assistants and all that. When they get to the workforce, like is it, is it more about redefining the bar for how you used to say you must have Microsoft Office skills and type 40 words from it? Is it getting to that? Or is it you're going to have an uber automation person in your firm and that's the person we're sort of.

Pouring into all of the above. I mean with everything in life, isn't there things that are open to interpretation and contextual for every person? Right. So I met one firm, but our buddy Chase Berkey, right over at Dark Horse. They're like having a head AI person. Tim Petrie at HD Growth, they're part of the Ascend platform with PE and they have like a full time AI person who's working with all the firms in that portfolio that are like driving Strategy. The big eight top 10 firms, they all have these big departments and multiple people that are, that are heading this up. But you know, Joan and John, the two person CPA firm, they're going to hire that type of level of person. So the curiosity is just as important as the organization for the big ones of having the AI person. So I think, actually kind of curious what you think too in this one. But automation and AI is really just an evolution of a skill and the more accessible and easy it is to implement them, the more people will. And it's really this, I won't say game, but it's this journey just like cloud accounting was, that may not take 10 years for the majority of people to be comfortable with it because of the way that it's implemented into all of our tools. So that's why this community exists in my mind is that we have echo chambers on Twitter and LinkedIn and in our own complete small circles. Why can't we amplify that by taking hundreds of accountants that are really interested and really smart with this and let them all amplify each other in this one place where it's a safe place to ask what you might think is a really dumb question. It's not. It's absolutely okay to say, should I use Zapier or is there something else? Why would somebody use something else? Hey, I'm thinking about using this thing in QuickBooks, but I have to pay this extra money to get it. Is there any alternatives? Like absolutely great questions. And I think when you have an audience of techie people that want to help each other and the focus is on tech, like you're good. So I just Think it's a, it's. It's a generic skill like using a computer that will eventually become part of our repertoire for doing work. I don't know. What do you think?

This isn't about what I think this is your interview. Um, do, do you think there's a risk of this question? This question is like getting into what, like my reaction, what I think of that. Take the big four, you know, Big eight. They've got big old AI teams. Is there risk in making tech or AI or automation? Is there risk in making it somebody's job? Because everybody else can sit back and be like, oh no, Steve will, Steve will do that. Steve's going to join the community. And then you just tell us, come automate our things.

We want Steve's son. Steve's retiring, remember? Yeah, okay. Anecdotally, it's easy to talk about this and say, yes, it's a risk. But in our firm specifically, it's easy for me to say, oh, I'm the AI person. But I actually think that's really detrimental to the growth of our firm because we have groups of people that are in charge of overall processes and then within each group, they are ultimately responsible for identifying and doing the right things and being educated. And that's how you progress through different areas of the firm. So by structuring it that way, you're, you're avoiding the it's Steve's job type of thing where it actually stalls all the innovation and doesn't include people. So maybe it's more of a cultural issue of like, is your firm a production farm of work with no innovation and openness to change, or is it a opposite of that?

Yeah, I feel we talked about this clear back in the no code days when that, when we're kind of in peak no code, it feels like we're. The level of leverage that's possible from people is like just getting to be astronomical. Like people talk about the first single person billion dollar companies. And that'll happen someday, but on a much more humble scale. The delta between the most productive and the least productive accountant, I think is just getting bigger and bigger. And it further puts stress on like the traditional employment model. And you could take an example as simple as bank rules and somebody who can, can just nail bank rules and like get most of that stuff running on autopilot with, compared to a bookkeeper on the other other end of the spectrum. And that's, you know, that super leveraged person can do, you know, forex the output of the other AT feels To me, like we're just going further and further down that path now with AI being able to write code for you and AI very soon being able to control the things on your desktop and take those tasks over for you. You have any thoughts on how to build an accounting firm where those types of people can succeed? Because I think oftentimes employment is not elastic enough to like even enable that level of independence and productivity from a person because they're kind of boxed into. Here's how we do xyz.

Hello. I've never worked at a company where my boss wasn't interested in making things better because it would either help him with his budget because he wouldn't have to spend money on extra people or her and. Or it made them look good. So maybe it's a framing exercise and it's like, how do you lean into this kind of thing to be able to talk to your bosses about having the time and capacity to make this work? I don't know. It's not something I'm any expert in. But I can tell you that what we've done at our firm is we've changed our business model so that employees and every team member work less so they have more time for this type of investigation and care and review and QA work of their own stuff. It means that you have to adjust your expectations on what your business is. Might mean the lower profit margin, it might mean less clients, it might mean all that kind of fun stuff. But we did it because we wanted people to join and stay here because turnover is incredibly expensive and it's not fun to work at a place in my experience where you're not leaning into this kind of thing. So I actually was at a conference couple weeks ago and met with a guy who worked at a really large firm that had AI at his company. And like they weren't even allowed to go to websites, not even use the app. But like go to websites that would encourage them to think differently about a problem. They're blocked.

