483 Can AI Clone My Accounting Expertise?

Today's a big one, gang, because arguably the most impactful AI to professional service work, and I would argue, like, bigger picture knowledge work as a whole, is how accurately AI can mimic your own expertise. I'm not talking about, like, visual avatars, like, can it look like you and convince somebody. I'm not talking about speech. Like, can it sound like you? That's all fine, but that's something totally different. What I'm talking about is I have specific expertise, and if I give AI enough examples of me dispensing that expertise, can it accurately respond to things the same way that I do? We've got an AI assistant that can see into all 500 episodes of this podcast, however many we're at now. We're going to put it to the test to check in on just how accurate these things are, but also explore the other really interesting features that are getting built in to these sort of AI avatar tools. How could we use them? Like, with our juniors, with. With our. With our marketing partners, even with our clients. Someday, I. I think you'll be blown away by how powerful these have gotten. Let's take a look. Okay. If you're new here, we talk about running accounting firms, and we've been doing it for a while, so we got a whole bunch of podcast episodes. And just to show you an example of how this technology works, let's just jump straight into a demo. So what I'm going to interact with is something that can see into all past podcast episodes. It's going to try to sound like me, sound like my voice, and it kind of sort of sounds like me. Don't get caught up on that. Think about, like, what it is actually saying. That's what I'm most interested in here, because in the context of, like, delivering advice, if it can dispense advice the same way that you do, that becomes an asset. That becomes a lesser version of you that's kind of infinitely scalable. Right. Okay, let's take a look again. Don't worry about what it sounds like. We're interested in how it communicates and what it says.

Hey, did you manage to sort out the audio setup? What's the latest on that?

Yes, I did, but we don't need to tell anybody about that. Let's get on with the demo.

All right, sounds like a plan. Let's dive in and make this demo shine. What's the first thing you want to tackle?

I'm unsure who to work with, like, what clients to work with, what clients. I need to cut loose. I'm Just. I'm torn, man. I get it.

Deciding who to keep and who to let go is tough. But here's the thing. Hanging on to clients that don't align with where you're headed is like carrying dead weight. You've got to ask yourself, are these clients helping you build the firm you want, or are they holding you back? If it's the latter, it's time to cut bait. And hey, one way to make it easier is to build relationships with other firms you trust. That way you're not just firing clients, you're handing them off to someone who's a better fit, which feels way better.

Right. That. I mean, that is like, exactly how I would answer that question. Okay, so the reality is I already know that I need to get rid of some people. I'm just kind of torn on, like, getting over the hump to do it. Give me some. Some tips on how to actually let some of these clients go.

All right, so first off, you're not alone in feeling torn. This is one of the hardest parts of running a firm. But here's the deal. The longer you wait, the harder it gets. Start by identifying a firm or someone you trust who can take these clients on. That way you're not just cutting them loose, you're handing them off to someone who will actually treat them as a list clients, which they're probably not for you anymore.

Right?

Then script out what you're going to say. Keep it simple. Explain that your firm's direction has shifted and you're no longer the best fit for their needs. But emphasize that you found someone who is. That referral piece makes the whole process feel way less brutal for you and for them. And hey, don't overthink it. You're doing what's best for everyone involved. What's holding you back the most right now?

I mean, the main issue is I don't have the network that you're talking about. Like, I don't have someone perfect to send them to.

Alright, so if you don't have that network yet, that's where you start. It's not about finding the perfect firm right away, but just starting to build those relationships. Look for firms that serve a different niche or size of client than you do. Ones where your C or D clients would actually be their A or B clients. Even just reaching out to a few local firms or hopping into accounting communities online can get the ball rolling. It's about planting seeds, not finding the perfect fit overnight. Does that feel doable?

It does. I don't know, like, what Are the top three places where I could start?

Alright, top three places to kick things off. First, accounting conferences. They're gold mines for meeting other firm owners who might be a fit for your referrals. Second, online accounting communities. There are tons of them now, where firm owners share advice and build connections. And third, social media. Seriously, just being active and engaging with other accountants can open doors.

Dang.

You'd be surprised how quickly you can build a network when you put yourself.

Out there so much like me. It sounds doable, but it takes time that I honestly don't have right now. Can you give me some tips for how to, I don't know, claw back more of my time to work on things like this?

