510 What Accounting Firm Roles Will AI Replace?

Today, let's get real. What is the accounting work that is most likely to be replaced by AI? Because I'm going to hit you with a hot take straight straight off the top here. I would argue bookkeeping has already been automated. That quote unquote, bookkeepers have already been replaced. Gasp. What does that mean? We're going to talk about different types of AI tech, different roles in accounting firms and a little bit more broadly in accountingdom. Just real brass tacks about like what stuff is probably going to change first and what tech is changing it. Because honestly my take on this has always been I would, I would rather replace myself than someone else replace me, right? So I'm always leaning into like the new stuff. Like I want to understand this because on the other side of whatever change there is, we have always had another group of talented humans that are defining what's next. Otherwise we'd all be poolside playing pickleball right now, right? No, we're not. Still working way too much foreign. To cover. If you're new here, welcome to the Jason on Firms podcast where we talk each week about running accounting firms and the real nitty gritty nuanced stuff around that. Lately, talking a lot of AI, I've got a bit of a software background. I've worked with software companies on their AI strategies as well. But I also last owned a 40 person accounting firm. So I we kind of try to talk about the marriage of those two things. Going to circle back to that hot take about bookkeepers already being replaced by AI. But because I know there's going to be like students and stuff like that tuning into this, should I still go and do accounting? Is my job safe? My take on accounting these days, I will say my take on public accounting, which is accounting that's happening in the context of an accounting firm serving other businesses, is that as far as white collar roles go, accounting is one of the more protected roles from AI. And it's hard to know if it is my proximity to it that makes it harder to imagine it being replaced. Because there's definitely an element right now of everybody being like, no AI is going to replace your job. But it could never understand what I do. But accounting from the outside has historically always looked more simplistic and more deterministic than it actually is. I think everybody that's not an accountant looks at accounting and is like, yeah, why is that still a thing? Let's have AI do that. Same with tax. Everybody hates taxes, right? It's why in OpenAI's GPT4 announcement live stream in March of 2023, the big thing they showed off at the end was we're going to have GPT4, this new model, prepare Becky's taxes because that's, that's something we can all agree that we hate, right? But the fact you don't like that it exists won't, you know, will it out of existence. The reality is what's left in accounting, the stuff that we actually do, is all the crap that falls between the gaps of what software platforms will do for us and the, the reality of how humans and software and building systems and structure and all that, it just doesn't all come together in a very nice, tidy, organized way. And so when people talk about the tedious manual things in accounting, by and large those things have gone away like they went away a long time ago. Nobody's sitting there keying transactions in, nobody's sitting there honestly. And this is a big development the last couple years. Nobody ought to be sitting there keying in like Bill Data. And we've had OCR in the past for extraction, but now AI vision models are way better, another big step. So whether it's bank statements, whether it's an invoice these days, like you can chuck something into ChatGPT and it will flawlessly extract the transactions from a bank statement. Like accountants are not sitting there keying things anymore. And so the last things that are left to automate, they're messy. They're because the business owner wants to do something this one way that can't be automated. It's all the fiddly little nuance stuff where you need a professional to come in and help you fill in the gaps, show you the things that you don't know, something that can create problems in your financial reporting or tax reporting or something like that, that is how accountants are used now, is plugged into all of those gaps. And so every time you hear an AI company that's like, well, our new proprietary model has gone from, from 91% to 93% classification accuracy. I'm like, dude, you don't, you don't understand what like bookkeeping and doing accounting is, because I can tell you these days it's not classifying transactions. If you look at everything that goes into a month end close for a business, classifying the transactions is a very small part of the time that goes into it. And if it's very much, you're doing it wrong, you're not relying on bank rules and stuff like that. So accounting, by and large, I actually think it is Fairly well protected compared to other white collar rules for all those reasons we just discussed. But also because at the end of the day, the job of an accounting firm is to help entrepreneurs overcome all of the financial and compliance blockers to entrepreneurship. That's what we do. At the end of the day, nobody wants to take out the financial trash. That is honestly like in my heart of hearts, what I think of accounting as for most small businesses, they're like, man, I want to run a food truck, I don't want to learn QuickBooks. And so you have this like off gassing of accounting and compliance, things that just have to happen. And that's fine, like we can come in, we can do that stuff and we enable entrepreneurs to do the stuff that they're passionate about. Slinging street tacos, trading