561 He Built the AI That Runs Your Accounting Firm

This may be the accounting firm technology.

People are most sleeping on these AI.

Meeting assistants that give you a transcript.

Of your client meetings.

I actually think they're about to automate a ton of work in our firms. When I ran my 40 person accounting practice, the sheer volume of meetings we held, all that expertise we dispensed, those transcripts may have just been our most valuable asset, but we never captured them. It was a missed opportunity. Because you'll see in this interview we talk about how accounting firms are using these transcripts to do everything from generate new sales opportunities to automatically identify out of scope conversations with clients, even capture the expertise of your staff in a way that can be leveraged even if that person no longer works for you. What is that? Okay, honestly, it's pretty sci fi stuff. Now today we've got three AI meeting note takers that are built specifically for accounting firms. And I recently sat down with the co founder of Vynyl, Jordan Vickery to talk through how these apps and it almost started as this little party trick, a way to get a searchable transcript from a meeting. We talk about how they may very soon become like the brains of our entire accounting firms. It's truly really interesting stuff. I think you'll like it. So without further ado, enjoy this conversation with Jordan Vickery.

Jordan Vickery, co founder of VYNL thanks for being here man.

Thanks for having me.

What's the 62nd intro for folks that.

Haven'T met you before?

Been working in accounting tech for the last 12 years in various different roles. Co founded a practice management product called Pixii. That's right, years ago been consulting with other brands. We also run an agency called Journey which supports software vendors in this space with their go to market. So it's an industry that we know really well. And yeah, excited to be building Vynl here now as well.

We're throwing around AI notetaker and just like super simple terms. Exactly. Like what is it that this category of tools does?

Yeah, so if we, if we think about how it works, it joins a meeting, it will record the audio and video of the meeting. It will then run that through an engine to create a transcript. So every word that was said in the conversation, you then use that transcript and run it through a prompt to essentially create a summary of the meeting. So here's what the meeting was about. Here are the key discussion points, here are the actions off the back of the meeting and then it's just all stored in one place for you just.

To like kind of think about it through the lens of the decision maker. So say you're a managing partner. What is like the day one value of pulling in a note taker that is like, man, you absolutely have to do this.

It's just capturing everything that is said in client meetings automatically and having it in one place for everybody to access. Because I think the biggest challenge with most firms is that different people take notes different ways and they don't always share the notes with other people in the team. So then when somebody goes to pick up a job, they don't have the complete context to be able to do it successfully. So kind of day one value is that you capture it automatically, which is a huge time save. So you don't have to do it manually, but then it's just visible and accessible to everybody in the team.

Did you ever work with that guy that's like the yellow notepad guy? No, you never had a yellow notepad guy. Oh, dude. I feel like almost every like managing partner type Persona I worked with was like had the big old legal pad and then they would read the notes and there's like one person in the office that could actually read and understand what it was.

Yeah, we've heard that one.

Hieroglyphics better ways mobile app. Actually like one of the biggest things I always hear is like, okay, I can understand for my virtual meetings, but like what about my in person stuff? Would your answer to that be mobile app recording?

Yeah, we're releasing a mobile app actually in the next week or so and that will just help you to record meetings in person. You open the app, you hit record, captures all the audio, does all the transcript automatically and literally the moment you walk out the door from the client's office, everything is already in the system. The team have access, it syncs through to the practice management products and it's happened in seconds.

How did you first get turned on to notetakers? Like what pre vinyl? What was your origin story there?

Yeah, we've been using Firefly since 2023 in our agency journey and we were just trying to figure out how to make like first of all catch all of the kind of client conversations, but then also figure out how to make it actionable. And we went down this rabbit hole of trying to integrate Fireflies through Zapier and building automations to pull out actions and automate them into things like Asana. And it just felt very clunky. And then we kind of asked the question, well, if we're experiencing this as an agency, we wonder if accounting Firms are having similar issues and we surveyed, I think 250plus firms globally around kind of their challenges with note taking and capturing and creating work off the back of meetings. And yeah, it was a huge issue. Like so much time has been spent manually taking notes, manually updating things with team members, adding things into practice management systems and most of the time it doesn't happen. Which means that things fall through the cracks, clients get upset because things get missed. So we just pushed on from there. And yeah, vinyl was really born off the back of that.

And we've had like versions of this for like, for a while. I would argue what's actually made it way more interesting though is you said the prompt. It's the ability of AI to like, like understand the context of a discussion rather than just having like the control f find a word in a transcript sort of thing.

