469 Ok But What If AI DOES Disrupt Accounting Firms?

Okay, we're all pretty sure AI is not just going to wipe out accountants, right? Well, despite what everybody tells you, everyone loves rallying around the water cooler and posting on social media different versions of, we're not going to be replaced by AI. We might be replaced by an accountant using AI, but we're. Everything's going to be good. We're all going to be safe. But what if. What if. What if not? What if things don't. Don't work out? Let's just. Let's just think through it. What does that actually look like? If it did happen, who could potentially be at risk? Who would be fine? I mean, I'm pretty sure it won't, but just in case it does, we're gonna make a plan today. Okay. What happens to me if AI does disrupt accounting firms? I realize now I said, what happens to me if AI disrupts accounting firms? That's unclear because it probably sounded like I'm talking about myself. Although this is a fun exercise that I also like to think about at nighttime. What if AI just wiped out accounting, like, entirely? I mean, it does make the premise of what I do even more ridiculous. What do you do? Thought leadership boy. Accounting influencer. Well, that's cool. Gets even cooler if accounting isn't a thing anymore. Oh, we're laughing. Okay. I try not to sugarcoat anything, AI. I think we actually have to be very, very careful about statements that feel like a nice, warm, cuddly blanket for our brain. Did I. I said Branket, didn't I? Man, brain brackets. Such as AI can never do what I do, or you never be replaced by AI. You'll just be replaced by, you know, an accountant using AI or something like that. There's a certain, like, fun, fun sort of symmetry to that. And I. I think we just all have to acknowledge that we all want to be told that everything will be fine. And so we, like, are drawn to those statements. And social media, by its nature, amplifies those statements. Because the game of social media, honestly, is that people will agree with, to then engage with, and then more people see it. And it's why algorithms are, like, kind of inherently divisive. Is the stuff that performs is the controversial stuff that people will fight over or the stuff that is taking a stance that everyone's like, yeah, no, that's how I. That's how I feel. You finally put it to words. And I, like, I will do over 30 keynotes this year, I think, like, in person. And a lot of people just want the person who can come and tell people everyone will be all right. But I think that frankly does everyone a disservice because it takes your eye off the ball. Like it takes the conversation off of what should I do next, given this information, and instead almost gives you permission to not care. Right? Like that is. That is how I process. Everyone's going to be fine is cool. Well then I'll just keep doing what I'm doing then. But we shouldn't be doing that, frankly. Like, we should change and evolve the way that we do things. So let's just think through, like what this actually potentially looks like in a very aggressive AI scenario. So what is AI coming for right now? I think the most powerful AI, most broadly impactful AI, is the agentic AI that can just work across a bunch of different stuff. So much of accounting, from bookkeeping to tax, like all aspects of accounting, even assurance, so much of accounting is about bringing together information from so many different disconnected places, applying a bit of logic to it and then putting it where it needs to go, basically. Or making a decision, taking a position. But like the really ugly part of accounting from a system standpoint, it's just that there's information in so many different places. None of them are like there is no one single source that gives you complete information to do anything. And it's why accountants need so many monitors. Listen, I don't like this any more than you do, but you need multiple monitors because we spend time putting numbers from one thing into another thing or having to reference this other thing to key in numbers to that thing. And if that weren't true, you wouldn't be sitting in front of a freaking stock trading platform. Or I see you 180 degree wraparound monitor, Samsung G9 ARC 49 inch monitor. Guy like a. Like a baby chick in an incubator. I think the monitor thing has gone too far. I would challenge you. Anyone beyond two displays. If you got beyond two displays, there's one of two problems happening. One, either your displays are not high resolution enough. It's 2025. You should not have 1080p displays. You should either have 2K displays or 4K displays. In either case, if it's big enough, you could put two documents side by side on a single display. That's the first problem. Too many low resolution monitors still. Second problem. What is this podcast even about? Where am I right now? AI takeover. This is important, people. Second problem with monitors again, lot of dayquil. Second problem with modern accounting monitor setups is the extra monitors. All you do is you park Your email there or you park your Microsoft Teams or your Slack or your Twitter, your LinkedIn or something like that, just begging to be distracted. You are just setting yourself up for failure there, big guy. There's enough things going on, especially as