543 Real Talk About the State Of Accounting Firm AI

Okay, so I was recently in Toronto, the very first event we have hosted in Canada. It was super fun. We did a little Fireside chat before getting some, some drinkies and some light bites. This one was moderated by the CEO of Blue Jay. Blue Jay is a tax research platform. Doing some cool stuff, also based in Toronto, was a super fun night. But this, this Fireside specifically ended up being a really interesting AI conversation. Ben, CEO of Blue Jay, he's obviously got an interesting perspective here. He's a law professor that is now just in the thick of AI's impact on research they raised. I don't remember what it was like 130 million or something like that. So they're, they're pouring tons of money into just how good can AI research get? And so he's got some opinions on this stuff, as you might imagine. So we touched on a bit of that. It was also just kind of like an AMA with the podcast. Honestly, the podcast listeners that were in attendance, at one point I asked how many folks here listen to the podcast? Probably 80 or 90% of the room. Anyways, ended up being a fun chat. I think you'll enjoy it. Here it is. This is the Jason on firm's Firm night out. Rolls off the tongue, right? Toronto edition.

All right.

We didn't plan the handshake or fist bump.

No, that was spontaneous. That was 100% spontaneous. So this is a Fireside chat. You'll notice there is no fire. And that's a good thing up here. We're going to make it pretty free flowing. That's the intention here. And I'm going to start with an observation. Jason and I were chatting just beforehand and I asked him, so, Jason, when was the last time you were in Toronto? And he explained to me that this is his very first time in Toronto. So he came specifically to Toronto to see you all tonight, which is pretty exciting. So I have to ask you, Jason, how have your first three hours or so been in Toronto? Any first impressions to share?

I have a very like, strange experience of the world because, like, I will come here and I will leave in the morning and just hang out in like a room full of accounts. It's been good. The flight up was wild. Anybody fly from New York today by chance? Caitlin came from Chicago.

You flew out of What, Newark or LaGuardia? LaGuardia.

So they got that all dried up from last year earlier this week. But flight over was wild. It seemed like, I don't. It seemed like, like right when we got into Canadian airspace, things just went Sideways, it was too cloudy to, like, see the line out the window. But it, like, halfway through the flight, it just kind of went nuts. I will say it is always fun, like, getting to go to different countries and talk accounting stuff. It is always interesting. And customs, like, what are they concerned about specifically? And how do they feel about Americans coming? And, like, New Zealand is probably the most extreme, where it's just from the moment you get off the plane, nonstop bird pictures and they're checking your boots and don't want you bringing an invasive candy bar into the country or something like that. Canada was pretty chill. Didn't really worry about what we were bringing in. Felt like more like ideological. Like, they're concerned with what Americans could be bringing in. Like, we got a pretty good thing going up here. If you can just kind of leave us be, that would be great. But that's the extent of my experience.

What did they ask you?

Like, they weren't seemingly weren't concerned with anything that you bring in at all. It was. It seemed pretty lax.

Okay. They just ask you, how long are you staying? What are you here for?

Yeah, don't talk about baseball. Just.

Okay. So welcome to Toronto. You're catching us, like, at a, you know, bit of a tough time. Like, it was a heartbreaking game Saturday night. I was at the game. It was like. It was like. It was like the worst. It was like, ah, it was heartbreaking.

Ben's just down the street, by the way. Blue Jays.

Blue Jay, Blue Jays. Just a few hundred meters down the street. Yeah, it was easy to come over, and we're really pleased to sponsor the event. We're at accountex. I know. My colleagues wanted me to mention, you know, we've got a presence at accountex. You should come by and see them. We've got a show discount, so you can come explore what that's all about. But this isn't supposed to be about a pitch. This is supposed to be.

But you've got an even better discount just for the people in this room.

Well, we can talk about that for sure. Matt over here is, like, smiling pretty big right now. So if you see Matt, he's got a Blue Jay vest on, and he'll be able to explain everything that you need to know. But let's talk about accounting. Let's talk about stuff that the people in this room really care about. And this is maybe an unfair question, Jason, but if you could teleport one thing from the US firm ecosystem into Canada, what would that be? And for bonus points, what's One thing that we're doing better here than you see US firms generally doing.

Oh, you guys should have seen the questions asked.

I asked Teresa if he wanted to see the question. He said, nah, I got it. No problem.

One thing, you could teleport the US market. I mean like, just that's a lot of. When I talk to Canadian folks that are doing US stuff, it's just like the size of the market is attractive and being able to pull some of those folks and do the cross border thing, that's a great question. I would love it. I'll be totally honest. And this is like, this is advice I would give to kind of people in this room. There's so few people that do what I do still. Like I would say Lozanus was, was doing whatever you'd call this Internet grifting business before I was. But I'm amazed that there's not so many more people because we would benefit so much from more specific, like nuanced. Like I'm hearing from auditors every single day. They're like, give me your tech recommendations for audit. And I'm like, I can't help you, man. Like, I don't, I don't know the first thing about it. I would love it if there were way more of me, way more of Ryan. Like, like speaking to the very specific to Canadian firms needs and issues and all of that. And like seriously giving that a go. Like when I started doing this stuff, I was running a $5 million practice. I didn't start this to be like, I found where the money's at now it's making YouTube videos for a tiny audience. Like that in no way was how I started. But I'm still shocked that there aren't more people that are like, okay, I can see other people have somehow made this into a business. Like I'm going to start going down that path because I know we're all super, super hungry for really sharp firm runners to like help us and to put helpful things out into the world. If you don't, the only thing that goes out into the world is from software companies. And none of us want to live in a world where 90% of education, what's filling the void is from venture backed software, right? Like it's not to say there aren't great people there and really useful things. It's just through a specific lens, right? And so I would love it if we could get like more Canadian thought leaders to go out and do some version of whatever this is. You know, like, why am I hosting the only pre con party for account X. Like that was. That kind of actually surprised us. As we're looking around like, who's hosting the party? We're like, oh, it's not there. As we're like, well, let's see if we can make one.