Yep. I think that's super helpful as well though. I think like having the ability to just search a transcript for specific keywords. If you're a team member that wasn't in a meeting and you're picking something up and you want to revisit what was discussed and just quickly find where they discuss tax or something like that, it's really easy to search. But we've also built something into Vinyl called Ask Vinyl, which is like our own AI chat. So you can prompt that and ask it questions your meetings. It could be one meeting, it could be multiple meetings. And that will help you to pull out more insights from that as well.

Why should I not use my Microsoft or my Google built in sort of transcript solution?

Well, they only work on those platforms. So firms are often meeting across multiple platforms. Teams, zoom, Google Meets. So there's that. I think also they're fairly basic in terms of what they do. For example, the way that we're building Vinyl is that we are training it on the context of an accountant or bookkeeper having a conversation with their client. And then we're training on certain kind of key terms and terminology, which typically means that the discussion points and the actions are a lot more focused and a lot more detailed than what you would get from a kind of generalist note taker. Like A teams 1.

As soon as people start thinking down this path, they're like, okay, that's really nice but like I kind of want everything. Like how do I capture everything so in person, Cool mobile app, all my virtual meetings. How do you feel about phone calls? Like people still have a lot of phone calls. Like what's ultimately the solution to that?

It's a Slightly trickier one to figure out how to solve. It's something that we're exploring right now because the kind of VoIP market is very fragmented. If you think about the systems firms are using to make the calls, and then they're also doing calls through teams and on their mobile phone. So it's really difficult to figure out the easiest way to capture all of that in one place, but it's something that we'll look at doing.

What are the biggest misconceptions right now for folks who are maybe hesitant to pick up note takers? Like, what are the blockers for, people?

I think one of the blockers that I've seen and heard a few times is just maybe uncertainty around whether clients would be comfortable with the meetings being recorded. I think ultimately it's for the firm to decide what their policy is on recording meetings, and then to just introduce that as almost like a general rule. So some firms I know have actually built into their engagement letters terms that say, we record all client meetings. And that way, when clients sign up, they know that it's gonna happen.

Yeah, okay, so I'm. I'm like a skittish client, like, tinfoil hat guy. I'm having a conversation with you, the accountant. I see the note taken, and I'm like, man, that's. No. I don't need big brother listening. Like, how. What's. What's an example of, like, how do you just sort of walk them through managing that?

I think you just have to let them know why you're recording it. You know, we want to capture and document everything we're discussing. We want to make sure that we've got the advice we're giving you documented on file. So if anything did happen, we know that that's a source of truth that we can reference. It also means that we can capture this information and give you a better experience and service, because all of that information will live in one place. The team will know everything that they need to know about your business and how to best help you.

I heard a quote recently on social media that was all the best advice I've ever gotten from a professional was off the record, agree or disagree?

I guess they weren't recording the meeting, so disagree.

Do you buy into the notion of, like, we can selectively, like, oh, this one will record, or let's hit pause on the recording right now, or do you think that's ultimately problematic?

I think it can be problematic because I think in terms of how you implement that in a firm, it starts to become quite difficult in terms of which clients do we record, which clients don't we record? Are there certain topics we record versus other ones? I think it's much easier to just mandate and say the default is that we record all of our client meetings to document them, to store that so that we can give you the best possible service.

Yeah, I feel like that's usually the big boss in the way that they advise and they're like, oh yeah, no, I want that flexibility. But if you ask the same thing of their team, like do you want your team to be able to stop recording? They're like, oh no, I don't, I don't want that.

Where we've seen that actually appear is not so much in terms of whether to record or not, it's who has access to the recording afterwards.

Oh, interesting.

So something we're actually working on right now is updating our permissions so that if you are for example, partner level, all of your client meetings are private to you by default. No one else in the team can access them. Whereas if you have like a kind of client facing team, all of their meetings are accessible to everybody else by default because that way you kind of need that context to be able to do the work. Whereas the partners and directors might be having slightly higher level conversations and there may be things being discussed that shouldn't be shared with the team. So that's kind of where we've seen that appear so far.

Should people be recording like everything, like internal stuff, external stuff? Are you like roll it all up or start with the juiciest type of meeting?