we're, we're working at home and the kids are kicking down the office door. The leaf blowers just standing inches outside your window just absolutely going ham. Did I say the leaf blower? I meant the landscaping guy. Yeah, no, I know you're doing well. You've got a landscaping guy. There's enough distractions in the world. What we don't need is, is more displays beaming distractions into our brain all day long when we're trying to focus and get stuff done. Too much of accounting is still entering thing from one thing to another thing. It's why we need multiple displays. And so the AI that's most relevant to solving that problem is agentic AI that can work across multiple apps. We already have agentic AI that's getting okay inside of a browser. Like ChatGPT operator recently got an upgrade. It's only available on the $200 a month pro plan, but basically it has a built in browser and you can tell it to do anything on the web and it'll go out, navigate to the web and figure that stuff out. Still hard problems to solve around authenticating into various different apps. How do I get it to use my password manager specifically on that ChatGPT Pro plan? Right now it is fun to play with, but the pro plan still trains itself on your prompts and on the stuff that it sees. So that security for me there is not good enough for a business use, but it's a great window into what's, what's happening. I think at least for us accounting pros, the AI agents that we need to be most excited about are desktop based AI agents because unfortunately there's still stupid desktop tools that we have to use, especially if you do tax. And so when the AI uses your machine the same way that a human does, then like I would theoretically there isn't anything that it can't do just from like an interoperability standpoint because it genuinely uses the exact same interface as you. So we're thinking aggressive AI timeline here, right? Like where it's very, very powerful. So you have agents that and pure AI like already language models are very, very good at running off and solving a problem. If you think about Chat GPT's deep research right now and just how good that is if you haven't played with it yet please do go get a chat GPT team plan. It's 30 bucks a month. Research a hard thing or upload a bunch of your own information or the transcript of this podcast. Give it a hard job to do. Click the little button that's a telescope that says deep research. I have seen so many hard to impress people be impressed by ChatGPT's deep research. It'll work on the problem upwards of 10 minutes. Come back with a really intelligent solution. There is no reason to believe that like we can't anticipate that same level of intelligence when it comes to the AI being able to use and navigate a computer. So what, what does that mean? Well, I think it probably means we have a rising baseline for what are the things that can simply be done with pure tech. We've been, there have been countless software companies that have come and gone over the years that have said we are a pure tech play to getting bookkeeping done. The most common example, we finally did it. We figured it out, we nailed it. We're going to raise a bunch of money and we're going to like we finally solved bookkeeping or solved accounting. I've seen that phrase so many times and in 18 months that company's gone or they pivot to being, you know, like a pilot, something like that. A bench QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping, which is just like you know, a accounting firm essentially that relies on automation but has a landing page that looks like it's a tech company. Reality behind the scenes there is, they do invest a lot in engineering so they'll have some tooling that you and I don't usually a ton of offshoring going on. So they're trying to make, they're trying to make, take advantage of the lowest cost expertise they can to get that work done to sort of drive that cost down to nothing. But at the end of the day it's not a fully automated solution. But that, that's probably changing with AI agents over the next couple of years. This episode is brought to you in part by Carbon, the practice management system. I had the opportunity recently to participate in an event that Carbon put together where they, they brought together a whole bunch of Carbon firms and I'll be honest, I think it was cool event but the thing that most blew me away was like the quality of the firms there. And if, like, if we can get, if we can get real on tech selection and how we build our tech stacks and accounting firms, practice management systems today, they've never been more similar than they are now for sure. They're still different. Each one has strengths and weaknesses and all that. We got to understand that when we're picking our practice management system. But you know what goes a really, really long ways for me when I can look at a whole bunch of firms that I respect and I'm like, can you just tell me what they're using, man? A lot of them, a lot of them are using carbon. And I'm increasingly seeing this among firm owners is if you have friends that run other firms and you're in constant contact with those people that actually like kind of auto impact how you pick your tech. Because if you have those close relationships where you're