All right, so clawing back time starts with getting brutally honest about what's eating it up. First, look at your client list. Are there clients who are just draining your energy and not worth the effort? Letting them go could free up a chunk of your bandwidth. Second, think about delegation. If you've got a team, are you holding on to tasks they could handle? And if you're solo, maybe it's time to explore outsourcing some of the repetitive stuff. Third, carve out non negotiable time blocks for this kind of work. Even if it's just 30 minutes a day. That consistency adds up. What's the biggest time suck for you right now?

Electronic mail.

Email is the number one time suck for most accountants, no question. The key is to stop treating your inbox like it's your personal to do list. First, get help. Pull in an assistant or delegate to your team. They can handle the bulk of those emails, fetching documents, answering basic questions so only the critical stuff lands on your plate. Second, stop living in your inbox. Check it once a day max and work out of a folder where only the important emails go. It's a game changer for reclaiming your time insanity. What's the first step you think you could take to start delegating?

I don't know because I'm afraid of people seeing stuff in my inbox that I don't want them to see. What about. What about inbox privacy?

I hear you. Inbox privacy is a legit concern, but it's manageable. First, stop sending sensitive stuff like HR or payroll info through email. Use a secure platform for that instead. Then set up clear boundaries. Give your assistant access to the bulk of your inbox, but keep a separate folder or system for anything super private. That way they can handle the day to day noise and you still control the sensitive stuff. Does that feel like a workable middle ground.

That feels workable to me. But I want to spend this weekend in Sarasota and wanted to know if you had any recommendations for good places to stay.

I'm sorry, I'm not sure about that one. Let's circle back to something I can help with. What's next on your mind about running your firm?

This episode is brought to you in part by Makers Hub, who's right now using AI to crush all things Accounts payable. I was recently at Scaling New Heights in Orlando and Makers Hub kindly let us use their booth to host a meetup. We had over 100 people come out and hang and it was funny like the conversations meeting folks, because we were at the Makers Hub booth, a lot of conversations ended up that we talked about Makers Hub and I was surprised the number of people who have listened to my stuff, watched my stuff, seen the Makers Hub ads and they're like, yeah, it's actually pretty freaking good. Heard some pretty cool stories about like really hairy client situations that Makers Hub handled well. And that's kind of their sweet spot is complex accounts payable stuff. Do you do inventory management?

Receiving?