I would say definitely start with client meetings like today, start capturing that. We find that a lot of firms are recording internal meetings as well, because internal meetings are often about work. You know, many firms are having like client stand up calls where they have a meeting and they'll spend an hour talking through 10 clients and what they need to do, that's still really important context. You need that information captured to be able to reference it and do things with it. So I think ultimately like the push is try to record as much as possible because the more you can record, the more you can do with it. It's so, so valuable. But if you pick one to start, then it's client meetings.

For folks looking at all the different note taking options, you talked about Fireflies earlier, there's a bunch of mainstream options that are super mature that are generally going to be pretty cheap and oftentimes cheaper than industry specific solutions. Why, when it comes to note takers is an industry specific solution. Important.

It's important for a few reasons, I think. Firstly, anything in the AI world that is industry and context specific is going to be much more valuable than something that's generalist for a number of reasons. The context is going to be much better. It's going to be trained to understand your world versus more of a generalist world. And then I think, also thinking about integrations, the biggest bugbear for firms is that their tech stack doesn't integrate. There's data here, there's data here. It doesn't flow, it doesn't connect. If you're using things like Fireflies and stuff, that stuff isn't integrating into your practice tech stack you need to have. It's important to capture the information. It's just as important to then put the information in the place where your team need it.

Yeah, we're actually used. Yeah, there's a lot of people just collecting transcripts right now, which is better than nothing, right? But then not doing anything with it yet.

Whenever I speak to a firm that's using Fireflies or Fathom, I'll say to them like, what are you doing with the meeting us afterwards? And they'll go, nothing. So they literally just have this directory of client information, client context, which isn't a bad thing. Like it's important to still record that stuff. But ultimately it's not really helping because you're still not sharing that with the team. They still don't know what was discussed. You've just got this kind of library of everything and it's not actionable.

We both super geek on like the long term possibility of like we're actually capturing kind of the collective knowledge of the firm. And what does that mean long term? And I'm excited to get to that. Before that, like today with the tech we got today with Word Vinyl is today with ChatGPT, with all the ways that we can use transcripts. Like what are just the most common examples where folks will be digging into transcripts every day? Like in vinyl, you've got, you know, is it. Ask vinyl, what are the most common scenarios where you see people hopping in there and like time after time hitting that to get past context or something like that.

Yeah, I think there's almost like two ways that firms are using it. The first is to just reference previous meetings and pull out more information if they weren't part of it. So yeah, just going in and saying, give me a rundown on everything we discussed about their goals or then analyze the transcripts and give you that back in a really Nice digestible format. The other way that firms are using it is to actually now create post meeting artifacts like help me draft a follow up email to the client, help me draft the scope of work, help me draft a file note that I can download and hand off to somebody in the team. So there's lots you can do with transcripts. Like we've got a prompt library built into VYNL right now and going to have the ability for firms to add and save their own prompts. And this thing for analyzing client sentiment, identifying sales opportunities, providing feedback on how well you ran the call, pulling out FAQs, creating content, building a case study, all of these things that you can do once you capture the meeting.

I'm excited for more of this stuff to just happen. Yeah, like to just trigger. Right. Because like one of the limitations is, is you got to go in and you got to do the thing and you got to run the prompt and like what are some examples that you're excited about of where, boy, wouldn't it be nice if every single time there's a new meeting transcript this workflow ran and it delivered some sort of like specific value.

So a really simple one that we're actually building right now is pre drafting a personalized follow up email. Because other note takers have this really awful habit of just sending out an email with a list of 20 things that were discussed.

A recap of your meeting with Jordan.

Vickery, and guess what? Nobody reads it. And it's really impersonal as well. So one of the things we're working on is the moment the meeting finishes, there will be a personalized follow up email drafted in vinyl based on the meeting that you can then go in, review, copy, paste, put it into whatever platform you use to send emails and send it to the client within seconds of the meeting finishing. It sounds kind of like really simple, but that's a huge value add for many firms.

What are some interesting things maybe people don't think about that can be mined from a bunch of transcripts?

So much. Yeah, there's so much. I think if you think about client experience in general, like analyzing client sentiment, analyzing the types of questions they're asking, how they're feeling, the types of things they're sharing in conversations. You can also use transcripts to create SOPs around the type of advice that you give. It almost becomes like a library of how we as a firm advise our clients. It's almost like your ip. So there's lots you can do. You know, one really interesting one that I'VE been speaking to a few larger firms around is just pulling out sales opportunities. So if you've got a client facing team, they may not be listening for opportunities to offer additional services to clients.