Let's talk about the point you made about the noisiness of the conversation with just having vendor voices, because this is something we were chatting about before the event. And I was saying, you know, I heard recently that the accounting profession is the second most marketed to, sold to profession on earth. The number one physicians, big pharma trying to come in and like, you know, get physicians to prescribe their medications and that sort of stuff. But accountants are the second most marketed too. And I was saying, like, I actually have a lot of sympathy for firms that are, you know, bombarded by marketing messages from software vendors. And how on earth are you supposed to tell the really great software from the stuff that others are saying? Oh, it's great, it's AI enabled, it's this, it's that. It's going to change your practice, it's going to change your life. Like, how on earth are you supposed to figure out which are those solutions? How are you supposed to assemble the tech stack for your practice? You could probably spend all day, every day taking tech demos and being sold software and you like, everything would sound great and you'd want to. You'd just be perpetually churning the tech solutions that you're using. How do you, like, how do you approach that? I've watched a bunch of your videos, so I know you're quite active on that space and you've got like, the things that you're watching that are kind of doing really well, that you're hearing from firms. But what are your thoughts on, on that whole question?

Yeah, I, my take is like, you got to get this stuff from your peers.

Yeah.

So like Blue Jay. Should I pick up Blue Jay? Do I know anybody that uses Blue Jay? Like, do I know anybody that's a raving fan of it? Even if you go through the exercise of doing all those demos, even demos are paper thin where you get into the platform. You're like, oh, this doesn't actually work the way I hoped it would work. The way I build my recommendations is 100% based on what I see people having success with and what they love. So my inbox is full of people who are like, hey, we got this platform, just sent you free access to it. I'm like, I don't. I gotta kick the tires on every platform out there. What I am going to do is sitting a whole bunch of rooms like this. So we'll do 70. Like, I'll be at 70 live events this year. Obviously. We're pushing 600 episodes on the podcast. I'm unavoidable on social media. I think I've probably talked to as many firm owners as anyone the past few years. And the bottom of that filter is, like, you just hear about weird stories of, like, what's not working, what's problematic, what's working really well. And that's the, like. That's the closest thing to truth that I can get to is, like, are you using this? If so, what works? What doesn't? Nothing's perfect. And then trying to, like, we try to condense that into which it's. It's all very ambiguous because it's like, if people ask, how do I get to my recommendations? And I'm like, it's whether or not I'm hearing about it. And that's not as explicit as some folks want it to be. But it's the value of a peer network, man, like, having a place to chuck that question and be like, hey, just saw this press release from, you know, insert company here. How real is this? Is anybody actually using this and having success with it yet? That's the value of making friends and showing up for stuff like this, I'd say on that.

That's really interesting, I think. I'm curious how many people of here are users of ChatGPT? Like, I've been asking this question recently. Almost every hand goes up, even in, like, audiences of international tax lawyers, as in Lisbon, Portugal, two weeks ago. I'm like, this is like, this is an audience that skews like, hyper European, hyper elite educations, very serious, like, tax lawyers who only spend time doing, like, really, like, big ticket M and A advice. And I'm like, I was expecting, Jason, that maybe half the hands. I asked that question, and, like, 80% of the hands went up and these. Like, the average age in the audience is probably 65. And it was like 90, 95% male. And they're all dressed to the nines. Like, these are, like elite, like, tax lawyers. I was like, oh, okay. That was pretty amazing to me. So chatgpt, I use it every day. And I know you're a fan. How should people be thinking about. There's so much AI hype, and Bluejay is obviously like, a verticalized AI solution for tax research. How do you think about, like, the demarcation Point between things that the work, the jobs to be done that you can leverage a ChatGPT or a Claude or a Gemini for versus the kinds of tools that you really want to look for a vertical solution. How do you think about that based on what you're hearing?