Do you have to fuss with purchase orders? I sure hope you don't. And do you work with vendors that send stupid invoices that have all these different nuances and fiddly things? Megasub is the first tool I've seen that is malleable enough to literally, on a vendor by vendor basis, pull those dumb details that ought to impact how an invoice gets processed, even. Even right down to handwritten text because they're using AI vision models. Really, really cool tool. Makers Hub. Even if you don't do this stuff for your clients, I've got a bunch of videos demoing it on my YouTube channel. If you've got clients with gnarly needs like this, shoot them one of my videos. They'll be entertained for five to seven minutes. And it truly like transforms. Transforms the entire accounts payable department. Really, really powerful stuff. Learn more about Microsoft. Check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is brought to you in part by Missive. Missive is a platform for managing email in a team. And if you've heard me talk about email, you know we need to break down the silos where we all are managing our own email inboxes, please. Email is the receiving bay of your accounting firm. Let's take the team approach. Okay, now Missive. Actually a huge percentage of Missives users are accounting firms, probably because most practice management systems these days like with very few exceptions their email implementation like the client for sending emails kind of sucks. But also outlook awful place to manage team based inboxes. Missive we talk about like building your org chart around pods and managing client groups and all that stuff. Missive will let you set up like email management the same way in pods. Everybody can have their own inboxes but you can also share those inboxes well so people we can help each other out, cover for each other. Makes it way easier to delegate the work that's coming from those emails. Really cool platform. Some G2 reviews from actual accountants. It massively improved their workflow. Makes inbox management a dream. Fantastic tool for my busy accounting firm to manage multiple inboxes for clients. Missive is all caps amazing and I can't live without it. If you are wasting too much time on email, man, give Missive a look more info down in the show notes. Okay, enough of that. If you tune into the podcast much, you know that I mean that was just about I. I can't imagine those answers being any more spot on. So what's happening behind the scenes when we have this interaction, this speech stuff? Like it's cool, it's novel that the interaction is pretty real time. Like it's probably a second, second and a half delay before we cut back and forth. Probably just enough to where in the podcast edit. Like it just gets trimmed a little bit, but it feels pretty balanced. And I can mute my mic if I have to say something. Like when I was, when I would say something as it was talking to me, my mic was muted. There's a big like mute button there because I can just talk over it and interrupt it if I want to, but the mute button prevents that. Every time I, I ask it something, I throw something at it. What's happening behind the scenes. And if you just use the text chat version of this, you can see this, it will cite the sources. By the way, link to my assistant down in the show notes if you want to play with it. It's fascinating just to see how the tech works that the assistant that we're actually talking with here. Every time I throw something at it, it goes out and it pulls from three to eight past podcasts and it pulls about a half page text, half page of text each, so couple hundred words. So every time that it responds, it's pulling that stuff instantly from almost 500 episodes. It's pulling that stuff from multiple episodes and then rolling it up into one sort of cohesive like coherent answer. And that's Happening so, so fast. Like, that's the mind blowing thing to me in practice, that's like it's over 2000 hours of audio that this podcast is on the back end. It transcribes all of that stuff. So it's just working off of the text. But just how much information it can look across and how fast it can do it is just, it's. It's mind blowing. And I think the biggest blocker for us as we imagine using tools like this in our day to day is it's not me and it isn't and it will never be as good as you. I mean, in some ways it is better than you. The fact that it can do this with a hundred people at the same time, 24 hours a day, that's something you and I can't do. But in terms of the ceiling of what it can do and be flexible and adaptable to different scenarios and all that, not quite as good as us. But also, you and I don't have perfect recall. So if the subject matter here is something different, some of these podcast episodes are, are almost three years old now. This thing will have recall to a level that you and I do not have recall. And so it's not you, it's something different. The point is, how do we use it? How do we put it to work? Because increasingly I see knowledge automation kind of is what I'm thinking of it as. I'm seeing knowledge automation as a bigger and bigger part of kind of the AI Married with Professional Services future. And we talked about this a couple of weeks back. But in short, if you think about an accounting ledger and how that's a perfect record of every transaction for a business, what would a knowledge ledger look like? That is a perfect record of every client meeting you've had, every internal meeting, every training you've had with staff. Like, arguably we're there already where if we just capture that stuff, we can now use AI to put that stuff to work in interesting ways. And so we're building this almost perfect ledger of the expertise that we dispense and beyond a certain threshold, once it's got enough of that information, that thing's probably pretty powerful because it's pretty rare that we will hop on a call with a client or go into a training with a team member where we've never talked about that thing before. So many of these conversations are the exact same thing every time. The, the same training with, with the same different staff people, but