Because I'll just tell you they're not.

They're not exactly. So imagine having the ability to surface those opportunities automatically in a dashboard for partners and directors which says last week in three meetings these clients mentioned the need for cash flow support. Do you want us to draft an email to reach out to set up a conversation? Equally you could do the same for clients that have raised issues or concerns where the client facing team may not share that information with other people because they may be worried. But you can pull those opportunities out and say this client raised a concern around XYZ thing. Do we want to set up a call and speak to them?

Yeah, there's a world too where that's connected to even like the engagement platform. So it knows the scope of work and it can identify scenarios where that goes outside those boundaries.

Exactly, yeah. So we're actually looking at things like that right now. Like there's obviously engagement platforms in this space and we've got a vision to be able to integrate with those and pull through the service library, cross reference that with the transcript, but then also use transcript data to pre populate proposals off the back of things like sales meetings. And that's just one of many, many use cases. Right. Where things like, I don't know, do you guys have like AML anti money laundering checks in the us we don't, no. It's a big thing in the UK and other countries and it's a real time drain when onboarding new clients. You have to ask all these questions, collect all this information you have to do before you start doing any work for them. We can run a meeting, ask all the questions and then take the transcript and pre populate the AML check in a platform and it's ready to go like that, like huge, huge benefit.

I think one of my favorite things that I've seen around, like just cool stuff you can harvest from a meeting is client testimonials. Client says something super kind, super nice and we just, we go about our day, we're like, oh thanks. And we like, we don't ask can we use this for that sort of stuff to be like auto identified or flagged and go to another member of the team or something like that. Something like that. What's an example in the future of what an automated workflow version of that could look like?

Well, I think Pull out the testimonials, have them available for people to use. I think there's a world where you could have a version of something in vinyl just for a marketing team, where they don't see the meetings, but it pulls out everything they need to create content or case studies or testimonials, because all of that stuff's being shared in meetings anyway. Even things like writing content where lots of practice owners know they should be on social media. They don't have time, they don't know how to write, they don't want to write. You don't have to. You can literally just take everything you're saying in client meetings, pull out the transcript and then draft content in your tone of voice and the way that you deliver that advice and it's ready to go. So there's lots of workflows and opportunities around things to do there as well.

Even harvesting client questions.

FAQs is huge. I use this every single week when I'm demoing vynl. At the end of the week, I go into vyno, I select all my demos, I run the FAQ prompt and it tells me these are all the questions that keep coming up time and time again from people. That means that I can then update my demo deck, update the sales process, update the website. And firms I'm speaking to are doing the same thing. They're building content libraries to answer these common questions they're getting asked time and time again.

So you talked about the marketing team side of this and the way that they use all of that data. I've been kind of bullish the last couple of years on the utility of marketing agencies. You've actually probably got an interesting perspective on this with Journey as well. Marketing agencies that work with accounting firms, the problem is always getting that stuff to be in their tone and like, technically like any semblance of correct. And how they would advise. This seems like it could be a huge unlock for marketing partners being able to take your firm further.

It's massive. It's massive. Like, I think one of the biggest challenges from a marketing point of view, like you said, is actually just getting that information from the firm in the first place. And they're busy and it's not the top of their list. So if you can capture it automatically and then just feed that through to them and then they can do what they need to do with it to create the content or whatever, A is quicker, B, it's going to be much more valuable content.

What is your take on AI assistants that either just via Text or even with visual avatars will act like you and respond to questions like you. And putting that sort of thing in front of clients.

I mean, I guess for some firms it may be the route that they want to go down. I think the way that the industry is heading, I don't think it's the right approach. I think a more personalized human approach is going to be what clients need and want. And I think actually the interesting thing is that AI is only going to make that easier. I think there's a misconception that AI removes the human element from accounting and it's not true. Apps like vynl, I strongly believe, actually make relationships even better because you can focus on the conversation. You're not going to miss things that you've agreed to do. You can deliver better advice because you're capturing it.

You seem smarter and you seem like you care more because you have better recall. And even like man, even CRM stuff, like everybody's always like, man, wouldn't it be nice to have like a more built out CRM where we're like, oh yeah, no, that's their birthday and they like this thing and all of that and we get these details but we never really capture them. And that's something that theoretically couldn't be entirely automated completely.

Yeah, that's a good example. Right. Think about onboarding a new client. You've got lots of different bits of data you need to capture about the business and everything else. If you just had one meeting with them, like a kickoff meeting where you're asking all these questions, then everything's in the transcript, it's ready to then just pre populate where it needs to go.

