AI and NotebookLM: Tools for Better Strategic Insights for Accounting Firms

Right. Today, then we're going to look at how we can use, how we can use AI better, specifically to help with strategy. So it's coming up to that time of the year, end of the year, where certainly I always think about strategy. I think about how am I going to make 2025 the best year so far? It's something that I strongly recommend you do in your accounting firms. If you want 2025 to be a great year for you, then now is a good time to start thinking about what are you going to do different, what are the strategies? And for those of you that do business advisory work helping your clients, then you should also be helping them make 2025 an awesome year by helping them with their strategies, their strategic planning. And one of the things we can do is we can use AI to help us with this. So I'm going to talk about in this session, what we're going to look at is firstly, how can we, number one, guide AI to better understand our business and our strategic needs? Or think of it another way, how can we guide AI to better understand the strategic needs of our clients if you are doing any form of advisory? So how can we guide AI? How can we train it in strategic needs in our business? And I'm going to look at things like what are the sorts of information that we can gather, pull together as part of this process. And then we're going to look at a couple of AI tools that will really help with this. First, we're going to look at one of the things you can do that's really powerful inside ChatGPT. Now this is going to use custom GPTs which are really simple to use. They're really powerful. However, I will say that at the moment, to build your own GPTs, you need to have a ChatGPT plus account or a Teams account. ChatGPT is very inexpensive. It's currently 20 bucks a month. And there's some awesome things that you can do with the paid for account. I strongly recommend it. If you've only got the free account, then some of the things that we can do with a GPT you could still do with a free account. And I'll let you know what you can do. And I'm also going to then talk about another tool that you can use which is really powerful, another AI tool. And this is one that's completely free at the moment. And for this type of strategic planning for either your business or your clients businesses, this tool is extraordinary. It's really, really good. So that's our agenda for Today we're going to look at how do we train AI into our strategic needs, what documents we need to get together for that. Then we'll look at how we can do that in ChatGPT, and then we'll look at another tool that's free, that I think is extraordinary. And you're going to love this tool. So let's first of all talk though about in part one, let's talk about how would we train an AI system in, in terms of what our business is. We need to feed AI with context. We need to give it information about our business or our client's business if we're doing advisory. And so we need to get together information about our business. And I think from this point onwards, I will just say our business, your accounting firm. But when I say that, also think about in your mind, everything I'm going to say today is also equally powerful. If you are doing business advisory, if you are helping a client to build a more successful, profitable business, okay, but rather than me keep saying all the time, your business or your client's business, I'll talk about your business. Because one of the things you should think about is your firm, your accounting firm, your bookkeeping business, that should be thought of as your most important client, your number one client is your business. That's the one that you need to make successful first. And strategy. Strategic thinking is really, really important. Very often we are in the profession, we're so busy doing client work. I think about my time as a sole practitioner, which I started my business in 1996 and I sold it in 2006. In the early years, I was just busy doing it, doing it, doing it, doing the client work, reacting to clients demands, firefighting, solving problems all the time. In the first few years, I never really took that step back and look at things holistically. It was only when I started doing that did I start to build a more successful business. So we need to do that, we need to take that step back and think about strategy. And so this is where AI really, really helps. In fact, I think that large language models like ChatGPT, like Claude's Anthropic, like Google's Gemini and many others, they've all got many strengths, they're very good for certain things. They're great for creating content marketing, for example. I think the number one strength for us in our profession of large language models like ChatGPT is strategic thinking. Coming up with ideas, brainstorming, strategic thinking, which is great for us. And it's also great, I think that business Advisory is one of those powerful things we can use it for. So we need to think about how we first, though, train up AI. Because if you went into, let's say, ChatGPT and said to it, give me 10 great strategies to make 2025 the best year ever. It's going to give you 10 ideas, but they're going to be so generic because it doesn't know about your business. The more information you can provide about your business, the more specific the strategies will be, the better the results that you will get. So what are the sorts of things that we should pull together? What information should we get? And remember, if you're using, if you're familiar with ChatGPT, then one of the things we can do is when we start a new chat, we can upload documents. You can upload up to 10 documents. It gives it that context, that background information that will get better result. So what documents would we upload into a large language model like ChatGPT? Well, firstly, we could load our business plan. Do you have a business plan? Possibly not. So, my thoughts on business plans. When I started my accounting firm way back in the 1990s, I got excited by business plans. And when I started my firm, I wrote in the first few months of my accounting firm back in 1996, because I didn't have many clients, I wrote a business plan and I studied and looked at and learned what would make a great business plan. What do you put in a business plan? I spent weeks writing a business plan. I was really proud of it. When I'd finished writing my business plan, I put it in a drawer and then I forgot all about it because I got busy doing client work. And that's been the. I think that's the problem in the past with business plans, that very often people spend a lot of time creating a business plan and don't do anything with it. Unless, of course, you are creating a business plan because you need it as part of raising finance. Perhaps you're raising finance and the bank, the lender, is asking to see your business plan. So, yes, business plans have a place. They may be essential as part of raising finance, but I think historically for many business businesses, they created business plans. They've put them in a drawer somewhere and then forgotten about them. That was me. I was guilty of that. And so I then became, over the years, I then started to become a bit disenchanted with the idea of business plans and I didn't really see the importance of them. However, that's now changed because one of the Big strengths of having a business plan is it's a great way of then training AI in the key parts of your business, in understanding your business. So I think a business, if you're going to do strategic planning for your business, your accounting firm, I think it's really, really important to have a business plan. And if you are going to do business advisory with clients and you want to use AI, then again, having a business plan to upload is powerful. Now of course it takes time to write a business plan. It took me weeks back in 1996 when I started my accounting firm. There is some good news though. There is some good news is when we understand the right prompts to use, then it's easier than ever to create a business plan using a tool like ChatGPT. And that's what I do. You could use ChatGPT to build a business plan in rather than weeks, in less than a day. Okay, so that's one thing that would be worth having, having a business plan. It doesn't, you don't have to, there's other things that you could pull together, but that will be one document to consider having to feed to a AI system. Number two, another thing that you could feed either as well or, or instead is a SWOT analysis.