like developing them kind of through the same arc. Clients coming to you with the exact same questions about, you know, escort elections and just all these common scenarios. And the context does matter. And so if you start thinking about ways that this could break down, your advice will not always be universally the same. Right? Depends on the context. And for a transcript to be pulled as relevant for a specific answer, you want that bit of the transcript that it pulls to include that conte. And this is one thing that two or three years ago, these tools didn't do very well because it couldn't pull enough information fast enough. They've now gotten much, much better to where it does a pretty good job of handling that context. But again, it's not you. But the upshot is it's genuinely an infinitely scalable version of you. And with the nature of this interface, there's some other cool like additional features built in here that are. That are things that, that you and I also could not do. So for one, you can charge people for access to this stuff. And it's interesting, this hasn't really landed to date, I don't think, because there's a lot of. There's a good number of like online influencers and like Arnold Schwarzenegger and all these different things where you. They have like these AI assistants like Andrew Huber, Huberman, the, the. He's got big podcast about sort of wellness and stuff like that. They've got an AI assistant on his website. And if that thing was wildly popular, you could see a world where they put that behind a paywall. My take on this is the most generalist sort of think people. I'd struggle to see a path to monetizing something like this directly, but in more niche spaces, it's a possibility. In fact, we've seen Ryan Lazanus in our space. He does this at least at one point. He was doing it a couple, two or three months ago, he announced, actually with this same tool, we're using Delphi for this Delphi AI. I'll put that in the show notes. Ryan rolled out basically a subscription thing. It was like 13 bucks a month or 20 bucks a month. I remember what it was. But you could get access to his assistant that has kind of all of his proprietary documentation around best practices and scripts and kind of his framework for how to run an accounting firm. It's got all that stuff built into there and you can interact with it for a flat fee per month. Now you can see how that has value. But I would argue like the jury's still out on whether that kind of becomes normalized, like how much humans actually want to interact with an AI like that, or if they still just want to talk to the human. Again, it's not as good as the human, but that's, that's not. The point is it's a version of that that previously didn't exist. So jury's still out on like, how much interests interest humans have in working with an assistant like that directly. But even if you don't charge for it up front, in the case of this Delphi app, anything you like, if you do want to pay wallet, you keep 85% of the revenue, at least at the pricing tier that I'm at, Delphi takes 15% of the revenue. I think that goes down on bigger plans. But there's other things that, that can do even in a free context. You notice that I asked it about going to Sarasota and it found the boundary of like, that's not a thing that Jason's talked about before. So. So I'm not going to answer that question for you. But you can set up actions in the assistant to do things like plug products, plug services, or alert you anytime a conversation goes down a certain path. So let's say we want to set up an alert every time somebody ends up talking about cost segregation or something like that. You could stand up this assistant for free, your clients could use it, and the assistant, like the platform is going to give you a heads up anytime somebody wades into a discussion about cost segregation. And you can then follow up with the company directly even more sort of like automated. Here you can get the assistant then to plug specific landing pages, specific products or resources anytime a conversation goes down that path as well. So in my case, I run an online community for accounting firms. It has like 600 firms in it. And when I asked it about communities, no, I didn't ask it about communities. When I asked it about how to build your network as an accounting firm, it said three things. It said go to conferences, says there's a bunch of online communities. And it says social media, just start hanging out in those places. You'll make some friends. If I wanted it to, I could create an action to plug my community hard. Anytime the conversation starts going down that path, it's got a talk track that's like, hey, this is what makes realize a great place to do X, Y and Z. Go to this link to learn more. It can do that while you sleep. So that, that actually to me is, is the more interesting version of this than just the straight up paywalled version is the one that kind of like sends them down a path once the conversation gets gets into a certain area. Other odds and ends. I will have just gotten an email when I asked that Sarasota question. You can get notifications anytime there's something that it can't answer and this is so that you can build out the assistant further if that's something that you want to cover. So if I actually want my Jason Stats assistant to talk all things accounting firms and great places to stay in Sarasota, I can give it additional knowledge to be able to build that out. Today's episode is sponsored in part by cloud accountant staffing who helps you find talented offshore and nearshore accountants to come to work for your firm. It is run by former accountants and a cool thing they just launched is what they're calling a candidate portal. That is you can hop in, see the candidates they found that could come and work with your firm. Filter by years of experience, filter by software experience filter filter by region. Are they in the Philippines, Latin America, South Africa? That many matters depending on the role. Is it important that the time zones align? Are they going to be doing anything client facing? But they've now got kind