574 The Best AI Apps for Accounting Firm Marketing!

Today, one of the world's leading marketers for accounting firms and one of my favorite people, Karen Rayburn. She is back on the podcast. We're talking about the tools that will make your marketing dreams come true. Specifically, what's the AI tech they're using? She runs what in my mind is like the longest running marketing agency for accounting firms.

Over 15 years they've been running.

She got big old team. Today we're getting a peep behind the curtain of how has their work changed in an era of AI and what are the tools that we should be using to do these jobs? So without further ado, enjoy this conversation with Karen Rayburn.

Karen, lovely to see you.

Hello.

If anybody hasn't had the pleasure of meeting you before or seeing your wisdom espoused on the Internet, what's the 62nd Karen Rayburn intro?

So I am a qualified CPA and a creative person. I own a creative agency. I'm the author of the Accountant Marketer, which is a structure of marketing for accountants. It may, Jason may have seven or eight copies.

I'm just in this room somewhere.

I'm trying to find it.

That's right. I got one. Looks like this.

Oh, you got one. Okay, that one.

And then book two is coming out this year. Plan is for it to be in April. Accountants, you are creative. So we got the structure of marketing. Now we're going into the mindset of creativity, which is very exciting. And we help accountants to understand and enjoy their marketing. And if they need help with it, we are here to help them research, plan, and implement or we can just give them direction. So that's what we're, that's what we're busy with.

So you've been running this agency just for accounting firms for 14 years, is that right?

15. 15 years, 15th anniversary. Whoop.

Okay. Okay. Exciting and theme for you right now. Like excitement kind of around AI. I know you're, you're running actually a workshop series on sort of marketing, AI stuff and we'll talk about that. But let's talk today. Like AI tools to help us do marketing better and also more efficiently, but kind of through some specific lenses. So here's the kind of the flow I'm thinking you could tell me if I, if you like it. What I wanted to start with is kind of thinking of it in terms of, of researching. Like maybe I'm researching a client.

Maybe I'm researching a niche that I might go into. Starting with research, then getting to extracting.

Like from all the stuff that I have, be it meeting transcripts, or this article that I liked, whatever it is. How do I extract useful bits from that?

Yep.

And then third, ideating, how do I take that stuff and somehow bridge it to a thing that I want to make that's useful? And then four, Kind of the Holy grail writing. Can AI actually help me spit that thing out faster? That sound reasonable?

That is perfect. And the only thing I would add to that is your tendency as an accountant will be to start at the other end. Oh, yeah. So instead of starting with research and extraction, you're going to be like, do you know what I need? Content. That's what I need. And I will go to AI and I will create content, or maybe I will ideate. And you're not even going anywhere near extraction research, which is actually where you need to begin. So we're flipping it, most likely for most of you to help you so your ideas and content are better.

Yes.

That's why when you go to the AI thing and you're like, can you do this thing for me? The result kind of sucks.

It kind of sucks because it's like, I got you. I got every other accountant in the whole world who's doing exactly what you are. But I'm going to tell you that you're awesome because this is the one thing.

I love that we're talking with you about this too, because you've done this well before AI and literally hired teams of writers. So, like, I feel like you are like a good sort of balance to be like, well, here's what's good and here's how far I can get you. But let's start with research. I want to know. Yeah, not only what are your favorite tools, but what.

What.

How do you think through the process of researching, maybe a specific client, maybe it's like a potential client, but also maybe more widely.

My firm is thinking about getting more.

Specific in who we serve. How do we use AI to discover what we need to know about that?