So you refer to what you do as a meeting assistant, not just a note taker. You see that demo from the guy not that long ago of like sitting down across the dinner table, like having a date and like in real time there's like the UI off to the side that is like reacting and responding, responding to the conversation and pulling up context. And everybody saw that. And in the context of a date, like that's kind of disgusting. But I have to imagine like we are headed to a time where it's like real time feedback as I'm in a meeting for say onboarding where it's I gotta get through these 20 things and that resolving real time. That seems close, right?

It is, yeah. Like one of the things we're looking at for early next year is pre meeting agendas. Like how do we create agendas for firms before they go into A meeting. And then I think the next step beyond that is how do you have that available? Live in the call, ticking items off one by one as you go through, and then almost providing you feedback if you've missed something or not captured something that you need to. You see this a lot in like customer support teams. There's apps that do this and it allows them to deliver better support and a better experience. So why can't that apply to accounting?

And I almost feel like this is a path towards like, more standardization around how we run meetings. Meetings now are almost like the fallback of like, oh, we just kind of got to figure it out rather than like, we run four different types of meetings. And here's best practices for these meetings and the things we need to hit on. And that seems like that makes it lowers the bar quite a bit for like, does this need to be a unicorn that can shoot from the hip and like, give really good advice, or can I instruct my team how to run these meetings?

Meetings, Yeah, I think so. I think standardizing meetings in general is a really smart thing to do because it means that everything you capture from the meeting is also going to be standardized as well. And then it means if you want to do stuff with that, it's much easier, I think, having template agendas for different types of meetings, like tax meeting, month end review meeting, discovery call meetings, they can all be templated and standardized.

When to go, like full meeting ception. The person that's like, I've always kind of just done this and I don't even know how I do it really. I've just done it for years. The best thing you can have is a whole bunch of transcripts that are examples of that. Right?

Yeah. And then you just need a prompt, which is create an SOP from how I run these meetings. So you put all the meetings in, pick 10 discovery calls, put them in and say, create a process for how I run discovery calls. It will then analyze it, pull out all the questions and give you that agenda ready to go. We've actually got that prompt in vinyl right now.

Yeah. Cool. So I had a team of about 40 people on average, took two meetings a day in my firm. And we didn't capture any of that stuff. It was all just happening. Nobody had any visibility into that stuff. You can see a world where we've got vinyl plugged in for like two years. And vinyl, like, is my firm, is my firm's knowledge in many ways. Right. Like, it's like, if we think about what makes an accounting Firm unique. We're all using the same software behind the scenes. Like, we're all built on the same tech stacks. What makes it unique is how we advise. Like how we advise people on XYZ in this situation and that situation. And this person has this set of expertise and this person has that expertise. You're going to have all of that. Yep. So then what? Like, it's like, how do we almost automate around our own expertise? Like, it seems like that's kind of taken us to a different place.

Yeah, I think it almost becomes the, the IP of the firm. Like, it becomes your differentiator.

It's like an asset too, right?

It is. And I was talking to somebody about this recently from like an M and a point of view. If you were acquiring a firm and they've been using a tool like vinyl to capture all their client meetings for the last 12 months, imagine what you could do with that as part of your due diligence instead of just, oh.

Man, like some people just got the chills. They got a little scared when they heard that.

Yeah. Because then you can go in and you can analyze things like client sentiment. You can try to understand, like, what types of questions and concerns the clients have in conversations. But also it means that when somebody does buy the firm, you're not just buying the clients, you're also now buying the relationships and all of the IP and the insights that have come with it. So in terms of now integrating that into a new firm, you've got everything there. You know, you can put a client in front of a new team, team member. They can go and they can say, I'm now responsible for this client. Tell me everything that I need to know to deliver the best service. It analyzes all the meetings they've had in the last 12 months. You've now got a one page document which gives you everything that you need. So there's so much that you can do with that. Like, the way that we think about tools like vinyl is that it almost becomes the relationship ledger. Like, you've kind of got the general ledgers for the financial information, but like, who's capturing the stuff for relationships?

Okay, that's interesting. I've called it the knowledge ledger because it's almost like everybody knows what ledger is all, like all the transactions. But this is almost like the transcripts become the transactions and it's a snapshot of all of your expertise, right?

Yeah, but I think it's more than knowledge. I think it's the actual client relationships as well.