I think that's a. Sometimes it's an underrated business consulting model because everyone's heard of SWOT and sometimes they dismiss it as being over simplistic. It's actually extremely powerful. If you've never heard of it before, I'm sure you have, but just in case you haven't, it stands for strengths and weaknesses, which is the internal side of you and your business. What are your strengths, what are your weaknesses? And then looking externally, what, what are the opportunities facing your practice, your business? What are the threats facing you? And that's essentially what a SWOT analysis is. I used to do it all the time when I was doing business advisory work in my accounting firm. I think it's a powerful tool as part of advisory work. And once you've done that SWOT analysis, it's a useful thing to give to an AI system when you are doing strategic thinking. If the, if AI like ChatGPT understands what the strengths of your business is, what the weaknesses are, what are the opportunities and what are the threats, then it's going to help you come up with great strategies to capitalize on those strengths, to capitalize on the opportunities, and to mitigate your weaknesses and threats. I found that with the right prompts, ChatGPT is amazing at strategic thinking. When you feed it a SWOT analysis. Now, it doesn't have to be swot. There are many different business consulting tools swot. It just happens to be the most widely understood, the most well known one. There are many others that you could use. I love the Business Model Canvas. There's Pest Analysis, Piece Analysis, Balanced Business Scorecard. There are dozens of different business consulting tools and you could use any number of them to start to come up with some strategic insights into your business, which you could then pass on to an AI system. I just think SWOT's a great place to start. And again, just like building a business plan, if you've never done a SWOT analysis before for your firm, then with the right prompts, AI makes it really easy to do a powerful SWOT analysis. Okay, what else could you, what other documents might you want to pull together as part of your preparation for strategic planning? Well, you might want to pull guys from financials, Perhaps the last 12 months, P& L, perhaps some forecasts and as you, as you probably know, Chat GPT, for example, that you can feed it Excel spreadsheets. It can understand Excel spreadsheets. Or if you prefer, you could save your Excel spreadsheets as PDF documents. It understands both perfectly well. So financials will be a good thing to put into an AI tool. What else? I think then, if we think about marketing, there's some powerful things because I'm guessing as part of your strategy for your firm for next year, I'm going to guess you want to grow your firm, you want to make 2025 your best year ever. And so if you want it to come up with some strategies for you for growing an accounting firm, then some useful things to give you information would be what is your ideal customer profile? I hope you do have one. It's really powerful. Every accounting firm should have a marketing strategy. Every accounting firm should have an ideal customer profile. So we know who are the right clients, but who are the wrong ones? Who are the ones that we should avoid. So at ideal customer profile, taking that to another level in the value pricing academy, I teach marketing strategy in three steps. And the first step of marketing strategy is really making a decision on who is your ideal client. What's an ideal client to you? Is it in a particular geographic area? Is it in a particular industry? Is it a particular stage of the business cycle? Do you like startups? Do you like people thinking of exiting? Is it a particular.