kidneys, whatever that is. And do you really see a world where AI just like that removes all of the blockers to entrepreneurship that are related to accounting, finance and compliance. Tax stuff seems unlikely now. All that being said, accounting is going to change big time. Like everything is changing big time. GPT5, the new model we've been talking a lot about agent mode, AI, agent, stuff like that. It's all absolutely changing the way that we work. We need to be super plugged into it again. Let's replace ourselves rather than wait for someone else to do it. But in terms of like the accounting profession as a whole, I have a very hard time seeing that going away because there will still be compliance, there will still be the need to measure things. But the day to day of what we're doing, it does probably look very different. And if you zoom out and you think about like the notion of like will accountants be automated, quote unquote, or even more specifically, will controllers or bookkeepers or CFOs? It's worth remembering like what it means to be an accountant because that's very different things in different contexts. In industry, you may have a Fortune 500 company that has entire floors of accountants doing one repetitive thing from eight to five, all day, every day. That is a role that for sure is exposed. Right? Because if something changes about that one thing that they do, that's a, that's all of their job. As opposed to what me and my team did in an accounting firm. We did a kajillion different things for thousands of different clients that seem to change every day. You get a random new beekeeping client and they're like, hey, there's this weird compliance thing in this county in New York. Can you help us fill out this form and, and you're like, I just work here. Why do you think I'm an expert in this? But we figure it out and we help them through that. So there's a whole bunch of stuff like that. But people call both of those people accountants, right? And so those are very different things. At the end of the day, anyone's job, anyone's role, it is a collection of tasks and every single one of those tasks is on a path to extinction. Either it'll go away someday or it'll get automated. And this is just how it has always been. The question is what tasks will go away? And, and this, this is the big thing, how quickly. And that's what's changing right now, I think is just the, how quickly the evolution is happening. Like, I think it will continue to accelerate. You can, you can foresee kind of some tipping points where, you know, ChatGPT's agent mode, we've been talking about that a lot right now. It's very good to spreadsheets. Folks that have spreadsheet heavy jobs and they spend a lot of time preparing spreadsheets over and over again. That stuff all just changed with agent mode. So you got to be tuned into what chat, GPT and other AI tools are capable of. And sometimes that's hard to keep up with. Sometimes you may not have the control over your time to go out and learn this stuff if you're working for somebody else that isn't, you know, keeping you up to speed on AI. But it's happening fast and we, and we need to keep up. That's why I think, like, I mean, that's why I'm passionate about what I do around education. And I think there's more folks that need to go out, folks that really have deep domain expertise. Where I spent 15 years in public accounting, I owned an accounting firm, worked with thousands of small businesses. When I see AI things, I could see it through a very specific lens for a specific type of person, I.e. accounting firm leaders. And I would love to see more people with domain expertise come in and like raise the level of conversation, bring AI application to specific domains. Because right now you just got a lot of like shouting about AI more generally because everyone else has jobs. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Maker's Hub. You know, the fastest way into the heart of any company that has inventory or complex purchasing stuff. It is the bill pay process that was our foot in the door to doing all sorts of advisory for these companies and cash planning and stuff that actually paid pretty well. And this is now a juicier opportunity than ever before thanks to how AI is changing Accounts Payable and Makers Hub, man, they are like right at the forefront of this if you haven't seen them yet. We've done a number of demos on our channel of just how far automated AP has come. In fact, I've talked with firms now in the wild who have successfully automated like big chunks of the accounts payable department in various clients businesses. But the real value of getting into this work to me isn't like the arbitrage opportunity that might be temporary around like just showing them a more automated way to do it. Rather it is having the completeness of all that information, the bill pay info, all the invoices. It unlocks some really cool advisory opportunities. So my firm, I did a lot of bill pay. Not because I liked bill pay, goodness knows I did not, but because of the other types of more valuable work that that actually unlocked the advisory opportunities that we didn't otherwise have access to because we didn't have that really valuable information. If you want to learn more about just how automatable this stuff is now, man, check out the link in the show notes to chat with the folks at Maker's Hub. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Stanford Tax. Do you have a plan for next tax season yet? Buddy? It is high time to be using the tech now that you're going to be using next tax season. You don't want to ride into battle in January and February on stuff that you're not already comfortable with. And if you're just feeling like overwhelmed at not knowing what tax intake solution to use, buddy, look no further than stuff. Stanford Tax, one of the earliest ones in the game, one of still the most widely loved tax workflow solutions and they're doing some cool new stuff. Stanford Tax. Now it's not just a way to like push a portal to your client for them to submit information though you could certainly do that. Growing number of firms are just using it internally because you can pile whatever source docs you got in there and it will automatically like check off the items from the pro forma checklist to like see like do I have all my info in now or not? Like it does that automatically based on what it sees on the docs. It builds out this like nice indexed sort of work paper file, auto renames all the files, organizes them like almost like a like a PDF, like a bookmark PDF but in the cloud. And you can now even like do annotations in that. So you literally just take your big old pile of source docs from the client, chuck it in the Stanford tax, it does all the organizing, and then you've got a dynamic checklist that will tell you, do I still need more information from them or not. A massive upgrade to traditional methods for gathering 1040 info, which is just kind of a mess. I can put Stanford in front of my clients and they can submit the docs, or I can just use it internally. And any old way that docs come in, they just get piled into a single centralized place. Very, very good platform. Check out Stanford Tax. More info down in the show notes now. To date, the things that have been most disrupted by AI have been the things that are very deterministic, the things that have a clear right answer. It's why every new AI model that comes out, they, they run it through these benchmarks, right? And it's why they talk about how good AI models are in math and coding, math and coding. By and large, these things have right answers. So you can give them a problem, a thing to do, and there's a correct outcome that it needs to get to. But not all things in the world work that way. And to bring it back to the misconception of what accounting looks like today, you will still have a small business owner that will go to two accounting firms. I mean, they don't actually go to two, but if they went to two accounting firms and said prepare my tax return, they would expect to get the same tax return back from both of them. But that will virtually, I mean, that will never be the case for a small business. They think that what we do is more deterministic than it is a math problem. One model can get it right, one model can get it wrong. But preparing a tax return, doing somebody's books, that's just much more like amorphous, kind of squishy, not explicit. But some domains within accounting, they are more this way. One of them accounts payable. So accounts payable, it has been the most disrupted area in accounting. And I know a large number of folks and accounts payable teams that have gone from 15 people to two people. And accounting firms that are helping their clients do this. I had a bunch of clients, we did accounts payable support for our clients. We had maybe only 30 or 40 companies where we kind of manage their accounts payable department. And a lot of them, especially the ones with more hairy, complex needs like inventory tracking and all of that, they had full time on staff people that were helping with this stuff. And in most of those cases, I think the team size probably could have been reduced by 75%. Now I think in almost all of those cases, the state of those businesses were, boy, we would sure happily repurpose these people into different parts of the business, into different accounting and finance functions, because the highest and best use of their time is almost certainly not entering bills in calling vendors dumb stuff like that. But in bigger teams, like we're Talking about a 20 person accounts payable team that probably looks like laying some people off. And the whole conversation of like, will I quote unquote, replace accounts? I think it's just a dumb conversation. Did, did computers replace accountants? And everybody's like, no, we're still here on a micro level for sure. Lots of people got replaced. I mean, look at the, I mean the Industrial revolution, like every big change on a micro level has brutal impacts. But on the arc of like civilization, I think most of us can agree the Industrial revolution, that ended up being a net positive. So let's not kid ourselves that accountants won't lose our jobs with AI. They will. The flip side of that is there's an unbelievable shortage of accountants. Right now is a huge number, a huge percentage of accountants that are going to retire in the next five years. So if you look at the ecosystem as a whole, there's still a tremendous amount of opportunity. But people will be replaced in the same way that right now, voice actors have been replaced, graphic artists have been replaced. I mean there's, there's stuff happening everywhere and accounting is not immune to it. So accounts payable still for me, first and foremost, it's the most disrupted. And a big part of that is AI vision models, which I don't think people talk about enough. How AI vision models are capable of pulling detailed information off of, off of documents, off of screenshots, off of anything in a way that no past technology we've had has been capable of. And for the past probably decade, we had all sorts of vendors saying with our OCR technology we've now eliminated manual entry, but they just never did. Like, OCR just never got that good. Especially in high stakes scenarios like accounts payable, where the difference between paying somebody $5,000 and paying somebody $50,000 is it's, it's $45,000 actually. But that's like, that's a pretty big mistake if that one slips