like, hey, what do you do with X, Y and Z? Like how do you handle this or that? And can get immediate answers from like real people that run firms and have worked through these things, that's something that has absolutely nothing to do with the product, but makes that product tremendously more useful. So this ad read, while it has absolutely nothing to do with the carbon product, which is like very good and they've been in my top recommendations now for several years, but like sometimes the ultimate proof is what are the big brands using? And I can tell you there's a whole lot of very smart, very progressive firms that we should aspire to, sort of build ourselves to be similar to. It's a lot of those firms that are running carbon. Learn more about Carbon. Check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Mercury, which I'm also happy about because I am a actually a big Mercury fan, a user myself. So Mercury is a FinTech that over 200,000 companies trust for banking and running their finances because the traditional way of getting this done, those platforms, big hot pile of new sponsor. There they go, walking right back out the door. Like I said, I'm a happy user myself. It is a modern platform. We liked it so much we actually moved all of my businesses to it. Now Mercury for accountants. It's a referral partner program that allows firms to give their clients VIP access to the Mercury product and unlock special perks. Tell me more. Dedicated onboarding and support for firms and clients. Thousand dollars referral bonus for every new what? Okay. Per eligible client. An advisor portal for easy team and client management. Mercury Pro for the firm. Nice. Check out the link down in the show notes to sign up and learn more. Disclaimer Disclaimer Disclaimer voice Mercury is a fit tech company, not a bank. Terms apply for bonus eligibility. See show Notes for details. A lot of people Got mad at me at my, my AI predictions. At the end of last year, everyone's talking to AI agents. I'm like I said, I don't actually think 2025 will be the year of the AI agent. I think we'll probably see that more in 2026. This year we'll probably see AI agents being able to do some cool, very specific things. But for AI agents to truly like take over, they need to in a very open ended way be able to go out and kind of complete end to end tasks themselves. I don't see that happening this year. It's for sure something to keep an eye on. Feels more realistic that that could come next year or the year following. So in, in practice this looks like, you know, in your practice management system assigning a task to a bot instead of a person, which frankly that's really, really exciting. If you think about a recurring task maybe a month on close, ticking over and right now there's you know, 27 tasks you do each month. For one of those tasks to be done by a computer, for 10 of those tasks to be done by a computer, like honestly I'm, I'm for that. That's exciting. So like that, that reality is, is probably closer than we realize. The question will be how much can it do? There's so, so many AI applications right now that are blocked by data silos by not having access to information. As soon as we have desktop AI agents where we can give them permission to access things that like there's, there's for sure like concerns there. My concerns are namely cutting these things loose to do things unmonitored. I mean it's just like given an intern the keys to the castle and they could potentially screw, screw some things up. Something that we have to think about and something that we have to manage. But if you run a team, you're already thinking about that, you're already managing that. The upside to me here with AI agents, very, very exciting. I mean stuff as trivial as, you know, people not following our naming convention, just right for the work papers that we put into the file system and you know, AI agent Roomba overnight going through and fixing all that stuff automatically. Like there's so many trivial things like that that it feels like we're so close to being able to solve in a more automated way. So those AI agents, ultimately we can run as many of them at a time as you need. Like we're used to chatgpt conversations which are synchronous, that is one to one, we're Talking back and forth with it like a human AI agents right now, they're slow, and they may be slow for a while, but that may not be a big. That big of a deal, because there's theoretically no limit on how many of them could be running simultaneously. So you start thinking about these things, become more and more powerful, and you're like, oh, geez, that's kind of spooky. Like, maybe my role looks a little bit more almost like this sort of puppet master where I've got these things out working for me, getting stuff done. A very common refrain that comes up here is, geez, Louise, what. What are we gonna. What are the interns gonna do? In fact, this is already coming up in a much more real way inside the world of software development, where large language models are very good at writing code. Probably. It's probably the thing that large language models are very best at, which there's some sort of sweet irony here, as engineers have been telling literally anyone in any industry, oh, yeah, we're gonna write some software