It's a great question. We've been doing tons of stuff on this lately, too, because research is at the heart of what we do at pf in my agency, as we help an accounting firm. So an accounting firm says, hey, can you help us with our marketing? We need a strategy, we need priorities. I don't know what to do. We always start with research, too. And that is because there is. There is real gold in the numbers. Your analytics, your website numbers, your social numbers, et cetera. Or if you don't have those, the. The existence of data that's on The World Wide Web somewhere, you know, like, there's so much information. So starting with research means that you're saying, let's just see what the state of play is. Like, what is, what is happening with veterinarians, for example, if that's a. If that's a niche you're considering and a lot of clients we talk to are in that place, you're going, well, I have a few vets. I don't know if I want a niche in them. I don't think I want to be exclusive, and that's fine. And doing the research means that you're just saying, what's, what's available, what's out there, who's doing what? So you could research a niche, an industry. You could research a type of person. You could research an individual prospect, for example. We would love to work with clients who. And you get like top 10 prospects and research them. You could research clients that you've signed up and you want to get to know them a little better so you can advise them better. So there's a lot of categories of research that you could do. And the key is to begin pulling together as much as possible. I do think it's really helpful to have a human strategic eye on it. And this isn't to discourage anybody from diying their research. It just means it's possible. You're going to get to a point of like, wow, this is a lot of information which we'll get to in the extracting bit. But this is the bit where you get to play. And a lot of that is that concept of creativity and a creative mindset. Don't think about this as, okay, I'm going to research for one hour. I'm going to get the answer, and then I'm going to have my decision look at it as an opportunity to just get a little more knowledge and expand it a bit and, and stretch it a bit. So I forget what your original question was. Whether we were going straight to tools.

Yeah. What. What's your process look like for that? And what's. What are your favorite apps for it right now?

Yeah. So our process would be to first, you know, ask the questions what niches are. Let's talk about niches. Industries is. It's a perfect example. Happens all the time. What niches are you considering? Why are you considering them? Do you have any clients in that category already? Do you have none, but you think you could. Are they tangent to. That's not the word. But are they similar to another industry that you do serve? Are you Curious about them. So answer a few of those questions and then the top three AI tools that we tend to use at the very top would be Google Gemini. That one is, I think, because it's connected to Google, great at research, can give you so much stuff. I played with it for a client just to show them what you could do. And within like five minutes, the sheer amount of information was fantastic. But again, I will give the warning. You will be tempted to go, cool, I've spent five minutes. This is great information. I'm good. You've got to hold on to that standard advice that you and I both given before, which is never accept the first answer. Keep asking, keep pushing, keep questioning it. But I would put Gemini at the top. And the other two would be perplexity and notebook. LM both of those quite good for research. NotebookLM comes up with these. Like, here's an audio clip if two people were talking on a podcast about veterinarians. It's like if Jason was a vet and I was a accountant for vets, and we were talking about that, here's what the podcast would sound like. It's fantastic. And then they give you a PDF report and a SWOT analysis and how many vets are in, you know, Arizona or New York or whatever the area is. And this, all of this means that you have to have good prompts about things like geography. Do you want state, country, international, specific region? Certain cities, yes, certain cities, no. Do you want revenue? Do you want affordability of your fees? We did this for a client where we're like, listen, their minimum fee is a thousand a month, and most of their clients spend 3 to 7,000amonth. So we don't want anybody in this industry who is unlikely to be able to afford that. And those kinds of questions and prompts make sure that you're not just gathering, going, yeah, vets are the best. Oh my gosh. And then going, oh, wait a minute. A lot of these are like owned by a bigger company, they're not going to sign with us, or they're owned by one person and, you know, the budget is probably not there. So there's those questions and then there's also the things you need to tell AI, which is true for all these categories we're going to talk about. But for this one, the number one thing you need to tell it is don't assume anything. Now, it's still going to do that from time to time, but if you tell it, your chances are less. But if you don't say it, it's Going to make some assumptions. It will say, oh, I was assuming that you wanted vets like this. I was assuming that your firm does this. The other thing it will sometimes do is literally make up documents. And it will say, well, this veterinarian practice has this document on their website. And you're like. And so your big question will be, cool, where did you get that from? Where. Where is that? What is your source? And it'll. It'll give you the name of this thing and, and a link that doesn't work. And you're like, what? I. I'm sorry, I'm not finding this.