through, right? And that was your job to make sure they got five and not 50. So we're not just going to blindly trust the OCR figures that come in. But now you can combine OCR which is still very good with AI. To double check it, you throw a different AI vision model at it to be like, does this look correct? And if you're not totally sure, right, raise your hand and we'll have a human double check it. And so it's changed how much work actually has to go into that process. And now kind of the last mile, the last aspects of accounts payable that remain is managing the human stuff. It's the human approvals, it's the vendor you're having some sort of issue with. But to be clear, compared to how much work that was before, it is now much, much less so. Ap, it has changed a lot. But if you look at ar, I would argue it hasn't. And it's because AR is less deterministic. AR is, is more messy. The folks that struggle to automate their accounts receivable processes, it's because the way that they bill people is ambiguous. It's based on human decision making. It is something that is not very concrete. And that's not necessarily an argument for making it more concrete. Like sometimes there are completely justified reasons for why that process is messy, but that's also why that department, it hasn't been as disrupted as accounts payable. I'd actually lump AR with like payroll, very similar, where the inputs to it, if the inputs to it are messy and are coming from a bunch of different stakeholders and not very standardized, that's a tough thing to plug tech into. If you can get it to a point where it is like pretty locked down. And the inputs can be automated for sure. Payroll can be more automated, just like AR could be more automated. But right now the bigger blockers are the processes and the people and all the inputs required. They're also examples of pretty high stakes things. Paying someone wrong, invoicing a customer wrong. Ooh. So there's, there's some risk there, but also there's a lack of standardization there. Whereas bills on the accounts payable side, bills, there's much more standardization around. Not, not as. Not to say it can't be messy, but it's like you got due dates, you got amounts, you got payment terms. There is more of an agreed upon language for how that needs to work than there is on the accounts receivable or on the payroll side. Now let's circle back to the bookkeeping thing that I said up front and think about the spectrum of bookkeeper to accountant to controller to cfo. I would argue today that what bookkeeping historically was by and large has already been automated. And every one of these things, there will be exceptions to where there's this fringe case over here where somebody's still got to do xyz. That's fine. That will always exist. But bookkeeping, historically, bookkeeping was entry and classification. It was entering transactions every day. I don't even know how much people considered it classification, historically the bookkeeper's job. Historically, it was entry, but entry isn't a thing anymore. We have bank feeds. And I know if you're a U.S. accountant, bank feeds are not what we want them to be still. But worst case scenario, usually we got transaction imports, so you're not actually keying them in. But then you can say, like, let's. Let's put classification on the bookkeeper and say they're coding transactions as well. Now, these days, 95% of that stuff needs to be handled by bank rules, by the software that is ingesting the receipt and associating that back to the transaction. And they can see, yes, the last 18 examples of this transaction were coded this way. So we're going to auto code it. Like, that's something that zero that QuickBooks Online do very well now. And if you compare that to what bookkeeping was in, like, 1990, that role in 1990, it was making sure it was a complete record of transactions, making sure everything was in there. Maybe a bit of classification, but even classification, I would say, gets more into what would be the role of maybe an accountant rather than a bookkeeper. It's funny that we still talk about what we do as bookkeeping. In fact, like, in my firm, we rolled out a cast practice, a bookkeeping practice, whatever you want to call it. But we never referred to what we did as bookkeeping. Bookkeeping was one of the line items of the. Of the services that we were providing. But what we were really doing was controllership. It didn't go as far as CFO stuff. It wasn't proactive, but it was controllership. It was overseeing the systems, making sure the entire month unclosed was happening in an efficient way. It was not bookkeeping. And that was one of the conversations we'd have to have with clients when they would come and have their books done by a professional for the first time. And we're like, yeah, here's the, you know, here's the quote. For 700 bucks a month. And they're like, 700 bucks a month. My mom has done this for me thus far. And I'm like, okay, well, I'm a CPA. I've got 140 years of collective experience on my team, we lead the industry on like building efficient tech stacks and doing all this stuff like at a very high level. What your mom was doing was connecting the bank and then putting a category in. We're doing a little more than that. But clients, they don't know the difference between bookkeeping versus accounting, controllership and all that. Right? So bookkeepers, I would argue bookkeepers have already been replaced. And it's really funny that there's a like the whole like identity thing around bookkeeping or bookkeepers versus accountants. And it's actually very, a very charged conversation in Australia in a way that it isn't in the States. People wanted to be called bookkeepers versus accountants. But if anything, what I would say what