and replace you for the last couple of decades. And. And the first. The first thing that LLMs are, like, really profoundly good at is writing code. Now, there's, like, these models can write code at levels that are far, far beyond even the average programmer now, but there's still a whole lot of programmers out there. It's being very good at writing code doesn't solve a lot of things, like what code is worth writing. But what it is impacted more than anything else is, like, the junior level, like, how you hire. And so you see a ton of companies that are in kind of a hiring freeze. And so we could. We can make the same crossover to accounting. If I have these agents that are, like, very powerful for me, what does that do to the interns? It's a good question. Like, it's. It's interesting to think about. I will say one thing we don't always factor in is that we have an entire generation of kids who have now gone through school with ChatGPT. And if you had ChatGPT when you were in school, you. You would have been a freaking wizard with that thing. Like, I don't. I don't care if you want to call it cheating or not. Students have spent hundreds or thousands even of hours with AI tools in a way that you and I have not. And so I think while it's really hard to get your head around, like, well, what will these kids do if they didn't have to learn the exact same way that I learned and have to do xyz. And I mean, imagine how the people felt when we first got computers that would manage an accounting ledger or the first generation of people that had software to prepare tax forms. I mean, what did those people say? Like, no, no, this next generation, there's like, they will not be capable of what I am capable of because I did manual accounting on paper or because we completed tax forms on paper. Imagine how those generations felt. Now, that's unthinkable to you and I, right? Like, that just seems wasteful. There's a lot of those things right now that we're blocked on though, where it's like, okay, the person that just trusts AI to do this thing rather than having to learn it and do it themselves the way that we did. That's actually a pretty good analogy to, to kind of the analog to software transition. And right now AI is not perfect, but we're, we're pretty darn close to it being, I would say, beyond the average, above average. And right now it's probably already better than your intern. So what happens to the interns in that situation? Well, right now I can tell you accounting firms are really struggling to get up to speed with AI and to get their team to start developing this very important career skill, how to work with an AI assistant. But you know who's got that skill in spades? A whole generation of new accountants. There's a world where the next generation of accountants are like the most productive of generation of accountants that we've ever had. And like, I would love for that to be the case, frankly. Like, it can't come soon enough. Right? Like, we need, we need these zoomers or Alphas or whatever we are even on now. We kind of need them to be the most productive generation of accountant we've ever had. So I don't, I'm not ready to pour one out for the youths quite yet because I think they actually have something to bring to our firm that the rest of us are struggling with. So when your generalist AI agents are capable of doing really powerful things, one thing we've talked about is a byproduct of that is productized solutions. So not professional accounting or tax firms, but the software companies that say they do this stuff, they're going to get better human. So your QuickBooks, live bookkeepings, your bench, your pilots, whatever those more productized versions of what we do are, they will get better. And when they get better, they will come up market, so they're gonna start serving the needs of more complex types of clients. And this Is again, we're talking about a pretty aggressive AI scenario here. Just thinking about what is our place as accounting professionals in the market of AI gets really, really strong. These solutions come up market. And the answer for us in the same way that it is right now is, well, we gotta move up market too. So we've talked about the example of turbotaxes like full done for you. Small business tax filing service starting at sixteen hundred dollars for federal only. That is. I don't have the data on this. Actually, we might have the data on this. I believe that is above the average for the cost of a business return. If you looked at all tax firms, I would just say in the U.S. i would say most are charging less than 1600 bucks. In fact, the average might actually be less than $800. And so we already have this problem of productized providers are already outpacing many firms. And the only way that you end up getting hosed by that is if we aren't able to separate what we ought to be doing versus what we ought to be referring down to some other service. So I have to be able to very confidently explain to my clients, if you're paying me $500 for a business tax return right now, I can point to QuickBooks as a service and say, that's federal only. That's the starting price of 1600 bucks. And you know what you're going to get? You're not going to get the collective experience of my whole firm. You're going to get one person they're going to work with one year, and then you're never going to see them again. And I'll tell you what they're not going to do. They're not going to go in. They're going to fix your books. They're not going to be there when you get a notice in a couple of months, and you're not ultimately going to build a relationship with them that is a vastly different level of service. So what should I be charging? 