of a self service portal where you can go in, see the folks book interviews like in real time? No, like weird kind of recruiter gatekeeping. Right. And like I mentioned cloud account staffing. The folks who put this company together and actually still run it to this day, they're former accounting promoters so they actually understand what you do and what it takes to like effectively integrate folks into your team. You want to learn more about cloud accountant staffing, check out the link down in the show notes. Today's episode is brought to you in part by Mercury, the fintech platform that over 200,000 companies trust for banking and running their financials finances. Because traditional banking websites, banking apps, they what words are we allowed to use here? They're no good, they're very bad. You hop into Mercury you're like oh okay. This is like What a modern SaaS platform for managing this stuff in my business ought to look like. Stuff like being able to invite clients to set up their own accounts, manage multi user stuff, manage access. It's actually pretty fully featured like invoicing, bill, pay card management and all the stuff you need for like moving money around, wires, ach, all that stuff. The before and after of working with a client with a modern platform or like Mercury versus a traditional bank. I mean if you're doing bookkeeping it's a tremendous time saver. Vastly simplifies the month end Close. But oftentimes we don't feel like we're. We don't feel like we can be opinionated about what bank they use. It's actually a great example of when we talk about in say a three tier proposal, letting someone just rock up with whatever bank they want to use. That's going to cost them more money. For me, and at a certain point, honestly, that like, that may not even be an option. There is an easy solution for crusty old banks and the workflow issues that they create. I encourage you to check out Mercury. Like, you will hop in there and be like, okay, you know, I get it. Okay. I can tell you that with confidence because it's what I use. Honest to goodness, HTG, you can even get it up to $1,000 referral bonus per eligible client. Okay. Disclaimer time. Mercury is a fintech company, not a bank. Terms apply for bonus eligibility. See Show Notes for details. Learn more about Mercury. Yeah, look down there. Check out the Show Notes. The knowledge behind this. One thing that Delphi does really well is you can automate the fetching of new information. So right now it's connected to my podcast's RSS feed so that every time a new podcast comes out, it automatically gets added to the knowledge. Now, if you want, you can go in and dig into the detail and remove certain podcasts from it, or there's a slider where you can make it reference some episodes more than other episodes. You can turn them down, turn them up, so you've got control over what sort of knowledge it's going to reference in conversation. And if, if you're like, that's great for you, Jason, but I don't have a podcast with 500 episodes. Our meeting transcripts in our accounting firm, I mean, that is like, that's like the saddest of a professional services firm. Like, that stuff is just happening all the time. But we don't do anything with those transcripts usually. Now, in practice, if you're going to actually use this with client transcripts, then you got to have a different security conversation, right? Delphi right now, it is SOC 2 Type 1 compliant. Not Type 2 compliant. It is GDPR compliant. It is CCPA compliant. They got a pretty robust trust center where you can kind of dig into what they do and what they don't do. But there's also a world where you could even redact that information or just build your own knowledge base just for the purpose of putting behind your Delphi assistant. But the volume of meetings that we hold in Our accounting firm like I ran, I mean I had a team of 40 and if people averaged two meetings a day, then we're running 400 meetings a week. 400 transcripts a week. We're talking about just under 500 transcripts from my podcast that are in this. Accounting firms, you generate in a whole bunch of transcripts too. So whether we're using this for like external client facing stuff, which is the spookiest and kind of the hardest thing, I think, versus just using it internally, I mean the, the best way to use it internally is probably a custom GPT having your team on a, a chat GPT team plan, very secure. But then you can create a custom GPT with whatever knowledge you want and share that GPT with everybody in your team. Deli is probably more designed for external stuff because you can build in like the alerts to kind of plug certain things and, and alert you if a conversation goes down a certain path, that sort of thing. You can also connect it with Slack so you can have a conversation with this thing over Slack with Zapier. So, so certain alerts can trigger Zapier workflows. You can also integrate it with Zoom. So I think you can actually have like a speech conversation with it over Zoom. It's interesting, like if you think further ahead to where all this tech is going and it's already in a pretty compelling place right now. I mean, even just being a listener to this podcast, you're. Every day I get emails that are like, what was that one tool that you mentioned that did xyz? Or you listened to something a year and a half ago and you're trying to remember, like good luck ever finding that in a podcast. Right? Or even old newsletters, it's already very useful for that, like going back and finding stuff. But if you think kind of to the future of what professional services and the business of advice looks like with AI, even just knowledge workers and how we interact with each other, these avatars are almost going to be, I think, the first line of defense. And to just take a very basic scenario here, let's say you run a small team. Let's say you're a senior bookkeeper and you've got four staff level bookkeepers that report up to you. Everybody's, you know, they're still learning QuickBooks, they're still learning best practices. Company sops us things that are specific to the client. And rather than going direct