I think it's super important that everyone in your team develops a comfort level. With AI assistants as kind of the Swiss army knife tool. There will always be the tasks that like are so specific to you and your client and your workflow to where you're having that tool that can kind of just do anything you throw at it. It's incredibly useful. So I, what I try to preach is don't skip over that step and jump to, you know, say the, the AI research tool. Like don't skip that step of I need to somehow work out how to develop like an AI capable team right now. Like that's a huge risk to your firm. As if they're not learning this stuff right now. Then three years people worried about the cost of AI tools right now. What is the cost of three years from now having a whole bunch of people on your team that don't know how to use AI, right? Like that's, that's scary to me. I talk about AI assistance and for most people right now that's chat GPT. In the future it may be more Gemini, more copilot. That is kind of the foundational, like everybody needs to like build the skill, build the muscle of how to use these things productively. And then beyond that you layer in the, the really good vertical tools. So like AI research tool comes out on the market, AI whatever, any, any type of tool comes out on the market. You have to like cross check that with how far can I get just myself doing my own version of this. And we were actually talking about this with, I can't remember Garrett. Who was Garrett Garrett beforehand where two years ago they dumped the legacy research subscription. That's just super expensive, right? And they just do their own sort of in house chatgpt custom GPT sort of thing. And they're like this is as good or as useful as what we had. But it's best for the power users, the folks who are really good with ChatGPT, right? And know how to like read between the lines of the answers and make sense of that. In my opinion, there's no skipping that step of everybody has to build a baseline comfort level with AI assistance. But it's then after that, when you know what it can do and what it can't do, that you start pulling from. And there's an abundance of AI solutions out there right now. But that's when you start looking for the more vertical, specific, like, okay, we need a research solution that's accessible for the whole team. Like, dummy proof. Like, we can't get this wrong, something that we trust. To me, that's an easy one because most of us are still cutting big checks to, like, legacy providers for these very antiquated research libraries. But I just don't want firms to skip the step of. We've also got to learn just how to work with a system existence.

Okay, let's talk about, let's talk about that. So I wear one hat as founder and CEO Blue Jay. The other hat I wear is as a tax law professor at the University of Toronto at the law school. I get a lot of questions from my students in my tax law classes about Professor Aller, what does this mean for us on graduation? All this AI stuff, like they're using Blue J in tax class. What does this mean for us when we get out into practice? And I think this ties into what you were just saying, Jason, about. In your firms, you don't want to be caught out three years from now with, you know, a whole bunch of people who don't know how to leverage this new technology. But let's, let's actually rewind this back and let's think about somebody who's graduating this year or maybe who graduated last June or something. What does their career arc look like over the next few years? If you're, if you're a junior accountant joining one of these firms in the room, what, what should you be expecting? How, like, how, how would you advise those junior folks?

Man, I, I think there's a lot of concern for junior folks like, like, for good reason. And we have seen in other domains that junior hiring has gone down, mainly software development. I'm super bullish on, on juniors for a number of reasons. For one, if you think about just how powerful our own internal AI can be. Now, if you're capturing your meetings, you know, you've got a pile of meeting transcripts. You've got examples of how we advise this client if we're trying to capture our internal trainings, like, there's so much more available to juniors now or ought to be in the right setup than we ever had access to. Man, you just think about, like, these summer afternoons that are just dragging on, where you're like, I just asked my senior a question. I can't go back to them with another question yet. Like, just how unproductive you are as a junior. Well, imagine if the whole firm is recording every single advisory call we have with our clients. We've got research tools that actually get us to answers way faster. We've tried to kind of capture our internal training so that it's searchable. And, you know, you've got a custom GPT or something in your Microsoft or your Google workspace, you know, organizes that for you so that you can search it. Juniors have at their fingertips way better resources than you or I ever did. But also, they just got through college with that thing. Like, had ChatGPT come out when you were in high school or college, like, you'd have been a freaking wizard with that thing, Right? All the, all the cheaters are now joining the workforce and they're upwardly mobile now. Yeah, yeah, well, and we talked to a room of people who like, own firms and they're like, yeah, okay, I get it. How am I going to make the time for it? Whereas the youths are like, man, this is the only way I know how to write like this. And, like, that's got his own set of issues, Right? But there's folks for whom, like, this is just native to them. We got to somehow, like, get them into the mix with the rest of our team, who's maybe struggling to know where to even begin or how to get started with it like this. Like, if you are struggling to. A lot of times it'll be the firm owner who's most hyped about this and the staff is oftentimes scared. If you need a way to get those people, like, more enthused, man, like pulling in some people who have just spent thousands of hours with AI tools to get through school. Like, that's an entirely different, different energy.

Mm.