And it's like, that's the best one. It. When it, like, doubles down.

Yeah, yeah. It's like, it's. It's called veterinarian practices 2026. And you're like, cool. What website is it from? Oh, I just, like, imagined that if there was one, this is what it would be. And you're like, cool. No, stop it.

Imagine somebody doing that to you in real life. You're like, it's like very obvious. You're like, no, like, that's not even true. They're like, no, no, no, it is. And then the third time you ask them, they're like, no, you're right. No, sorry, I don't know.

Yeah.

So for somebody that's not comfortable with.

The research thing yet, can you give us just like a super, like, dumb prompt example of how exactly you would ask the question to. To make it useful for the person exploring, say, vet clinics?

Yeah, I would. I mean, first I would say there isn't just going to be one prompt. You're going to need to go back and forth. So re. I mean, the, the starter prompt will be. Yeah, tell it who you are. Especially if you haven't been using Gemini. Say we're using Gemini and you've been mostly using GPT. One option is you could jump back to GPT and say, can you download everything you know about me into a document and then upload that to Gemini? Because usually what our strategists will do is they'll go into Gemini and say, here's the brand book, here's the research we've done so far. Here's a list of their clients, here's their tone of voice. Here's like, literally everything we have on this client they are considering. So if you're the accountant doing that, you throw all that in there and say, we are considering this niche, this industry, and what we would like to know is what's the opportunity available to us? Given and just identify a couple things. You're not going to catch everything. But think about your, your non negotiables. So minimum fee, affordability, type of person, region, geography, something like that. Throw a few of those in there and, and say can you, can you ask me some questions about why we're doing this so that we can get to the right research? That's usually my first suggestion because if you just tell it to do something, it will do it. I would also recommend that you say can you act as whatever you want it to act as in this case a market researcher, a market marketing strategist. We do. I mean our senior marketing strategist will say I want you to act as a senior marketing strategist and then we'll work together and, and then you will say don't assume anything, show me your sources and ask me questions about why we're doing this. So as it does that, then you just answer them. My favorite is just to click the voice note thing and talk it out. You don't have to really type much out. You just talk it out like you're talking to the two of us and then put it in there. And once you get some kind of a return, which it will do pretty quickly, start filtering it down and looking for things. The next stage is usually what is their, what issues do they have? What kind of problems are they facing? What are they struggling with? Why would they need an accountant or to switch an accountant? How much data is out there about how long they stay with their accountant? I did a whole AI research thing on how long people tend to stay with an accountancy firm before they move. And 15 years ago when I set up PF, the average was 19 years. The average is now closer to seven. So on the positive side, that's an opportunity for all of you that if somebody is thinking of changing accountants, they are more likely to. They're not as scared to. On the flip side, if you're not doing a good job or they're not seeing that value, they will switch. But, but even asking those questions like what if, what if vets tend to stay with their accountants really, really long, then you need to address the fact that if you're going to win them over, you need have some assets. Which leads us nicely to competitor research, which is the next level we do, which says who else out there Again, use similar parameters. What other accountancy firms in this geographical area with this rough pricing and doing these kinds of services serve this industry either exclusively or have a unique focus and then it will give you some and it will give you links to their websites and it will start saying they this firm has a veterinarian specialist who has videos and a course and a PDF guide and is a speaker at all these events. And then it'll say, this firm has a veterinarian page, but there's not much on it. Now flip that around and think about what Gemini is going to say about your firm. If a veterinarian is out there going, hey, what are the accountants? It's going to pick up one of those and then it'll say, oh, this firm is there, but they only mention veterinarians twice. It doesn't really have very much and there's no information about pricing. And you know they're not going to, they're not going to be recommending you. And the AI tools need to do that.

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I don't want to get too far off topic here, but how spooked should people be by others doing the same thing as them?

That's a great question. As soon as I was talking, I was like, somebody's sitting here listening, going, great. Why is this?