1600 bucks? No, like 2x that 1.5x that. I could tell you the answer isn't 500 bucks. And I mean, we already have people who know this and who are stuck on this and we're dying on this hill because we're unwilling to be like, yep, no, we got this totally wrong. But we're just not willing to rip off the band aid. That's a scary place to find yourself in. I can, and I can raise my hand there, Been there, bought a firm that was in that situation and we sent out a really scary letter and did a really scary price increase that was massive. Everyone basically minimum 30%, many people's price went up 2 to 4x. And we're like, we're really sorry. Like, we came through tikja, we tried to keep things kind of where they were. Then Covid happened, Pipeline shortage, people getting more expensive, whole bunch of factors, but namely the factor that we screwed it up, the business owners. And that's usually the hardest one to acknowledge to be like, hey, like, we didn't price this in a realistic way. And it actually made our firm grow a bunch because good old referrals. Nothing drives referrals like pricing yourself below the market. And to have to own that and eat it, that's really, really hard. And so there, there's. Honestly, there are a lot of us who are just set up camp in the wrong place right now. And you know, this is. It's always just like a step in your journey. It may be unthinkable for you right now to charge $1,600 for a small business tax trip. Like, you just may not be able to even get your head around that. And so it is genuinely like developing that self confidence, learning that that's possible through just proving to yourself that, oh, there actually are people that will pay this, or proving to yourself that there are people who will say, yes, when you say, I'm really sorry, you're paying me $500 right now. But look at this service. I'm gonna give you two options. Go to that service. And I think if you do, you'll almost certainly be back next year, if not sooner or I'm really sorry, pay me 2,500 bucks instead of 500 bucks. A lot of people, the reaction we have to that still is, that's wrong. You can't do that. You can't do that to the client. Like, it's wrong that you did it in the first place and now you're eating it. Now you are the victim. And like, nobody doesn't do this at some point in their career. Like, I'm not pointing fingers, man, because good golly, have I done it many a time. We just can't die on that hill because we're unwilling to acknowledge that we got that wrong. It is going to suck to eat that and have those conversations, but there is no alternative. So in an age of AI, that stuff, I think, starts happening faster. Those productized solutions come up market, it becomes even more important for us to come up market more. And ultimately, how powerful AI gets will, like, the biggest thing will be that that will define how far up market those productized solutions can get. Because the most productized version of what we do is ChatGPT being able to do it all. And ChatGPT is the product that just does it all. Now hundred reasons why that feels unrealistic, right? From all the inputs required for a financial statement to somebody still has to stand by them at the end to like support you and say that they're correct. Same thing on the tax side. There has to still be like an arbiter to say like this is correct. If the IRS comes to a small business owner and the small business owner says, well Chat GPT told me it was right, that's not going to be great as far as representation goes. But a more productized ecosystem means that it goes up, it serves more and more premium clients and the lever of like where that stops is just a product of how good is AI? This episode is brought to you in part by guess who Wrong Client Hub. Client Hub is the practice management system that makes every season wow season, not busy season. We're delivering wows, buddy. That's, that's for two reasons. One, because Client Hub provides a game changing client experience. It's designed with the client in mind. First, not like this afterthought bolt on portal, but second, it's drop dead simple, okay? It's not any harder than it needs to be. And one of the really cool things that they've got is magic email. So you actually use Client Hub as your email client. Some things you can do beyond just like some niceties they've had like creating work from emails, being able to pin an email. You can actually even reassign a pinned email to someone else. But in that screen where you're authoring an email, like client sends you an email, you get some AI options down at the bottom to generate like a yes reply. Like it will look at the context of the thread and draft a response. That's basically yes, a button to draft a no reply and then an AI composer where I can give it a custom prompt and have it draft that response. Got some other buttons for like