Personality type? You want people who are ambitious, for example, people who are financially well off, for example. So there's all these different characteristics, and you need to think about what is your ideal client. That's a decision that you make. It's the first step of marketing strategy. It's something I didn't do back in 1996, and I so wish I did, because for two and a half years I built a company, complete mess of a practice, with every possible type of client you could think of. I was a busy fool trying to deal with so many clients, many of whom were C and D clients. In hindsight, I would have been better off without some of my clients because I just took on anybody. It wasn't until I discovered the power of an ideal customer profile that I started targeting the right clients. I started building a better firm with better clients. So that's the first part of marketing strategy. The second part.

Is once we understand or once we've decided who is our ideal client, then we want to carry out some research to understand those particular ideal clients. And we want to understand, for example, what are the particular challenges those clients have. So if, for example, you decide that you want to build an accounting firm and your ideal client is.

Multi partner businesses in the medical industry, they could be doctors, they could be dentists, perhaps that's where you want to focus your energy, then we need to figure out if that's you. If you want to get inside the head of the partners of medical firms, doctors, dentists, and you want to find out what their biggest problems, their biggest challenges, their pain points, what are the things that keeps them awake at night, what are their fears, what are their worries, what are the things they want and what are the things that they aspire to, their goals. Because the better you can understand what's going on in the heads of your ideal clients, let's say it's the partners in medical firms, then the better your marketing is going to be because you need to create marketing that speaks to those ideal clients. And so what you build in marketing, we call that a customer avatar or, or a customer Persona. And what you want to do is build customer avatars for your ideal clients. Okay, it can be more than one avatar. Even if you have a very niche practice with a very specific type of ideal client, you may still have multiple different Personas, you may have two or three. And you want to carry out that research and understand that, because that's going to make your marketing much, much more powerful going forward.