They'll be like, well, there's. There's another accounting firm that does real estate. They're like, I can't do real estate.

It's like, obviously there's no point. Yeah. So first off, I would say this is also why you question everything. Because Gemini is going to. Or any of these tools are going to present it in a way that is going to feel kind of like, oh, My God, they're so amazing. Secondly, go to the website yourself, like a normal human and see if what they're sharing is actually seems helpful or reasonable or human. Thirdly, think about your this is why your brand is so important. Your tone of voice, your style, your way of doing things. There are so many accountancy firms out there because not everybody wants the same accountant. So even though they have a specialist and they have a speaker and they have a video course, maybe there's a whole bunch of vets who just want a fairly personable human being where it's not too fancy and it's not too cheap, but it does good work and it's easy to sign up and it doesn't feel like they're joining the world's biggest corporation with 400 team members. So this is where the uniqueness of each firm is so important. Because every marketing strategy research document we create has at least four to six solid competitors. And every time we are able to say, here's a gap in the positionings, it doesn't mean those firms are doing a bad job. It means the they've chosen their position. And what you likely haven't done yet is choose yours. So the research is an opportunity to say, how will you position yourself? Is there a market for this? And the other thing to do is say, like, if you're in the early stages of this, you don't have to commit to renaming your firm and exclusively working with vets. Just create a few blog posts and a landing page. You know, keep it really simple, minimum viable marketing and try stuff. But what you're doing with research is saying, is it worth it to try stuff? It's a similar approach when we're doing a renaming process for a firm's branding. We always get them to go to a trademark lawyer and say, is there any reason we couldn't use this name? And we do that because rarely. But it does happen. The trademark lawyer comes back and says, if you use this, you're going to be in big trouble. Don't do it. In the finance and accounting industry. And it is very rare. I can think of two times in the past eight years that that's happened where they're top choice. And we do some initial research as much as we can, but we're not trademark lawyers. And the second instance was a couple weeks ago and we had the world's best name for this firm. And the trademark lawyer was like, you will get sued. And of course in trademark lawyer language was like, oh, it's very, very possible. And the Chances are high, so. But the reason I tell that story is imagine if we had built the whole brand, designed everything, done the imagery, built the website, got the domain, did the social posts, and then found this out. What a waste of time and money. So don't do that with your niche industry research. Just use the research to say, could this be a good idea? Can I test it a little? And if my tests work, then I'll do more of it. And maybe while I'm testing, I go, do you know what? Vets and medical practices, that's what I'm going to do. And it's going to be of this kind. And now I'm going to have two pages. And then if you find yourself getting a stage where you have 14 pages, you've probably gone a little too far and you need to focus.

Okay, so that's kind of the research side. We're going to get into the best tools for extracting useful bits from whatever context you have, be it the research you just did, be it meeting transcripts and then ideating and then writing. So on the extracting side, when you already have a pile of information with a specific goal in mind, what tools are you using for that? Interesting. ChatGPT wasn't in the first group. My mind goes to Notebook LM for extracting. But curious what your favorites are right now.

Yeah. And yeah, I was going to say, like, take all of this with. These are not rules. You know, if you want to use NotebookLM for extracting and you want to use GPT for research, you can. We tend to find. And we use all of these tools, so we tend to find that GPT is so cheerleader, it is so positive. It is so trying to tell you that you're the greatest, that its skills are a little less on research. Not that it couldn't do some research, but it is far more likely to tell you how great you are and how wonderful your ideas and how you absolutely need to, you know, pick vets, because that is the way. And the others seem to be a little more objective, giving you the information. So on the extracting, I would lean towards something like GPT or Claude. And there are multiple others as well, but those are the top two that a lot of our firms use because it's whichever one you're sort of defaulting to day by day. And we use GPT every single day. At pf, it knows PF well, we have projects for each of our clients, so it knows our clients. We can say, I am. This is for this client. And GPT is like, yeah, I got you. I got seven other projects here. I got the research, I got stuff you saved from Gemini. I got everything. I know what you're doing. So the more GPT knows about you as a firm and the more questions you and the team use, especially if you have a team account, literally no reason not to in 2026, get the whole team using them so that there's a combination of information that it has. And then you take all your research, drop it into GPT and say, this is a lot, given what you know about me and my firm. Ask me some questions about whether this is a good idea, where I could start and you could move into the ideating, I think in that as well.