Because the client Side too?

Yes. Yeah. Because you have clients, financials. You know what the business looks like from a financial point of view? Do you know what the business looks like from their perspective? Like, what are they concerned about? What are their goals? What are they trying to achieve? If you're able to now capture all of that information and have it accessible, imagine what kind of service you can now deliver and help them with. Because you've got all of this information in one place.

Does this feel spooky at all to you? Because there's like, there's somebody out there who, when you said, like, think about M and A and that being able to see all their conversations where they're like, nope. And they just uninstalled their note taker when they thought about that. Like, even, even. I've even heard people say, like, what if somebody leaves the firm and then the firm can continue using all their transcripts in this sort of semblance of their expertise? Like, is there any, like, kind of weirdness around this?

Yeah, it's an interesting question. I mean, first of all, with the M and A piece, I don't think people should go in and actually see the conversation. They should be able to analyze more broadly, like, what's happening. But yeah, I think we're in this kind of new world and it's not just note takers. This applies to. I think it's just AI products in general where we're still trying to figure out what does best practice policy look like around usage and retention and all of that stuff.

Man, anytime I go deep on note taking, my head just starts spinning. Even things as simple as we've got two years of meeting transcripts now and Gloria on my team is an expert and I'm a junior and I always have to bugger with questions. This almost has to become the default, the first line of defense, actually, before I go to Gloria to ask her a question directly about how I handled this situation with a client. Gloria's probably handled it 20 times in the last year. I just go to Gloria AI and like in the meeting tool, like ask, like, how does she normally handle this?

Yeah, and you could create one for the whole firm, almost like a firm version of the knowledge base. But then like you say, it could be team specific ones like the tax teams one, the bookkeeping team one. And then for training and reference and support, people can go in and just ask those questions and try to pull out what is the best practice within the firm. I mean, you see this already with, I guess, more technical stuff, right? You've got tools like tax tax GPT which is trained on the tax library. And then you can go in and just ask questions. But this is the same approach but for advice.

Yeah.

And how you deliver advice.

One thing people have struggled with now is like how to organize their transcripts because there's almost a lot of different dimens where you're coming to the transcripts needing, you know, there's the client dimension of just what's going on with this client. But there's the cross section of that, that is month end advisory meetings. How do we have these conversations? Then there's the cross section of what does Gloria say here? How should people be thinking about this? And this is still a hard problem because we don't like, we don't have anything right now that like off the shelf like gives us all these different ways to kind of slice and dice the different ways that we may want to interact with transcript information. Do you have any thoughts on like what the kind of first versions of that will be in the most useful sort of cross sections?

Yeah, well, what we're building right now in as vinyl is being able to analyze transcripts at a contact level, a client level, the firm level and a team member level. So firm level is we're analyzing meetings across the entire client base. Contact and client level is just for that specific person. And then team member is yet the specific team member in the team that's having meetings. And you know, there's different applications. So for the team member stuff it might be around providing feedback. So if you've got junior members of the team, they're starting to have client meetings. The partners and directors want to help them improve in how they're delivering the meetings. They can now select their profile, select their previous 30 meetings, analyze them and pull out insights in terms of what are they doing well and where can they improve equally at the kind of like firm wide level you could pull out insights around. What is the general, what is the general feeling of clients right now based on all the conversations we're having? Are they positive? Are they worried about things? What are they talking about? What are the common themes that are coming up?

How do we get this context into a bunch of other things? Because when I'm responding to an email, it would be lovely if it could draft something and it had all of that context. It almost becomes a hard ecosystem thing because we want this context different places.

Yeah, well I think, I think it depends on what you're trying to do with it. So like a really simple version of that is we sync to practice management products because you need the context on the client timeline of everything that was discussed. And, you know, tools like Carbon, there's others available. Obviously they now have, like, timeline summary capabilities where the AI can analyze the timeline and that has, like, the work items and emails and now meeting context. But there is a world in the future where vinyl will also bring that context into our products as well. So meetings, calls, emails, documents, all of those interactions and touch points with clients where you can now create this hugely vast context layer of information that you can then do pretty incredible things with.

I feel like right now, like, if you had to say, what is the core of a firm? Like, what is. What is kind of the most central aspect of how we get stuff done? It's probably tasks, yes, probably projects. But I could also see a world where that core actually becomes like the knowledge graph, what we know, like our collective expertise. And then other things are almost like, wrapped around that. Because how we do all of that stuff and how we talk about it and how we identify when a conversation's out of scope. Like, all of that stuff almost ought to be downstream from the conversations and all the stuff that's happening.