most bookkeepers are doing today is either accounting or controllership. I think of accounting as like what's getting you to the month end close. I think of controllership as oversight of accounting and the systems involved in the process. So that's more what we're really spending time on these days is accounting and controllership. But interestingly, if we buy into the notion that the bookkeeping has largely already been replaced because we're not actually doing bookkeeping people like we are like running the entire accounting department, then what has actually happened in practice is the bookkeepers have become something more. The bookkeepers have become accountants, they've become controllers. But when you think about what the AI conversation normally looks like, it is normally like, oh, AI is going to chop off the bottom of that org chart, it's going to replace the bookkeepers. That's not what's happening in practice. Because if a bookkeeper can now be an accountant or a controller thanks to tech, thanks to AI, why would I hire a controller to do that work? I actually think AI is putting as much pressure on the top end of the org chart as it is the bottom end of the org chart. And for sure, like it is very nuanced. And we talked about the example of accounts payable where there are definitely folks that do AP that are getting laid off, but there's also folks that are being upskilled where it's like we're going to move this person to a different part of our business to work on a more valuable thing rather than entering bills all day. So bookkeeping, I would say it's already gone. Today's episode is brought to you in part by Carbon, the practice management system. Couple big announcements from Carbon over the summer if you've missed them. One and a totally brand new client facing portal. Like a beefed up client Experience called Carbon for clients. You can push tasks to IT documents, E signatures, all that stuff. For clients with multiple like entities and they're 1040, it's easy for them to quick switch between those accounts because I mean any business owner client we have, that's a problem, right? They've got their business, they've got the 1040, they've got eight other LLC. Carbon for clients makes that easy to access. But then another big announcement was a first of its kind. Super deep integration with Stanford Tax. Another tool we really like on this podcast because you got these really cool tax workflow tools but then none of them talk to your practice management system, right? Carbon wants to change that. Carbon's like an ecosystem first player. If you want the PM that's going to integrate with best of breed, take a look at carbon. PMs right now are kind of like separating into we're going to build our own versus we're going to integrate. Carbon's going hard down the integration path. The whole Stanford taxing is a good example of that. Got some videos on the YouTube channel about carbon if you haven't seen it in the wild before. I know folks down to like solo firms clear up to like some of these PE roll up platforms are using Carbon one of the most mature options in the game in a, in a good way I would say. More information about Carbon down the show notes. Today's episode is brought to you in part by Mercury. Mercury is the FinTech that over 200,000 companies now trust for banking and running their finances. I'm a happy user myself. Long before they sponsor this podcast my money has been with Mercury because it's just like man, traditional banks, they don't really seem to be going anywhere or getting any better. And you know all too well that struggle in fact and it's dumb to even say out loud but the greatest upside of your clients using better banking solutions might just be access. Not having to do two factor authentication Olympics, not having to have clients like forward you codes, you know the codes they get over text, the text that say never share this code with anyone. And then the process that we communicate to our clients is hey, when you get this, send this to me. The just the janky things we got to do to get access to things because traditional banks they don't let you handle like micro user stuff. Did I say micro user, multi user stuff, granular permissions for the different people in your team. And even in the scenario where a client does give you your own login, then your entire team is like Sharing your login buddy. There's like so many problems with that and so much risk in that where if you're just a little more opinionated and we're like, hey, hey, just so you know, all this fuss and headache around like getting access to this thing, there's a better way that we recommend come over here and check out Mercury. Sometimes we're like apologetic about what a pain it is to do this banking stuff. So stop apologizing, say client, go use this better alternative. There's a solution to this and it is your fault that you're not on the right platform. I'd encourage you to give Mercury a look. It is, it's genuinely really good. More information about Mercury down in the show notes accounting. I think it's getting smooshed too because technology is almost like as the month end close in a business has gotten more efficient, where all the work used to happen in the accounting ledger, there's now a whole layer of tools above that that are focused on like automating the month end close process itself in the ledger. So at bigger companies, more mid market companies, you'll see tools like flowcast which sit on top of the accounting ledger and facilitate all the tasks that need to happen to finalize what's in the accounting ledger for accounting firms. Now you've got tools like Keeper is like a month end close automation platform. Client Hub is a practice management system that does some month end close