Okay, so you're going back to your daily driver tool for this.

Most likely I would, I would lean towards that. You're trying to get it to summarize and hate saying that. Or like just every AI tool seems to be obsessed with like, do you want a summary? Do you want a summary? But in this case, it might actually be helpful to look for patterns. And I think that's why when we're saying extraction, you know, one of the things you can extract is here's a bunch of AI note taker recordings. Can you extract out the top questions people are asking? I've used it for case studies and testimonials to extract out the words and phrases that the client used. And again, I have to tell it, do not reword these, do not put it into different phrases. Phrases. Don't try and make it sound nicer. I want word for word. And I did this the other day and it is, it said, do you want me to take out any fillers like M or like. And I went, oh yeah, for sure. Take those out. So we did that and then there were still some fillers. So there was a couple stages and then finally I rewrote the thing based on what I knew of the client said, here's my final. And it was like, kind of didn't use that word. And I was like, oh, I know. But that's. I know. The client is like, okay. I was just pointing out and I thought, well, that's fine, that's all right. That's what I asked you to do. So, you know, giving it, the extracting bit is where you give it as much content as you can. Emails from clients, calls from clients, recordings. Like, if you have an in person meeting with a client, get one of those apps. I think Otter does it, I think Vinyl does it, where you can Put it on the app and just record. Of course, with the client's permission. But just say, like, I don't want to forget this. Is it cool if I hit record and then gather all of that and keep it in there? And you can use it to help support your research. You can use it for case studies and testimonials. You can use it for content which is down the road. So it gives you more data to get to the good stuff in your marketing.

Okay, so we've got this sort of body of information, and like you said, we probably started with the goal of I want to write some good stuff, I want to make something, and we're getting close to it. Now we've got sort of this body of information and have to bridge ourselves to the writing process via ideation. How do you, as like a very creative person that's put out every type of content you can imagine for someone who. Who maybe doesn't have the. The library in their head, of all the things you could do right, how do you come to an AI tool to even think through? What's the best way to br what.

I have to writing such a great question. That's actually one of the top questions our new clients always ask us because we use what we call marketing credits every month to use towards implementation work. So you buy a block of credits and every time they're like, what? What could I use credits for? Like, what kinds of things?

And we've actually spend my Karen bucks.

What's that?

How can I spend my Karen bucks?

PF bucks. PF bucks.

PF bucks.