change in tone, expanding the length of it, shortening it, using AI to try to take try to take the pain out of email because frankly email just sucks. So if you're looking for a delightfully simple yet powerful practice management system, take a look at Client Hub link down in the show notes this episode is brought to you in part by Cloud Accountant Staffing who helps you hire staff come work for your accounting firm but they live in the Philippines. I didn't. My firm, my last four hires were in the Philippines. If you listen to the podcast, you know this by now. But when you're getting inundated with, like, all sorts of offshore options every single day, how do you know what the right one is? Huh? Well, I can tell you for one, cloud accountant staffing. We partnered with them because I actually know a bunch of firms that have had a very good experience with them, but they also used to be an accounting firm, so they get it, man. Now, another reason we're heading into conference season, Cloud accountant staffing actually going to be out at a whole bunch of the big accounting conferences, the same ones that I'm gonna be at. Which means, man, they're. They're part of the zeitgeist. They're out there jamming with accountants, hanging out. They get what's going on. They know about the new tax bill. They're in the thick of it, man. And I want that with the people that I partner with, not that random weirdo that just sends me a LinkedIn DM. Okay, that's not the move. If you never hired in the Philippines before, you're gonna have a bunch of embarrassing questions. They can answer them for you. You got nothing to lose. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes. Right now, I have a hard time imagining, you know, and this is a actually really helpful mental exercise to, like, get your head around how realistic this seems. Can you imagine, say, TurboTax bookkeeping, live service, you know, insert. Insert productized solution here. Can you imagine that going up market, you know, 4x in the next few years? That seems. That seems very unlikely to me with how far what I do today is from those solutions. Seems very unlikely. But here's something that, that may give you a bit of peace. Like, let's. Let's zoom out a bit and recognize, like, who we are and where we are at on the spectrum of accounting firms just by being here, listening to this podcast, and even being willing to entertain this conversation. Because I can tell you where most accountants and accounting firms are. Living right under a big old rock. And most of us were this way for most of our career. Like, I still remember when I was coming of age in accounting firms, I'd get stuff in the mail like Journal of Accountancy or this, that or the other thing. And I would love that stuff like that. For me, that was like, you know, getting the. Getting the Christmas catalog when you're a kid. I would love that stuff. Now flip through it and that was the only window that I had to the broader accounting universe outside of the little bubble of my firm. This is early days, like early in my career. I love that stuff. I ate it up. Now at the time, were there places where I could go out and see a lot of that stuff online? Like there was these days. There's, I mean 50 times as much of that stuff online in those spaces where you can go hang out. But the vast majority of this profession, they're offline, they're not consuming thought leadership around accounting. Most adults don't engage in self improvement of any kind. And this is where frankly, wherever you are at in the journey, you are just different by even being here. Like we're what, 20, 25 minutes into a super nerdy nuanced podcast. Episode number 471 about running accounting for 471. That sounds like a lot to you? Imagine how it feels to me. I was thinking the other day, my wife married me 11 long years ago. She married a staff tax accountant at a small town accounting firm. I was, I mean I was making 50, some low 50s a year, just doing 1040s tax stuff and I wasn't very good at it. Imagine how she feels right now. I like to joke with her. I mean nobody understands what I do outside of the accounting space when I try to like kind of walk through like the, the stuff that I do from in person events and YouTube and podcast and all that stuff normal people don't understand. My wife, bless her heart, she does her best, she doesn't understand it. I like to tell her like two decades from now I'm going to tell her that I just like in the cartel or something. And she's going to be like, yeah, no, that actually makes a lot more sense than what you've been telling me that you do. Anyways, we're 471 episodes into a podcast. You're now 27 minutes deep into, into some podcast episode about how to make your accounting firm more AI ready. I got good news for you. You're in the 1%. I don't care where you're at in your journey right now. The way you are thinking and approaching accounting firms, it is ahead of the curve. And so what's a very dramatic AI scenario that we could consider here? What, what if AI disrupts 50% of the accounting profession? I mean, can you imagine that? That is like asteroid level extinction event, I guess like a glancing blow by the asteroid because it didn't get everybody. That seems pretty far fetched, right? The Notion that AI