Funny thing happened recently when I was at a conference with one of this episode's sponsors, Maker's Hub. So Makers Hub, they're like an AI accounts payable platform. The party trick is they're using, like, AI vision models to do extraction at a level that was kind of never before possible with OCR technology. But I was doing something at their booth. Some of the customers came by. Like, it is one of those tools where the customers are kind of raving fans. But a funny thing kept happening. Like, people kept throwing. Throwing out these ridiculous document situations they have where they're like, I got this client, I have X, Y and Z problem. It's a total mess. We spend so much time on it and they just start riffing on it. Like, with the Maker sub team and they're like, oh yeah, now I can see, like you do this potentially. Like our product doesn't really do that, but actually if we change this or that, this could potentially work. The team is just like, they're just a bunch of like document processing geeks who are also AI nerds. And the product very much is like the marriage of those two things. And it's what Maker Sub does best right now. Like the biggest, ugliest accounts payable stuff that you got. Man, I had some gnarly clients where Makers Hub would have saved us so much time. But if you got any ugly bill pay stuff, class tracking projects, inventory manufacturing, stuff like that, definitely worth giving Makers Hub a look. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes. So I'm out of some live events that we're hosting this week and I was talking with someone the other night. We were actually at a table. They were sharing with some other firm owners stuff that they were doing, from like different pricing methodologies to some of the tech that they were into. Some of the folks around the table were like using some of the old like traditional legacy tech and stuff like that. And then they got to offshoring and everybody sat up and they're like, hang on. What? Tell us exactly how you're doing this. And you know who they were using? This episode's sponsor, Teamup. No lie. They were using Teamup. It was basically just a recruiting group that works exclusively with accounting firms to go out and find you the most talented accountants in the Philippines to go and work directly with you. You pay the accountant directly. No middle, middle folk taking their own cut. Team Up's just going to be there to help you find a super talented accountant, place them into your firm, usually 4,000 bucks for a placement. Compare that to Robert half charging you quarter million dollars. And actually heard the other day somebody had to pay a body organ to get an onshore accountant. That's not a lie. Team up 4,000 bucks. They're going to find you a super talented and capable accountant. My last four hires in my accounting firm were in the Philippines and they were fantastic. Honestly, it totally changed how we staffed in our firm and got our stuff done. I actually talked with another accountant the other day who's like, I think I'm going to go start a Philippine staffing agency because we are having so much luck with the folks we're finding in the Philippines. I know you're like, not another one. Anyways, there's a reason people are doing this because it turns out Accounting is a universal language. Kind of in some ways yes, in other ways no. But people don't hop over the border and then all of a sudden not know how to do what we do in our accounting firms. Is that, am I making sense? You know what I'm saying? If you haven't done this before, you have a whole bunch of questions. Just hop on a call with the people who have done it. More than anyone else, the folks placing accountants in the firms would encourage you to do that with team up. Check out the link down in the show notes.

Okay, let's, let's, let's focus our attention on those seniors folks in the firm. So you got the junior energy coming in, super well versed in how to use AI tools. Now let's talk about the 50 somethings who are in the firms. Like I find this totally like scary and possibly alienating and like I know how to do my job perfectly well without using this stuff. Do I really have to use this stuff? Or like why should I use this stuff? I know how to do it already. What kind of thoughts do you have to share with them?

I'm excited that it seems like ChatGPT almost bridges the normal age tech adoption generalizations that you would make, at least in some parts. I know a lot of folks who are older and generally more tech averse who are like ChatGPT power users. So something about this is kind of bridging the normal divide where you see of folks that aren't willing to learn a new thing. I think we're still carrying forward some like old automation tropes like yeah, this will be great for automating the menial tasks and doing the low level work, which is stuff we've always said in the past about automation. It's just as good, if not better at high level stuff at like review at like writing really hairy sensitive memos. Like it's very, very good at what the seniors also do. Interestingly, we're seeing arguably more AI tech development around technical review than we are the preparation in many ways. So like this is the sort of thing where you could see someone like kind of puts their hands over their ears and they're like yeah, that'll be great for our juniors. Great for sort of automating the menial things. And leaders need to also be wearing the hat of like, for sure, how do we better capture and document context to support the juniors and all that stuff. But it's also tremendously useful to you every single day to what I do. It's like it's something that everybody needs to lean into.

Okay, so broadly useful for seniors, for juniors, for technical stuff, for automatable tasks. Are there things in these firms that you think AI should never touch?

Yeah, yeah, for sure, I think. And if we consider the arc of professional services and what's likely to kind of happen over the next five to 10 years, we got to be super careful with anything that kind of comes down to, like, the human experiential stuff. Right? So. So we've. We've got a chat assistant, an AI chat assistant that's been trained on all 550 episodes of the podcast. Trained. It can see into it. And so it'll give. It'll give responses to questions and like this text kind of back and forth conversation, very, very accurately. Like, just because, I mean, we've got almost 2,000 recorded hours of audio of me talking about just about everything you could imagine. So we've got this AI assistant. Nobody will use it. Like, we could see the data. Like, nobody uses it. And I talk about it very regularly. I'm like, hey, like, you can go talk to this thing. People still message me questions, email me questions. People come out to live events. Like, what the heck, man?

Yeah, you all should be apparently chatting with Jason's chat bot.

Somebody just left and I. That's orionbot. Orion bot, yeah. Los Angis has got this as well. So why is that? Right? You may have heard me share this story before. I got. Earlier this year, I got on a flight to Miami. Like, got on the plane and. And it was like, something's wrong here. And it turns out there's a Taylor Swift concert in Miami that night. Why would you fly to Miami to go to a Taylor Swift concert? Right? And we've all got phones in our pockets that could be playing Taylor Swift music in like 10 seconds or less. Why would you do that? Like, why would you. That's the least efficient way you could possibly listen to Taylor Swift. I don't know, man. But, like, we're all still doing it.

The experience.

Yeah. So, like, there's something about the experience, and I almost think that we are learning in the advisor relationship what is accounting and what is something else? What is. I actually need a human to give me advice because I think we're gonna see the same thing in people who will go to ChatGPT for therapy as their CFO for whatever they're gonna go to with. And this feels like trying to like, put a warm blanket around you and say, no, AI is not gonna take this, this or that from you. And I really try not to do that, but I think we're learning. Like there's just some core aspect of the human experience. We're having that interaction with a human. I don't know if it fires up the br different way, but like if the worst AI timeline is actually doing a bunch more stuff like this, it's just like non stop Taylor Swift concerts. Not that that's not a good timeline, but if it's more just in person experiential stuff like that kind of sounds great to me.