to the senior bookkeeper, an assistant AI assistant that is, that is trained on both the company policies, but also the trainings of that senior bookkeeper that becomes the first line of defense, where the junior goes to that first before asking the senior. And again, this isn't a replacement for having human conversations with the senior. It's, it's addressing the reality that most people need more help than we're able to give them. Especially junior folks that are getting stuck every single day. That would absolutely be hammering that assistant double checking the things that they're doing asking it, because they just asked their Boss a question 20 minutes ago and they can't ask him another question. Now that's a very basic example, but these avatars almost by default become the first line of defense, don't they? And maybe the closest example to this I've seen in the wild that we've talked about a bit on the podcast is like an IT company where you say you send them a message and you get that automatic, like we've, we've assigned you a ticket. I say IT company because this is where I first saw. But it could really be any company that does a large volume of support. You send them an email, you get the auto reply that says you've been assigned a ticket. Here it is. But then it uses AI to try to automatically answer that question for you in the auto response. And if that does answer your question, there's a button there to close the ticket. So. So it immediately attempts to answer your question for you as intelligently as it can. It doesn't automatically close the ticket, but if that does resolve your question, they can say close the ticket right there and they just got an instant answer. Now, are there risks with that? For sure. Is that as good as you? No, it absolutely isn't. But in other ways it's vastly better than us. Right? It's immediate, it's scalable, it has perfect recall. And it's not just AI, it's you put on blast by AI. And as all the AI solutions and the chat GPTs of the world and the robo advisors, and as all that stuff gets better and better and better and better because it, it will and it solves more of the basic generic use cases for people, then what's left for us? Well, it's what we can do on top of that, like it's our perspective, it's our worldview view, our expertise that's unique to us and not just parroting whatever the AI will tell a user like it is. It is our special sauce on top of that that is our value. And to me that kind of feels like the best of both worlds. Like the ability to use AI to extend what only you know, to give it the context of, you know, the information that you have in that client relationship. So, for example, your practice management system, let's say your practice management system in the client portal rolls an AI assistant that can see into past tax filings, into the client's accounting ledger. And if that's something that I can extend to my client, I'm the only one with that context. The tax returns, the ledger and all that, that's going to be a much better AI assistant than a ChatGPT that isn't connected to the company's ledger and all that. Now, if I can even go even further and layer in my own expertise and past conversations we've had with the client, that assistant gets really powerful then, right? And it still feels incredibly foreign for somebody to come and talk to an AI version of you. And they probably wouldn't talk like we just did, they would just message it. That still feels incredibly foreign and kind of spooky. And we're a long ways from being able to trust that. Right? But I can tell you, all else being equal, you got two accountants, they do the exact same thing. If one offers an assistant that can get you helpful answers 24 hours a day, that's a higher level of service. Still not a replacement for talking to the actual person. But in a day and age when more is being asked of us than ever before and there's more people out there than we could possibly help, man, that like, that seems like it has a place. It's interesting and it's way better than it was a year, 18 months ago when we last tested it. Pretty cool stuff. We'll be fascinating to see where this stuff goes. I can tell you where I'd love it right now in a really intelligent way, is in the email inbox, in the suggested AI generated replies we can send back to folks who, if, I mean, if somebody could nail that in the context of an accounting firm where it gives really intelligent answers back, that would be really powerful. The, the thing to do right now, biggest thing, biggest recommendation is to be capturing those meetings without the underlying context, without capturing your expertise, we can't do anything with it. Imagine if you could go back 10 years right now and have every single meeting you've ever delivered. What could we do with that stuff? That's really interesting. Favorite AI meeting assistant right now is Fireflies, because it connects to every virtual meeting platform, unlike Google's, unlike Zoom's, unlike Microsoft's Fireflies. So super secure and will connect to all those platforms. It also has a very good mobile app so you can record conversations in person. If you got an office and folks are turning up there also, you just sit down and talk to it, do a voice memo. Kind of a brain dump, and then use that wherever you need it. Super cool stuff. Kind of spooky, but pretty cool. That's all we got for today. I'm coming to a city near you. In fact, if you're listening to this the day it comes out, I'm in Denver at a one day accounting AI conference. Over a hundred accountants out hanging out there. I was in LA on Monday, but other dates coming up. I want to see you there. July 22nd I'm in Chicago, July 25th in Atlanta July 31st Austin, Texas. The next day August 1st, Dallas, Texas August 7th Minneapolis and August 8th Boston, Massachusetts. If you tune into the podcast, Supes recommend coming out and hanging in person. If you want to see us somewhere else, drop that in the comments. Where you at? Where? What city should we go to next? Want to see you there. But in the meantime, thanks for hanging out today and I'll see you in the next one. SA.