automation. Financial Sense does a bit in the accounting ledger too. But you've now got a layer of tools on top of the accounting ledger that are automating what's happening inside of the accounting ledger. And so even the accounting that is the finalizing of the books at the end of each month, even that is being automated in a, in kind of new and novel ways as of the last few years that are chipping away at what accountants would have said they would do. But if you look at accounting firms that are leaning into month end close automation tools, I don't know any of them that don't have, I mean beyond the firms that are at the very, very early stages of their business, there are vastly more firms that have more work than they know what to do with, than are underworked. So this is a change that's already been happening. We're talking about bookkeepers being replaced and I won't even say they're being replaced by AI as much as just tech developments. But now we're seeing like it's eating more into I think what you would say were accounting Tasks. But the net effect right now in industry, I think people are still struggling to hire accountants in accounting firms. Boy, are accounting firms just looking for anybody with a pulse that can do this stuff very far from a shortage. So controllership, I actually think that controllership, what we think of as controllership right now increasingly is what the near term accounting looks like, controllership being like kind of the facilitation of systems. Like if you think about the folks that are going to have a ton of success in accounting in the next five years, it is the people that can get systems to work together and get humans to commit to more structured ways of working with those systems. And if you think about say a Mercury or a ramp or something like that, like more modern finance platforms where everybody in your, in your company has a card and that card has spend limits and anytime you spend with the card, you get a notification on your phone and you have to provide any required context at the time that that spend happens. Platforms like that do the accountant's job at scale of gathering all the necessary context to do the accounting, but do it automatically. So if you can build rules and policies around what information needs to, needs to be gathered, then if it's all gathered at scale without you having to chase people around, then the accounting just sort of happens. And that maybe that's an oversimplification, but a lot of the stuff that was required before chasing all the stakeholders around and gathering that information, all that just happens. And so increasingly what people I think will call bookkeeping or accounting, it's really controllership and getting those systems orchestrated and getting those humans using the systems properly. Again, that's not bookkeeping, but people talk about it like it's a bookkeeping service. So more and more I think that's becoming super important. And I think you're seeing bookkeepers and accountants move into really what is controllership. So to me, the whole conversation of like, will AI replace accountants? On a micro level, AI will replace every type of person that you can imagine in, in very specific situations. All of that factors into like, what is the general market condition in that industry? You look at, say, Hollywood, like film production. Film production is down. Fewer and fewer things are getting made every day. And where in the past there were like projects that required 100 person VFX teams, now a lot of those teams can be paired back to like 10 people that can hustle AI stuff. And that's, that's a huge generalization and that doesn't work for all types of productions. But if you compare what the market is doing where there's fewer projects being made than ever before and what tech is doing to the market, they're both working in a negative direction for those talented professionals. If you compare that to what the accounting industry is doing, where you have a ton of people that are leaving the accounting profession, I mean, loads of folks that left during COVID then you got a ton of people that are retiring, so that the people who are there to do the work, that number is going down dramatically. That is one factor. But then the other factor is how is tech impacting the roles of those people? Is it replacing a bunch of people? I would say not like we're seeing in other industries. In very, very specific cases, yes. But those people who are being replaced, I would argue because there's such a demand for folks that can do all the other things that need doing in accounting. Because we have so many, we have such a shortage of accounting talent in the profession. Even those folks that are quote unquote getting cut or laid off, I think by and large they're just moving into other work that needs doing. Not all industries are that way. So if you look at say software development, ironically in the past it's been the software engineers who are like, oh, we can totally build software to do that and automate that and put those people out of a job. And those are the folks that are most quickly being disrupted by, by AI, Ironically enough, it's crazy to think, it's wild to think just like six or seven years ago, how what unbelievable sums of money were being paid for software engineers and it was like the job to do. Now I would say that still only applies to like the cream of the crop AI folks where you have, I mean, millions and tens of millions of dollars being spent for these unicorn people that can make AI do incredible things. But for the rest of the development universe, most big companies, I mean, Facebook has totally hired freezing of developers. They're seeing teams that are capable of outputting way more work as