It's like a dystopian B movie, but you can't like smuggle paintings in or classical music.

Yeah, like, like that stuff scares me. Like, like to be able to say, hey, you can't even go to this website. You're forcing them to go to their phones and their own personal stuff to be able to look at this. And if you think about like the evolution of bottom up marketing, expensify killed it. They knew that people, if they could just get a better expense report in front of their bosses, they would have user demand pushing this instead of the bosses demand pushing it. I feel like that's what we're going to see is a bunch of bottom up people saying bottom up progress. Being able to say like, I want to do this, I have done this. Like how do we make this work?

100%. I think really interestingly, like the fact that I mentioned my kids earlier being really good with language models and the fact that you can have an AI assistant in Roblox and you just tell it what to make and it makes that thing for you. And I mean older than that. I mean if you or I are in high school or in college, you better believe we are absolute AI wizards. And those people are entering the workforce and they're gonna look at this and they're gonna look at that and they're like, this is dumb. This is way harder than it needs to be. That Paul, I think it's Paul Graham that tweeted, you know, basically the 22 year olds are. Yeah, yeah. As capable as 28 year olds now because they're more comfortable with AI. And yeah, there's, there's a, I hadn't thought of it in quite so much of a dystopian framing, but very much a. Like you're almost like forcing them to turn that part of their brain off unless you invite some level of it.

Yeah. I really hope that the people that do hire directors of AI are really great people. People like, they're great listeners. They're good at understanding multiple departments, multiple views and not treating it like. Because I understand how rag works and how vectorization works, that I am now going to be your head of AI. I'd actually argue that the best head of AI has like a nerdy assistant and is a great people manager to identify and highlight the things you need to do AI with. Yeah, fun fact. My, my daughter is 13 and my son is 9 and they both have AI math tutors. My son uses synthesis, which is awesome. And their tutor programs like under 50 bucks a month. And he blasts through math and when he gets stuff wrong, the AI knows exactly why he got it wrong and can say things like, it looks like you thought that this was part of the solution, but actually you missed this one really important part because it knows if it was supposed to be six and you got nine or something. Okay, here's how you got that. And it's like I love that level and I am not anti teacher at all, but I am absolutely pro learn on your own time. Like have no issues with time restrictions to learn something, use the tools available. And it's, it's absolutely not hurting them when you've got other supplemental stuff to help learn. So I'm just super happy with that.

Imagine making like grown adults read textbooks. Like I feel like we're going to look back on textbooks and that will just seem so incredibly arcane, like so soon. Like it doesn't get more static than that.

No, I mean, in some of the posts in Automation Town, I've been posting up the transcripts of the videos so that people can take them and ask their own questions. There was one post a little while ago where it was like how to take QuickBooks reports from the API and massage them into what you want them to look like. And it gave some instructions on how to do it. But I didn't want to create the instructions because what if somebody is using a different tool and they had to change up one of the modules or something? So I gave them the transcript and now they can take their own tool set and their own approach and just get that little cheat to start to say, hey, create me some instructions. But instead of using Google Sheets, use 365 or instead of using QuickBooks, use Xero. And like that type of enablement I think is pretty healthy and is exactly what you're meaning with the textbooks. It's like give people the resources and the tools and let them, let them learn the way that they want to.

Today's episode is sponsored in part by Client Hub. It is practice management season.

You know that you're looking around, am.

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That'S more than just software. Learn more about Client Hub. Check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by cloud accountant staffing who helps accounting firms work with talented accountants in the Philippines.

For the first time.

Origin story of cloud accountant staffing A guy named Jordan was running a cloud accounting firm team of about 15. This story may feel familiar to you. Like most firm owners struggled to find onshore accountants and after having four consecutive offers rejected in 2020, was burned out on hiring.

Oh, buddy, if you've ever hit that wall, you know what that feels like.

That's when he turned to offshore staffing companies for help. Although his experience was not a big success, he realized there was like something to it.

The underlying people were great.

So he started building his own offshore hiring pipeline in 2021. Now his accounting firm has nine full timers in the Philippines. A light bulb went off and cloud account staffing was born. Now he's doing the same thing for other firms.