There's so many downstream opportunities, like the one you mentioned there. Out of scope works, a really good one, where if you can pull through the specific services that a client is subscribed to and then cross reference that against the transcripts of the conversations you're having with them, it's going to be very easy to identify where they're asking for things that aren't in the scope of work that you're providing. And then you can flag that and pull it out and say, hey, they asked about this. This is something that they're currently paying for. We need to raise a proposal for it. And then you could push that through to tools like Ignition or Anchor, where they can now create that kind of like, instant proposal based on something that they mentioned. I think another really interesting point is less about the actual transcripts, more about meeting time itself. So having a dashboard that shows you how many hours a month are we meeting with clients, which clients are having more hours than others? Because I think sometimes there's a tendency to just meet with clients, especially the ones like in CAS firms, where they're meeting every month. And you might not realize some clients aren't meeting that regularly or some clients are eating at more time. And then you can also look at utilization across the team, like which team members are having more meetings than others. And then that data is also really helpful. From like a practice management point of.

View, I feel like we could geek on this all day. So right now. So there's the framing of an AI notetaker. You think of it more like a meeting assistant.

Yeah.

But if you think about the ecosystem and all the different tools that support firms right now, it's probably more than a meeting assistant very soon. Do you think about that and where you fit into the jigsaw puzzle of other tools and the role that you play?

Yeah. So the way that we're thinking about VYNL in the future is that it evolves from a meeting assistant to more of, I guess you call it executive assistant, where it's not just responsible for recording the meetings, but it's actually helping you prepare for the meetings. It's creating agendas, even building in something like a version of Calendly into vyno, where it's now got meeting booking links and it can send those links out to clients and schedule time with them automatically. You can have an automated sequence that reaches out to them, books in the meeting, then creates the agenda, sends it through to whoever's running the meeting. We then capture the meeting and we do everything else with it afterwards. Also things like nps. Imagine finishing a meeting and then just being able to surface something that says, how would you rate this meeting? How happy are you with the service you're receiving, capturing that real time feedback and then being able to action that off the back of it as well. So we think about VYNL moving more broadly into this category of just being able to help with a number of different things within this kind of realm of I guess client experience is what we're calling it. Where yeah, the meeting is a one thing, but there's more that happens to then support and look after that client relationship.

Yeah, your head kind of just spins at all the different things. Like you say mps and I even think just like, what is like the silent version of mps, where it was basically sentiment analysis, like AI just inferring, like based on the conversation, it kind of actually looks like this and how valuable that would be to have across the firm.

That's super valuable. I think actually just asking the NPS question as well is also just.

And even the delta between maybe the way the client communicates to their actual number, like that's valuable.

Yeah, because I think like a big challenge for firms that I've spoken to around Churn is that like by the time a client tells you they're leaving, there's nothing you can do. Their mind is made up and it's typically based on something that's happened several months before. And it's because firms aren't capturing that feedback or sending out NPS surveys that they don't realize that there's potentially challenges with their clients. They just assume that everything's okay. I'm pretty sure most firms listening have had an instance where they've had a client where they thought everything was rosy, and next thing they're saying, oh, we're moving to a different firm. So just being able to capture NPS surveys, capture client sentiment, surface that information, make it accessible so that you can almost be a bit more proactive with planning how well these clients are doing.

Normally I end these asking, like, what are the accounting firms that you're best for and that are like, raving fans and where you're a no brainer.

Yep.

I don't really know how you can answer this question because it kind of seems like, well, you need a note taker.

You do need a note taker. Yeah.

Yeah.

Firms of any size should be using a note taker. I think there's typically more usefulness for firms that have at least a small team, because once you get kind of beyond like, let's say three to five people in the team, that's where the sharing of information becomes important. Because in a solo firm, you're doing the work, so it's less important to be able to make that information accessible. As you start bringing in other people that are now maybe doing meetings or at least doing the work of the backend meetings, they now need that context. So I'd say maybe. Maybe kind of like three to five people plus is where it starts to get really helpful. And then kind of sky's the limit. Right. Because any firm of any size could do so much with this information if they capture it, there's really no limitations around, like, which firms it's best for. Yeah.

Cool. Jordan, thanks for doing this, man.

Thanks for having me.