they're now augmented with AI. And so they don't need as many people to get the same work done. So in that case, tech has vastly reduced the need for people to. While the market itself, I don't know, the market itself is probably just the same, if not has a little more demand than it has in the past. I mean, especially in the AI space, but everywhere else, I wouldn't, I don't know. So that market on a whole, it's gotten tougher because the tech is doing so much of the work now. The, the north Star here to me is skating where the puck's going, right? Being aware of what's out there, what's available, what we can make use of today. Because in reality, the way this stuff plays out is much more gradual than it often looks if we're looking in the rearview mirror. So last week we're talking about, you know, the cool stuff you can do with agent mode and chat GPT that I think probably impacts some workflows for accounting firms where work paper preparation and maybe review and stuff like that is being done in a spreadsheet. Now ChatGPT is very, very good at doing spreadsheet stuff and that's something that we can work into our processes. And there's specific scenarios where that work in accounting firms is very spreadsheet heavy. And so you may have people on your team that are spending a bunch of time on that and that becomes a tremendous resource for them and those people are now able to go do other things. There's firms that I know that do like, you know, a high volume of end of day reports for restaurant clients. Like every single day restaurants submit this point of sale information. They summarize all that into a spreadsheet. They do that every single day for their clients and then that gets kind of summarized into some other ongoing reporting. And as with all things, there's a question of like, isn't there a better way to do that already or is that even worth doing? The reality is it's being done. There's a butt in a chair that's spending a bunch of time on that right now. But current state of ChatGPT, it can perfectly lift those numbers off the end of day reports and put it into a spreadsheet template. So that stuff is happening and it's happening week over week. And it's only problematic if we're not plugged into what's possible, are learning how to responsibly work AI into our firm securely and and like ride the wave, right? Like be part of it. Because when all this stuff changes and evolves, there are going to be winners and losers. It is not as if like you're going to do this thanos snap and six months down the road we won't need accountants for anything. Like do we still have to file tax returns? Do we still have to put together financial reporting for businesses? Like that's not going anywhere. But what we are doing and how we get there, it is changing fast. And so it means probably assigning a different value to like training and the amount of time that's going into staff development that will probably look different than it ever has before. Software spend. I mean, we're spending more money on software than we ever have before. Increasingly our businesses are like this sort of hybrid of all the stuff the tech can do for us augmented with some humans. And if you look at your accounting firm's P and L, you're seeing that, right? Like the software spend, like it just keeps going up and probably won't stop. But I choose to ride the wave. And a funny thing happens, even in those scenarios where you have this like meteor situation, this extinction event, if something really did come to pass that was that extreme, you know what you would still have on the other side of it is all of those human relationships that you've built along the way. And if something like that truly did come to pass, what are all those humans going to go and do? Probably something else. And there's probably going to be a new way for you to be helpful. And it's why I'm not not that spooked. And if we can even allow ourselves to be a little bit optimistic, there might be a timeline here where that world is maybe a little better. It's maybe a world where we have to work a little less. And don't get me wrong, there's all sorts of like problematic future timelines with AI and power being too centralized and biased and all that stuff. But I got to focus on being useful because right now I got a big old client list of people that need my help. So all I can do is take this stuff a day at a time, a week at a time, keep learning, keep putting it in front of my team so that I can be more useful to those folks that still need me. And as long as you're plugged into the matrix and like the kind of the progression of new cool ways to do things and encouraging that curiosity inside of your team, then you're going to be riding the wave instead of it wiping you out. For some of us, that's super scary. Some of us that's very exciting. And I will admit I'm a tech nerd. I probably enjoy change more than most. And it's because like in my career, I've gotten ahead by finding the tech that will do a job better and being more efficient, finding higher leverage ways to get stuff done. So having unbelievably powerful tools at our disposal, that's just, that's exciting to me. The net effect of that is we can help more people. I can reach more people. You and what you do can reach more people. That gets me excited. Anything we missed here? Drop a comment if you're listening on the audio version in your player there will be a link to the YouTube video. Pop over to the YouTube video and leave a comment. If you're new here, you ever thought about running an accounting firm? We need more people running accounting firms. It is not a bad gig. Check out some other podcast episodes. It is all we talk about here. Gang, thanks for being here today. I'll catch you in the next one.