Well, I mean, you had also a part of the answer earlier, right, when you said talk to peers. Right. So I think, like, just taking note here, you're all in a room. This is like going to be an. Right now it's just you and I mostly chatting and subjecting all of these people to our thoughts. But when we go downstairs, everyone's gonna have a chance to talk to everyone else and there'll be so much peer to peer sharing, which as you pointed out in your introduction is kind of the point of this. Right. Is like all this mixing and sharing of experiences with. You're all weird, right? Because you're all listeners to Jason and easy.

Yeah, but.

Yeah, but it's a good weird. It's like I tell my kids, it's like you guys are weird, but it's a good weird. It's like you're wonderful and weird. I promise. There's a question here. The question is this, like, Jason, let's try to peer into the fog of 2026 and let's fast forward to the end of 2026 right now. What's your boldest prediction about how AI affects accounting work over the course of the next 12 months? So if we're sitting down at Accountex next year, what will we say? You know, you made this bold bet, you know, November 2025. It's November 2026. And you were exactly right. What's that, what's that claim that you're going to make?

I mean, I, I don't. So the bold bet is that there's maybe not a bold bet here. And it's that the folks that are already winning right now will just be winning more. The world takes a lot of time to change. Like the world has so much inertia in the way that we do things and all of that. And even right now, like, if AI development stopped right now, we would have a decade of catching up to do and how we change everything about how we do our lives. So I would say the one thing we don't talk enough about is what an opportunity this is for AI forward firms. So like I say on the podcast, like, there will for sure be accountants that are displaced one way or another by AI. I think the folks that are this plugged into things right now, like, you're so far ahead of the curve and it serves to reason that there will be winners and this as well. Like, there will be losers. There will definitely be winners. Also, you think about the cloud transition and just how central accountants were to, hey, let's run your whole business in the cloud. Like, what does this have to do with accounting? Covid comes around, all sorts of new legislation, all that out of the woodworks, and everybody's like, maybe the accountants will figure it out for us. We get stuck with COVID relief, right? Something tells me AI will be the same. I don't know why. At least for the small business owner. Oftentimes, like, we are the one kind of ahead of the curve, like pulling them into the stuff that's real, like the stuff that actually works. I feel like AI will be no different. There's so much hype around AI right now that people are feeling this pressure. Well, I have to do something, be the outlet for that. We actually see a lot of bad versions of this of like legacy companies putting aside these war chests to say, we're gonna invest this many hundred million dollars in AI and then it's just like, whew, down the drain. There's a version of this where we are the outlet for the small business that is like, okay, I want to invest in AI, like, where do I start? And like, the thing is we get blocked with, like, well, I'm not an AI expert. And so we sit back and we don't hold ourselves out. We don't share the journey. We don't talk about how we're using AI. But if you're not, like, if you don't step in and help the client and say, please don't use that tool, use this tool. Like, if we don't do that, who will? Do you want, like, the AI Bros, the AI agencies to come in and tell these small businesses how to build their accounting and finance stack? Like, hell no. Right? So, like, to a degree, if we don't step in there and at least have something to say, who will? It's like so many other things, it seems to fall to accounts.

You said something interesting there that I want to double click on, which was they're going to be winners and they're going to be losers from the Tech shift. And I think everybody here shares an interest in being a winner and avoid being a loser from the shift. What is it that folks can do to make sure that they're on the winning side of these technological changes? I think you talked about one just now. Making sure that you position yourself as an expert advisor to your clients. Are there other things that folks should keep in mind?

Use AI. I mean, that's the big thing. Everybody's so scared of it and it's like, well, are you using it every single day? Like, be the one to find the cool way to use it. Surround yourself with other firms that are also trying to learn and just share what you're figuring out. Like, it's really not any more complicated than that. I, I was at a dinner a few months back and there was a CFO there of a like very big recognizable company. And we chatted for a couple minutes. He's like, could I have you come in and like work with our finance team on how we roll out AI and like make what we do more efficient and better with AI? And I'm like, not really what I do, but like, but how are you using AI right now? Like, what AI does your team have access to it? And he's like, well, they don't have access to any AI right now. I'm like, okay, start there. Like just get it in people's hands, see what they can figure out. Like, set the boundaries for sure. But that's step number one. I really push people. I think it rises to the level of importance right now of having a standing weekly meeting with your team where we don't have to have any big brain AI people here. It's just a forcing function to get folks together and be like, what did I try that worked this week? And what did I try that didn't work? Because that's also important. Hopefully if you have someone that's energized by this stuff, they can kind of carry the team. If you have that sort of self anointed AI champion on the team, a lot of times they can bring the energy into those rooms that sometimes the accountants don't just show up with. Just have those conversations, create those touch points and like ride the wave. Instead of like being like, oh yeah, I wonder what that will do. Like you can actually be a part of it.

You've built a really strong personal brand based on transparency and experimentation. On that experimentation theme and transparency, what is something that you've kind of discovered or changed your mind about in the last 12 months?