Beyond just me. But we're like, we literally have a guide that we created that says, well, These people spent 14 credits and got this. These people spent six credits. And they're like, oh, I got all these ideas. But the short version is you might actually have to step back to research for a minute. Doesn't mean you have to leave. You know, you can stay in Claud or GPT if you want to. You can go back to one of the others. But the question is not what content do I create, it's what are the issues? Either from your, like, the AI research or from the what you've extracted. What are the summary of the issues, and what is the message that we want to get across to these people about this issue? So you got to start there, because we always start with, is a PDF guide a good idea? And there's so many questions behind that. Who's this for? What kind of format and platform did they prefer? Are they going to be on Instagram, are they going to be on TikTok? Are they going to be on LinkedIn? So in order to answer that question, you have to go back to, to get the ideas. You go, okay, I'm talking to these people about these issues. I want to get across this message to them. What kind of platforms and formats do they tend to use online? Like, and we do this in our competitor research, it will tell us. Lots of people are downloading this guide. There's a ton of activity on this YouTube channel or whatever it be, so you can find that out or get an idea of it and go. I think we're leaning more towards video than a written guide for these people. So say, for example, one of our clients works with trades businesses, plumbers, electricians, and they're not going to sit there and read a 45 page PDF guide. They're just not. But if you have a series of little 30 second videos and they're sitting on their phone in their truck waiting for somebody to come so they can get in the house and do the plumbing job, they will sit there and flick through those videos. So like we have a client who set up their entire onboarding based on that. They said, well, if videos is what they want, we're just going to do the whole thing in video format with the option to click a button and read everything. So the first question is what the person may be likely to prefer, like to read about or to consume this content. And then what might some of my options be? And I would still again go with what seems to be genuinely like popular, like what are people in this industry downloading, using, accessing and where do you get that from? What's your source? How do you know? Because I did a whole project with a client who wanted to work with wineries and wine businesses and he's got a lot of experience in it, but he's like, oh, there's this new wine business, how do I reach out to them? And I threw it into GPT and went back and forth and it was like, PDF guide, ebook is your answer. I'm like, really? Like this person has just opened up a wine shop and barely has time to breathe, much less order the wine they need. Do you think they're going to read this? And I said, give me all the reasons why it's a bad idea, give me all the reasons that I would drop this off and they would never read it. And that was great. It was super helpful. It was like, oh, and of course, great, good point, you know, love this but we finally got down to like a little printed booklet with QR codes with audio voice notes that they could listen to, which, you know, may or may not work, but it's, it's a lot more of a creative idea. And what you're trying to do is find something that is genuinely helpful and genuinely appealing rather than thinking, I need a lead magnet. I need a lead magnet. Everybody has a PDF guide. If I have a PDF guide, I will be important. That must be it. We're turning it around and saying if I was the owner of a wine business and more busy than I could think of, but really worried about my finances and this landed, I'd be most likely to connect with it.

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Learn more at the link down in the show. Notes. Okay, writing. Boy, LinkedIn's gotten awful. The comments, the post, the like, you're just, you're just seeing AI writing everywhere. Yeah, I'm not. A lot of folks are spooked by this. Honestly, I don't. Maybe it's because so much of my life is lived in, like, algorithms, and I know just how hard it is to get something to perform anywhere to where it's like, three years ago, 4 million YouTube videos a day were uploaded before generative AI, and you weren't seeing any of them. So, like, I, I think I still have faith that the best stuff, the human stuff, will always rise to the top.

But does that then mean that we.

Shouldn'T be using AI for writing at all? What's the happy medium of getting the best of both worlds?

That's a really good question. It's that, that big challenge right now, which is how do we use AI to help? And how do we recognize the fact that the whole world is out there going, is this real or not real? For everything that goes out there, for every LinkedIn post, every video, every picture, we are questioning there's a positive side to it, but there's. We're questioning every single thing our eyes see. I literally saw a video the other day that I was like, that is so cool. Wait a minute, is that real? Is that like, did somebody just literally create that? And we're constantly doing that. So if your potential buyer is doing that too, and they are carrying the weight, many of them, of a bad experience with a former accountant that they thought was going to Be great. It's like a double whammy. So first they're a little bit cynical or not trusting or worried or suspicious, as normal as any buyer would be and at certain levels. And then in addition, they're wondering if you're for real. Then I think it's important to consider what kind of content you're creating, where it's going, and how you can address that question from their minds of whether this is real. And the single best way to do that is to bring your humanity into. Doesn't mean we don't use AI, but it means in general, I would lean towards using AI to help you research, help you plan, help you ideate, help you gather, help you summarize, help you look for patterns like do that stuff that would take you 10 days to do and now you can do in 20 minutes. And then, and even use it to say, here's the suggested structure of the post or here's a starting point. But don't accept the first output. Don't accept the third output. Get either your human eye or somebody who knows you, a content writer, an editor, a freelancer, or somebody who has your brand book and has your brand voice and has all your stuff and can look at it and go, yep, I know that person. And that sounds real. So it either has to be you or someone who knows you really well. And if you skip that step and you begin to descend into this like, yeah, I'm sure it's good enough, then in three to six months time, all your stuff is going to be generic. Nobody's going to trust it. It's not going to do you much good.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that like of these four things, research, extraction, ideating, and writing, that writing is almost the last place. Like if you had to remove AI from one of those altogether, you would.