Like it's.

It's as simple as that. The number of slimy DMs I get from. Maybe I shouldn't say slimy from random people I don't know anything about on LinkedIn offering their services. I can tell you Jordan is literally.

Just a guy that runs accounting firms.

I don't know.

I don't think he still runs this firm. But that was how this whole business got started. Was he just. He just started doing it for other people.

People who have all the same questions you probably do if you haven't done it before. So if you're feeling blocked on hiring heading into next year, give me a shout cloud account staffing link down in.

The show notes a couple of community questions and then I want to indulge with one more question. Real practical. What does it look like for somebody coming into the community? What should they expect? Is it. Is it. I'm gonna go through this course that's that Chad put together. Is it getting on big calls with.

A bunch of people?

Is it like one on one? What. What should they expect coming in right now?

It's $39 a month and you get instant access to the Circle community. From there, there's a welcome post where you essentially say who you are and what you're looking to build. And if there's people that can help you build that, they'll respond. If not, I will absolutely do that. You have access to eight or nine really long videos that were part of the launch event back in August. And we had all kinds of people like Isaac from Opsur and Shane from PowerApps911, like all these really great people, Corey from Streams, all just like building out things like revenue dashboards and Connections to all these tools. And Olivia look did a beginner Zapier for accountants hour on how to do onboarding. Like you can watch those videos, take the transcripts, ask questions about them. It gives you an idea of like, what's possible. We tried with those eight months, those eight weeks to cover the gambit of like what you could do with automation inside of an accounting firm. And then there's different spaces. So the space that is the most used is tech support. So you're building something, you get stuck, post a question, everybody will help. Unsure if you like which AI tool you should use. For transcripts, ask people will talk about it. Then there's a share your automation. So if you've built something that you're proud of, it's like show and tell. You go in, share it. Other people can ask questions and use that. And then there's some bi weekly challenges where people can kind of like follow along and build as you go. I think what will happen in the future is that there's just more like beginner friendly content of where to start and then some more non beginner content. But what I've been really liking is like every week we have one or two sessions that you can pop into live and ask questions, learn. We just did one on Wednesday or Thursday yesterday where we were able to just have people ask questions about a QuickBooks API build. And that was awesome. So all kinds of little things that you can decide what you want. But to be honest, even if this is just something that you're curious about, there's a weekly email that goes out every Thursday that summarizes everything that's happened in the community and you take a look and I bet you a lot of people do that as well.

Cool.

Okay, thanks. Thanks.

Last super indulgent question and we'll have, we've got links in the show notes to find all this stuff, AI stuff. It's been an exciting few weeks. Obviously we had one preview a while back. We had the computer use model. We've got rumors now of OpenAI launching an agent in January. What are you most excited about right now?

Oh, I'm excited about what just released, which I don't think it went under the radar because I'm sure you talked about it. But we've lived in a world where PDFs had to be interpreted through text for years. And then a week ago, two weeks ago, whatever it was, anthropic was like, you know what, we can actually see the PDFs now. We know exactly what it is and like why that's exciting to me is that it's a fundamental shift in how you work with PDFs. Like, as accountants, you're laughing because you're like, okay, it's PDFs, like, slow your roll a little bit. But that's the majority of government forms, full stop. So being able to now use that as part of your build and understanding the context instead of it just being text based is going to amplify how we're able to build around this whole system. So that gets me excited because now we're out of like the dark ages of PDF text and we're actually into something kind of new that's kind of nice. I'm like you. Following a lot of the agent work and just seeing how costly it is today versus the impact it's having is like, okay, cool. This reminds me of two years ago when we first got ChatGPT. But it's only going to get bigger. And with everyone else talking about different versions of AI and different models, we know that the acceleration for where we are at today versus what's possible is so short and it's almost scary. So I think it's nice to be aware of it. But at the same time, I'm just excited. For what? I don't know if you know what I mean, because they know it's coming. How do you feel about it?

The anthropic thing's a big deal. I think it probably goes under the radar because there's not a ton of people using Claude. But a tax return, like, if you want to review a tax return, it's not a structured body of text. It's like a quote unquote box. And like, where stuff is spatially doesn't make any logical sense. It doesn't follow the flow of, you know, a book or something like that. So language models will work really good. With a meeting transcript, it's just a bunch of text, but something like a tax return to now have something that can like reason through a more abstract document like that. Super cool. I'll be honest right now, yeah, Agents like, there's so much thinking that goes into every single step. It is. It's slow and it's expensive and it will obviously get better. Biggest like, front of mind things for me. ChatGPT voice assistant in the desktop app.