I think Think a big A mistake right now with AI adoption is to make AI somebody on your team's job. Like assign it to this kind of group, this subgroup of people on the team where it's like, they'll figure it out. I think as soon as you do that, everybody else goes, oh good, they'll figure it out. And they don't do anything right. And they're not learning. There's big companies where like, there's a version of that that makes sense for sure. I also still think, like, I, it's worth having an AI champion that is like plugged into some external resources. Chad Davis runs a, you know, community automation town. It's just, it's a whole bunch of AI champions all together. Like, that's amazing. Take back those learnings to your team. I still believe in like a champion like that, but I think AI ultimately needs to be everybody's job. Like, I don't think anybody should be exempt from learning it and getting plugged in because I honestly, I don't want to employ that person in three years time if they have no AI skills. Like, well, and if they're under my employee right now, like, the buck stops with me. Like, that's my responsibility to be like, dang, this is so important that we need to be having these conversations every single week. But don't make it somebody else's job because then everybody else kind of tunes out and they're like, oh, they'll figure it out.

Over the past few years, you've seen a lot of products come and go. What makes a tool, a product, a software stand out as something that is really going to be a true partner for firms rather than just the latest shiny tool.

Sticking around is a big one. Showing up at events like, actually knowing the humans behind the brand, I think makes a very big difference for buyers. You see a lot come in and make a push for a year or two and then they, they kind of bounce. I think you can sense with brands who are like the sort of firm first kind of brands. You can see it in the people that they hire. Oftentimes they're hiring people that used to run firms. There's a lot of tools where there's the main customer, which is the small business owner, and then we're like the side piece that can get them access to more small businesses. That's always kind of a bummer. There's platforms that are then just built like from the ground up for firms. That's what gets me really excited. Rather than being like the second or third channel on their priorities.

So the tools that are purpose built that identify as their ideal customer profile, accounting firms, those are the ones that and who attend to that and the jargon, the icp, like your ideal customer profile is those firms.

Yeah. And as much as I dunked on software provider education, there's some really good stuff out there and you can tell what they know by the quality of that stuff. Like if it's really good stuff, you can see like, okay, like they actually do get it. So if you follow my main YouTube channel, you know that about six months ago I ditched my traditional bank for Mercury. Mercury now sponsor of this episode. I actually made the move before they sponsored any of our stuff. Mercury. Over 200,000 companies now trust them for banking and managing their finances. It's everything that you wish traditional banks were, like good access management. Not having to do two factor authentication Olympics to get into your client's banking stuff, which is by the way like a major security risk to your firm. When the strategy to get the info we need is to tell the client to forward you the code that came to them in a message that says never share this code with anyone. And we, we feel dumb about it. Right? We're like, yeah, no, really sorry for the convenience inconvenience. Don't be sorry. Tell them there is a better way. Mercury. It gives you firm level access where then you can give the members of your team granular access to whatever they need, even down to like specific bank accounts. Much better from a security standpoint, but also like from a workflow standpoint is going to make your life, oh my gosh, so much better. Now Mercury, they will literally pay you money to put your clients on Mercury. Thousand dollars referral bonus per eligible client. Terms and conditions apply. Of course you get Mercury Pro for your firm. It's worth checking out. It's really good. Mercury's a fintech company, not a bank. Terms apply for bonus eligibility. See show notes for details. Totally worth checking out. I really like Mercury. Get all that down in the show notes. Boo. You know what's the worst, man? When you hire somebody and they start working for you and you're like, I thought this person knew stuff. The number of times I've been hoodwinked by somebody that interviews well and they have umpteen years of experience and you pull them in and you're like, what you did? You don't. What? You don't even know your stuff, man. This isn't going to work. Let me tell you what one of this episode's sponsors Cloud Accountant Staffing is doing about that. So cloud account staffing help accounting firms find talent around the world, be it the Philippines, South Africa, Latin America. And they have an online portal where you can go out and see folks that they have recruited, schedule interviews with those people directly on their platform. And one of the things now that every single one of those people have is a collection of assessments. I'm looking at one right here. Assessments for business tax, for individual tax, for critical thinking, for understanding instructions, their personality type. And so many of these things like individual tax, this person I'm looking at, they're in the 93rd percentile. And so cloud account staffing, they have a huge volume of folks that they have go through these assessments and they hand pick the highest performers and they serve them up for you to make your wildest dreams come true. Cloud account staffing's backstory there actually ran an accounting firm, hired some offshore folks, had an amazing experience, and then just started helping other accounting firms do the same. Interested? I thought you might be. Check out the link down to Cloud Accountant staffing in the show notes.

All right, we're going to move to Q and A now. So this is your chance to ask Jason some questions. You've heard enough of my questions. Or Ben or me, I guess.

I got some questions for Ben, too. There's an assumption that the juniors, that the youth, because they have more exposure to AI on a regular basis, are going to be successful users, but that's not necessarily true. What tools are you recommending to kind of vet that their knowledge coming in is actually going to prove successful versus it just being, you know, their personal experience, achieving their goals?

I think this was a question for Jason, right?

What would you say?