Remove it from writing 100%. Because, you know, when we thought 10, 20 years ago about what AI could do, we imagined it would take away all the boring stuff so that we could create more, so that we could draw and write and paint and tell stories and bring out our humanity. And now somehow the AI tools have become the writers and the artists and you know, we're sitting here doing the boring stuff. So I think, you know, make the AI tools stuff do the, the heavy lifting. Like the things that I've had AI do for me is fantastic. Like within seconds I get to stuff that would have taken me seven hours a year ago, two years ago. But I personally. This is your choice. But I personally never put out Any piece of content that I have not either fully written or talked out, like, I have put it in voice notes and gathered from other writing and reviewed myself personally. That is my choice. That is very important to me. Writing is extremely important to me. And, and I enjoy it. So that helps. But also, I do take that very seriously of, I want people to know that if they're reading a blog post, they can know that it's mine, and if they're reading my book, they know it's mine. And if they're watching my video, and that all matches. So if you meet me at an event, it matches what you read in the blog post. And if you get an email, you're like, yeah, that sounds like the kind of thing that she would say. And AI is getting better to pull those out. But it's still your job, I believe, to check and to make sure that it matches so that it doesn't slowly descend into something that's not you. And you can have systems for that and you can, you can build better prompts and make it faster and faster and faster. I have definitely used GPT to help me collate my knowledge about a topic in a blog post. So much faster than ever before. Like, I'll sit there in the car with the voice note on and just talk about. I did a whole blog post on why brand elements are a really important part of brand. And I just talked out everything I could think of, and it was a big old mess. And by the end of the drive, I had some fantastic content. And about a half an hour later, I had the blog post and then AI helped me put the headers in and the headers that are good for SEO and that are good to put into WordPress. And it knows all of that. So, you know, use all of those things. But just check to make sure that your humanity is coming across because your buyer is wondering that.

All the fear around, just like endless slop. Like, I, I, I think the, the folks who are doing the lazy version of it, like, I, I hope the world filters that stuff appropriately. But I, I just struggle to see any world where taste isn't ultimately what wins. And it feels like taste is not something that, like, taste in the eye of a human is not something that I will nail. Like, the analogy I always come back to is like, if I had chatgpt decorate my house and I was just like, pick out all my furniture, here's what I got. It would kind of by definition come back to you with the most vanilla, most average thing, right? But I could find a prompt and I could watch a YouTube video that's like, hey, my lead magnets.

The 30 best prompts to give you.

The coolest living room set. Like, and so I could give it different prompts, I could do different ways.

Yeah. But there's still going to be a.

Day where you walk into somebody's house and you're like, this is sick. What is this?

Right?

Like, the. Like, this is super cool.

Yeah.

And so to me, like. Like film and, like, writing and all that. Like, there's just this. And hopefully this isn't like a Luddite thing to say, but there's just this element of someone's humanity that's unique to them. That is still what we attach ourselves to.