could wipe out half of the accounting profession. How many people listening to this podcast right now are in the bottom 50th percentile? Not many. In fact, I would, I would say none of them. You might be by a lot of metrics, but just by investing in yourself and engaging with this stuff, you're in the 1%, which means your track and your speed to getting to something better and finding a sustainable version of this. You have so many advantages than the folks who are offline, under a rock and have chosen to be there or maybe just haven't discovered that there's anything else out there yet. You are in such a better position than those folks. And in the scenario where AI comes in and serves a huge percentage of the small businesses out there, what remains is the unservable, the entrepreneurs whose needs are so complex and so out there and so unique that AI can't get that stuff done. And so who serves those entrepreneurs? It's you and me, man. It's us. Like, the only people that are left are these super, super unique entrepreneurs. And it makes accounting more mysterious. Like, is that still a thing? Accounting still needs to be thing people. People already feel this way. They're like, why do I need an accountant to prepare my tax return? Like, this all feels so quaint. Like, why do I need somebody to do my bookkeeping? How's this not a thing that's been automated already? Like, why do accountants need to exist? The only people that don't feel this way are the ones who have had a transformative accountant impact their, their kind of business journey. But people already feel this way about accountants. But in an age of a really, really strong AI where it, it will handle what we do, for a lot of types of entrepreneurs, accountants just get more scarce in a way that, frankly, to me, I kind of love. Because what does my day to day look like? I work with the people who cannot be served by AI. And you know who becomes the biggest beneficiary of that? Me. We already have this really unique gig where all we do all day is talk to business owners who are such outliers in the world. I mean, the number of people you bump into in the street every single day and what a tiny percentage of them are entrepreneurs. And then you get to go to your job and those are all the people that you talk about. That's already a very cool opportunity. But even in an aggressive AI scenario where the only entrepreneur is left are, are like the most unique, nuanced, off the beaten path types of entrepreneurs for whom AI is not enough for us to then be spending all of our time with those people. Man, that still sounds pretty cool to me, right? And think about the person that you come out the other side as having spent all those time with those people. You don't think you're gonna have access to opportunity and whatever that next thing looks like. Even in a scenario where AI totally wipes out, accounting doesn't seem that bad to me. And if we really do get to that point where like it wipes out all things, counting it will have wiped out all things of a lot of things. Like this is more like a just a huge sort of civilization altering event. At that point where, you know, everybody's sitting poolside, there's a, a lot of pickleball being played. Your, your children will have the choice of basically two vocations that could become lifeguards or they can go to work for big pickleball. But accountants, I like, I like to tease us, will be like, I can never replace us. And so if we have our way, everybody will be sitting poolside and playing pickleball because I automated all their jobs. But then the accountants will still be working 11 hour days and we'll be like, told you, we told you all I would never replace us. I would argue that timeline where everybody's playing poolside regardless of how you feel about pickleball, while there's definitely risks to that being a messed up world long term, that's almost certainly a better world than we live in today. And so the like, the very worst scenario for accounting is probably a better scenario for civilization. I guess in that timeline going to need a, like a lot of medical, A lot of pickleball is hard on the knees, on, on the ankles, on the ears, on a lot of things. Probably a whole kind of supporting medical infrastructure around that as well. Hey, I got some dates to share with you. Jason in the wild. I so badly want you to come out to an event and hang. This stuff is fun, but it doesn't, it doesn't match press and flesh, right? Whoa, can you say that? Press and flesh. What a disgusting expression. I was at AICPA Engage this week, but that, that is, that has passed. Coming up next June 22, Orlando, Florida, the Sunshine State, albeit scaling new heights. We've got a meetup going one of the days at the Expo Hall. I would love to see you. Also coming up in July, I've got dates in Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago and Atlanta. Head over to jason on firms.com to see all those dates. How to, how to book tickets, rsvp, whatever. It looks like various different types of events. I'm just trying to. I'm just trying to meet you where you are, okay? Nothing's better than meeting and hanging in person. Get in. Thoughts on the AI stuff? Any of that? Drop that stuff down in the comments and hope to see you out in the wild soon, Sam.