Oh, I think that's an extremely difficult question. I mean, I think it's really challenging to test how well somebody is using these AI tools. Frankly, one of the things. And now I'll just draw my personal experience, but my personal experience in hiring. At Bluejay, we're extremely selective about bringing on new people. We know that exercising a lot of care and bringing people onto the team is very, very important. It is constant practice. It's a consistent practice in the hiring process to have somebody complete some kind of presentation and do a presentation. It's a case study typically that they do, and depending on the role, it'll be a different kind of case study. It's usually a negative sign if we can tell that somebody used ChatGPT to complete the assignment, to inform the presentation. But it's interesting. It's I also expect them to do that and I want them to do that. But if I can tell that you did that, then you used it clumsily because I shouldn't be able to tell if you used it well. It's not going to be obvious to me that you use ChatGPT to complete the assignment. Does that make sense? So it's weird, but the right answer is either you're so good without using an AI system to inform your case study and your exercise that, like, you just hit it out of the park and that's just your native talent and ability, or you're able to harness that AI to mimic somebody who has that preternatural AI, you know, less talent and you can, you can kind of like. And I can't tell the difference. But if I'm just like, well, I could have done that using ChatGPT and I'm not a developer or I'm not, you know, somebody who's in marketing, but I could have mimicked that, then that's a, that's a red flag, at least in my mind.

Yeah. Only thing I'd add is definitely a problematic level of enthusiasm for AI.

Right.

Where they come in with this and our clients will do this. Too much confidence, kind of reflecting the confidence the AI gave them. Right. I kind of think that's why accounting firms are so well suited to figure this out as we have this internal control process where it has to go through the filter of the folks that like have the expertise that was built the traditional way. I think it's the marriage of those two things I'm hopeful is really positive. If there's something I want to capture from the younger person, it's the enthusiasm and the willingness. And if there's a risk to the, you know, the old farts. As I say this as a 37 year old, if there's a risk to us.

I just turned 48, Jason. I feel really old.

If there's a risk to us, it's not having enough of the enthusiasm. So hopefully it's kind of the marriage of the best of those both worlds.

You have a question?

So my question is for organizations that are a little bit, I'm just going to say lay or completely inexperienced with AI, what would your recommendation be?

As just a first step? I leave here tonight and tomorrow, a.

First step that I can do to put the ball in place to get it rolling. What would your recommendation be there? Not some big strategy, just a single.

Step in the right direction.

Yeah, I would say make it as easy as possible. For them to just sit down and use it. Probably by mandating that there's going to be a day, if we're not already there, where you're unwilling to employ someone that doesn't have AI skills. There's very few things that I would mandate about the way people have to work in my firm. But to me, this kind of rises to that level of like, we're going to try to give you all the tools we can to be successful here. But there's no world where I can have an entire team of people that doesn't know how to use AI and in three years time. So it's, I mean, there's, you could watch another video, you could do another this, do another that. Like, it really just boils down to hours spent with it. I super encourage people, accountants. We take such pride in the number of monitors that we have for some reason. Like, who's got four or more monitors here? I was not even saying that yet. And people were already signaling, ooh, ooh, oh, I, I, I have this mini, right? And parked on most of those monitors are things to distract you. Put ChatGPT on that. You know, put whatever your AI assistant is on that. To remember that it's a thing that you could check something in there to, to try to get help. And it's really just about starting. But for the people who won't just start on their own, at a certain point you gotta kind of force their hand.

I like, there are creative things to, to try to enforce that behavioral change. You could like blacklist, like google.com and like bing.com so that they can't search. Or you could set their homepage to be chatgpt.com and so they open their browser and they're like, oh, I'm going to Google something. It's like chatgpt. And then they try to go to Google and they can't get there. And they're like, well, do I want to tether my phone to my desktop to try to do it? They're just like, okay, this is just easier because it becomes like, how do you actually enforce that behavioral change if somebody's like unwilling to do it? So you could go around be like, no, no. The homepage, the default homepage for all of you is the ChatGPT enterprise subscription that you now have. And you're gonna, that's how you're gonna Google things Now is in ChatGPT and then get them going with it and you can kick it off that way. Might sound a little draconian, but Piggybacking.

Off of that a little bit. Are there any outside of the box KPIs you can think of that you track for a larger team in terms of AI adoption? Oh man, that's a great question. You may have a better answer to that.

Yeah, so I mean, we track it and mostly we track it with the firms that are bringing on Bluejay. So this year we've more than 2,000 firms have brought on Bluejay onto their firms. This year we provide a lot of transparent feedback to the firms about how their teams are managing the change. So we give them very detailed usage metrics and something, by the way, that the traditional publishers are loath to share. So I don't know if you've asked your rep from one of the legacy publishers, can you tell us who's using the platform? How much are they? They will not tell you unless I've been talking to all the wrong people. But basically everyone I talk to says we can't really get really granular, clear feedback. And if you press, they might share something very high level that obscures like the density of the usage. And maybe there are just one or two power users who are using it a lot. They don't want you to know because the numbers aren't particularly flattering to them and to their business. We track regular usage. We will give very granular information, user information. And the reason is like bluejay is so easy to use that people are coming in and regularly using it. Once they come in, it really delivers that value very quickly. Tax research becomes almost instantaneous for them. And so we give them feedback. And so that's one of the metrics. Like this is from my experience, what we track. And we hold the mirror up to our customers and say this is how your firm is using the tool. Because we want you to know. And if you have like half the firm is using it really well and the other half aren't using it, then we'll suggest an onboarding and let's actually do another explanation so that they understand the, you know, how the other folks at the firm are having success with the tool. And we, we have a lot of, we have a pretty big customer success team that comes in and helps to make sure that all of our clients are successful with the tooling. So I would look at just usage. Like if you can track the usage of the AI tools that you're bringing on, that's a huge indicator of success because if somebody's coming in day after day after day, they're clearly doing that for a reason, they're getting some value out of it. It's making their lives easier. Sorry, this is a question for Jason. Yeah. So we run a small accounting from about five people. And one thing I found out in this show, that clients also use ChatGPT a lot. One of the things that we started facing this year is clients challenging us. But chatgpt told me this. So the question I have for you, in this age of AI, how would you still position yourself as a value trusted advisor and still charge the value added fees in this day and age? It's been a big challenge for us. So what do you think?