Well, I think it comes back to the amalgamation issue currently. Like, we were talking about AI continually being obsessed with summarizing things. That is a good indicator of what AI considers its job to be. It is amalgamating, it is combining, it is bringing together. It is summarizing constantly. It's as far as I can tell, and I use it a lot. And I was in the time before we had it, so I can remember the difference. I feel like it. It feels like its job is to give you the summary, give you the most people feel this way sort of thing. Whereas what you're talking about there and what I'm talking about, true creativity, uniqueness, the uniqueness of the individual human spirit. There's no human person on this earth who is the same as another. And yet if we're not careful, we allow that to get stripped out so that we're like, yeah, but pretty much everybody thinks this. And the things that stand out the most in songs or films or blog posts or books or whatever, is when you're like, gosh, that is so Jason. That is so this person to do that. Or you listen to a song and you know immediately who the artist is, and you don't even know how you know, but you can tell that there's a difference to their voice. And currently, again, still, you can pretty much tell. You're like, huh, something's off with that. Something's off something's machine with that. So, yeah, I'm. I'm with you on that one big time in a. Again, in a very positive way. This isn't we hate the machines. This is like, use them so that your uniqueness, either you personally or your firm, can truly come out. Because the best marketing says, this is who we are. And then the sales process confirms it. And the client onboarding and client experience confirms it further. So if your marketing says, eh, we're kind of bland and we're like everyone else, and then the sales process goes, actually, we're kind of funny and we say these things and this happens. Somebody's like, oh, that. You don't want people to be surprised, even pleasantly. You want them to go, yep, that's what I saw. I watched your video and then I met you and then I worked with you and it's all even. It all goes together. These are my people. And back to your point about, you know, what if there's other competitors out there? That's another beauty of the uniqueness of humanity in accounting firms. Because accounting firms are made up of unique human people. That you have your own values and your own culture. And some people will love that and some people will not. And good marketing divides. So it causes the people to go, well, I don't want the small firm with three people who wear jeans and backwards baseball caps. That's not cool. I want the suits. I want the 400 people. No problem. There's an accountant for everyone. But be the truest sense of who you are and let that show so that your people can find you and vice versa.

It's interesting that AI used wrong sort of generalizes you. But pre AI you could argue that was maybe the thing we've struggled with most is being afraid to say anything. Besides, we provide peace of mind. You know, like we like the whole just very vanilla thing. Like we AI is pushing us that direction, but maybe at the end of the day we're actually still blocked by the same thing. Okay, very existential things for us to all consider. You have been running this basically an eight week accelerator for quite a while. As in you've done a bunch of iterations of them. But now for the first time you're doing this through the lens of AI. That same sort of accelerator. But what does it now mean, using AI tools and all that.

Yeah, so the accelerator, we've got the. The elements of marketing that are in the accountant marketer book that I wrote. And then the coaching group is, let's go through those in order. First you think of your audience, then you look at what their issues are, everything we talked about today. And because accountants are using AI in their marketing, which I fully support and want you to be using it. Well, this new version of the accelerator is okay, all of those principles are still there, but as you are considering your audience, go and research it. And here's how to research it. If you're determining what their issues are. Here's how to extract it and here's how to get it. If you are going to write a blog post, we have lots of resources like blog post briefs and templates and a PFGPT you can use. But the encouraging thing to me is we're reflecting the fact that more than ever I am seeing accountants getting actually energized about being involved in their own marketing because they see a little hope and GPT or any of the AI tools are a little, possibly a little more welcoming to them than some marketing agencies have been. So maybe they've gone to a marketing agency and they're like, here's your Google Analytics, you know, hope it goes well. And they're like, I don't understand but I feel kind of stupid and I don't know, sort of how your clients feel when they come to you as an accountant. They don't know their numbers. So what's exciting to me is accountants are now going, well, I can play with this a little. I could try this. I could do something. So the accelerator group is to get a bunch of you together, usually about 30, 20 to 30, but right now we're just about coming close to 30 accountants in the group who meet together once a week. And we have the topic, whether it's audience or website or blogs or video, and we talk about what you want to create or what you want to do or what you're wondering. And then we talk about how to bring AI into that conversation, into that experience so that you can get stuff done. And then we will review anything you create during that group so it's support and accountability over that.

That period kicks off in about a week and from what I've gathered, only a few spots left. You also can bring team members along, like if you're like, I don't want to just do this myself, like bring a couple of folks from the team, do it together. Yeah, we'll link more about that down below. Also, your book, which is just a killer mind opening accountants none of us identifies. I'm a marketer, but it's just a very accessible version of that. But Karen, it is always lovely to see you and thank you so much for coming.

Yeah, it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.