Oh, I'm using that every day. It is so good. Do you set up your shortcuts for it yet?

I've been using the Mac one for a while, but haven't set up the voice assistant shortcuts. I haven't got into the flow of using that regularly.

Yeah, it's great. I mean. Yeah, keep going. So the idea of using it on your. You're talking about the vision part that they've just talked about recently.

The vision is what makes that even more powerful. So if I can hands free talk with the assistant and it can see what I'm working on and what I'm talking about, that just seems like a totally new version of work where I no longer have to command T, control T to a Google window to look up that thing. To go figure that out, you just say like, hey, Chatty, go figure out why this or that isn't working or what the. The phase out was for xyz. Like, that just seems super compelling.

Isn't there something someone really smart said this. I forget who they were, but they were like, we're. We're leaving the age of how to do work, and we're entering the age of what to do.

Yeah, yeah. You read my newsletter yesterday, didn't you?

Was that it?

That was it, yeah.

Oh.

That was Adobes. Adobe CEO.

It was Adobe CEO. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, that's funny.

And you can totally see that in the creative arts, like, where I can just prompt into being an image or a video or something like that, and it's not as refined and not a true reflection that an artist could create. But for anyone else who isn't capable of what the artist is capable of, you can now do things. You have superpower. I make all sorts of dumb images, Right, that I never would have been able to make before. And so now it's more a question of, like, what do you do? And I heard the framing from a. From a designer like maybe 6 months ago who said a designer's job isn't to create the design, it's to decide what the design ought to be. And I think there's parallels there to accounting. Is it your job to do the accounting or is it your job to do what? Decide what the accounting ought to be. I like it.

It's catchy.

Feels good. But the reality is a lot of people are getting paid to do accounting still.

Yeah. Yeah. It's exciting. And, like, I don't know about you, but I've been kind of nerding out on the cursor replit thing for a little while, and there's people now that have created a whole bunch of templates to make it go even faster. And for those of you that haven't, like, heard those two words put together before, think of it more like a, a way for you to spin up a tool from scratch where AI builds exactly what you want and you can make it accessible to your team to be able to literally have your own app to do something very, very quickly. And there's a hundred thousand videos on YouTube about this. The more dated, the worse they are because if you can get the really recent ones, you'll see all these templates and all these connections that people are building. And it just blows my mind at what's possible because, yeah, there's a lot of opportunity for automation, but maybe you don't need automation. Maybe you might just need a little tool that would make the maintenance of the automation irrelevant and 10 times less than if you just had a tool that worked. So that's where I could see firms investing in like, oh, we need this thing to take all this stripe data and compare it with this Zwora or chargebee account, just to double check things. And also our inventory and our three PL and all this other things. And you could build automation, automations for that. But what if you just had an app that connected to all of them and had the right logic and anytime you needed to change, you asked the AI to be able to make that change without having to be an automation expert? That's what excites me about the future work.

I think we still very much think in the paradigm of humans using apps too. And we're very close to the tipping point where there's going to be more machines using apps than humans using apps. So like even the ability to spin up that app to solve that problem, like you may use it now, but it's also something that an agent can hop in and be like, hey, do this on the 3rd of every month. And it goes in and does that and creates the work paper and all that.

Yeah. It's a great reminder that knowing what to do is incredibly important. So leaning in to the people that have been there and done that and have seen all these things. Yeah, like have those conversations. It's, it's, it's powerful. Like learning not just the tech, but the why behind a lot of the things that we do. Great. I mean, unless you're in America where the tax code changes every six months.

Yeah. Where we have real taxes. Okay, Chad, thank you for coming and doing this.

Any parting words for the kind people at home? Automationtown IO links. Anything else we ought to share?

No. If you try it out and you don't like it or you don't save any amount of time in your in your life. Absolutely. Give you your money back. It's just a whole bunch of people that are really excited about tech, and it can be for anybody, like, any. It's not just for firm owners. So don't feel like you have to be an expert or a beginner that may not be able to find your tribe. There are literal developers in there that work for accounting firms that are just nerding out, and it's really fun. So look forward to seeing you there. And thanks, Jason, for having me on here. And it's always fun chatting nerdy stuff with you.

Cool. Thank you, Chad.

You got nothing to lose. You heard it from the man himself. Go check it out.

I'll see you in the next one.