Well, Hula's right in this situation.

Yeah.

It's mostly us.

Because what they would do is they would say, this is a tax plan proposed by ChatGPT, and we think it's right. But they don't have the full context, obviously. Right. But you have the experience and you have all the knowledge and context. So you have to take some time to explain all of that back to them.

Yeah. It's easy to dunk on it and be like, well, it wasn't right. We win. There will be a day when it's unbelievably better than us. Right. And. And it depends on how you slice it up right now. Is it better than us today or not? Like, in a very narrow scenario. Yes, it's unbelievably more capable than us. It will. It'll keep getting better. So, like, you will have people that will do a consumer version of what Blue J does, where it'll get you incredibly good answers instantly, faster than we can get them, and we'll be able to retrieve more than we know off the top of our heads. So, like, you follow through. You follow kind of the AI timeline through. In a very strong AI scenario, say, it's going to be very good. I think we just have to be mindful of what it is that we're in the business of. Like, if we're in the business of giving answers to tax research questions, that's for sure going to change. That business is going to change. Right. If we're in the business of classifying bookkeeping transactions, like, for sure that business is going to change. I think we have to develop a better language for exactly what it is that we do. Because right now people come to us with anything and everything, like this stupid compliance form. That's this local thing that you're like, I have no idea what this is. Like, you know what I do. Why would I help you with this? And then we help them with it. Right. So what we do ultimately is the perception of accountants on the outside is like, oh, it's all these repetitive monotonous tasks and it's like, no, we already automated that stuff a while ago. What we do now is all the crap in between. And it means you're doing a thousand different tasks every single month. You're not actually doing the same things all that much. So we're already at this point where we're kind of just handling the stuff that slipped through the cracks. There was almost certainly still be things that slipped through the cracks. Even in a very powerful AI timeline. If our job is to eliminate blockers to entrepreneurship that are related to accounting and tax, do you really see a timeline where politicians and the regulatory environment and all that completely eliminate the blockers to entrepreneurship? Like almost certainly not. What we do will for sure change. Like that almost certainly is true. But ultimately, like if we're in the business of just supporting entrepreneurs like overcome this stuff that they don't want to do, like there's still going to be a version of that that we've.

We have a number of larger clients, you know, private equity group and stuff that are hesitant and are putting in our contracts that were not allowed to use AI. Oh, how do you see that impacting the overall small business versus call it larger enterprise and how, how that's going to change for small businesses versus larger entities and not allowing or not wanting that due to privacy and confidentiality.

There are like workarounds to that. Like I was talking with a firm that is just a bunch of bitcoin bros at an event the other day and they had like a tool that I had never heard of that was this secure sort of offline alternative having no access to any sort of AI assistance. Ultimately who pays the price for this? I would argue me and my team big time. If it's like we're just kind of having to live under a rock, regulatory environment with AI and training, data, all that, like it is a for sure a minefield. I really am I messaging with my clients. I think right now it's in the best interest of the firm to not be afraid of talking about AI usage because it's so core to the future of our firm and where we're headed. Right. You're going to have clients that will push back on that. You just got to do that really hard ROI calculation of like, okay, I can see how it costs nothing of you to ask me this, but that comes at a pretty big cost for me. Is that something I'm worth. I'm willing to do or not. Gang, thank you for being here. How about a round of applause for Ben and coming man? Got a few people to thank that saved me from having to pay for the whole thing myself. Missive is Eva here. We thank them anyways. Missive doing cool email automation stuff, especially with AI now. Like, very interesting platform. They've got, I think over 500 accounting firms now using missive. Sage. Where's the Sage crew? I mean, you kind of already know what Sage does, right? Like, I don't even know how to. If you don't know, maybe you shouldn't be here. A heads up for my podcast friends. We put together the biggest, scariest project my team has ever worked on. A big old run of live events around the country headed up until year end. To ensure that your 2026 is just the best year ever, let me run you through the cities real quick. We're coming to Austin, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Nashville, Chicago, DC, Philadelphia, NY City, and Boston with some super cool half day workshops that roll into dinners. You get CPE for it. It is an event that is built for your entire team to get the whole squad feeling inspired so that if you are a firm leader, you're not feeling like you got to put everything on your back. Headed into 2026 going to be a super fun experience. It's going to be a surprise guest at every city. We're going to record an installment of the podcast live at each of these events. You're gonna be part of the podcast itself. What? And man, I would love to see you there. To learn more, head over to jasononfirms.com events and I hope to see you there.