I can almost guarantee that 99.9% of accounting firms in the world do not have customer avatars. Why? Because it means doing market research and we are accountants. We don't like marketing and we just want to do the, we just want to do the client work. And I understand that. I never did that. However, once again, once again, AI really helped. One of the things I found is that AI is really powerful and at building customer avatars or customer Personas. It's so, so powerful and it does it in seconds with the right prompt, it does it super fast. Why is this important? Because when you have a customer avatar, anything, you want it to create any written, anything in writing. If you want to write, for example, an ebook or a blog post or a social post, and you want to do it because you want to attract your ideal clients, then the more those blog posts, those ebooks, those social posts speak to the specific challenges, problems that are going on in the minds of your customers. The more you'll attract their interest, they'll start reading your stuff, the more you'll build up a following of people who are your ideal customers. It's really critically important. And the great news is AI can do that really, really fast. And so if you've got one or more customer avatars or Personas, we have two. For example, we work with, we help the owners of accounting firms, and in our business, we predominantly work with one of two types. Either the owners of small firms of accountants, sole practitioners, two partners typically, or the owners of bookkeeping firms, very often solo bookkeepers, sole practitioner bookkeepers, but sometimes some small bookkeeping businesses. And what we find is that accountants and bookkeepers, whilst they're very similar, they have different things that worry them, different types of issues. And so if I wanted to write an ebook, if I was writing an ebook for accountants, then it might be that one of the things they want to learn is how to use AI for better tax planning, which probably wouldn't be of much interest to a bookkeeper. So if we're a bookkeeper, we might write an ebook, which is how to value price cleanup work. So we'd have different content for the two different avatars, if that makes sense. And you would be the same. You will have multiple avatars. And when you've got that avatar, anytime you use AI to help you create a blog post, for example, it's going to write something much, much better, that's going to work much more powerfully. Okay, number this is the sixth and final thing to think about is consider having a document that contains market research and specific industry analysis, industry reports, in our case, market research into the accounting industry and specific things about the accounting industry that of course might be part of a business plan, it could be a separate document. Okay, so that's the first step that we want to think about. If we want to use AI for strategic thinking, we need to train it in our strategic needs. And so those are the sorts of things that you could pull together. Do you need all of them? No, the more the better. But you could do some great strategic planning with just a business plan or with just a SWOT analysis, for example. A SWOT analysis plus your website.

So that's step one. Think about what would be some great documents. Now then, let's start to get into the exciting stuff, which is what can we do with AI now that we have that? And as with all that stuff, as I said, we can use AI to help us create those documents. Once we've got those documents for our business or our clients businesses, what we can do is use there's two great tools that we can use. So number one, let's start with ChatGPT, because I think you've all heard of ChatGPT, and most of you, I think are using ChatGPT. And so one of the things we could do is if we want to do some strategic planning, we could just start a brand new chat and that would be okay to do. We could start a brand new chat. And with ChatGPT, you can upload up to 10 documents. So you could start a brand new chat and you could ask it to come up with some strategic thoughts for you. Your prompt could be some strategic thoughts and you might say in the prompt something like, I, I have given you, I have uploaded my business plan, I've uploaded my SWOT analysis, and this is my firm's website. I want you to first read the documents, read the website, so you fully understand my business. Once you've done that, confirm that you understand it. So the first prompt, I would always make the first prompt. If you're doing an exercise like this one that I call the context creator, it's making sure that you've given ChatGPT the context and you've asked it to confirm it understands when it comes back, which will take probably about five seconds, if not less, it'll probably say, I now understand your business. It might even summarize it. So now it understands it. Now we can ask whatever questions we want. We could ask it, please come up with 10 ways that I could grow my business next year. Come up with three ways to solve my biggest challenges. Whatever the prompts might well be, you're going to get much, much better results because you've created that Context because you've given some information. Now the problem with doing that approach is that every time you start a brand new chat you have to retrain it, you have to re upload the documents and give it context. Now of course you could stay within the one chat and that's okay to do, but as you probably are aware, there's no Easy Way in ChatGPT to manage your history of chats. I use it every day over on the left hand side. My list of chats is just crazy long. If I want to find an old one, it's really difficult. Fortunately, very recently they did bring in the search facility. So you can search for old chats, but it's not very easy to find an old chat and then build on it. So very often which just start a brand new chat and therefore you have to train it again and give it context. The other problem with doing this type of strategic planning within a chat, even if you do it within one chat, there's something called the context window. And what that means is that after a certain number of tokens, which is the way that AI systems count in tokens, it forgets stuff. Just like human beings, we forget stuff. And so as you create more prompts and get more and more answers, what will happen is eventually it'll forget the early stuff. And of course it's the first thing, the first prompt is where you gave it the context. So if you keep building on this conversation, at some point it's going to forget the context, which isn't very good. So we can do strategic planning inside a chat. But much better, much better is to build a GPT. This is what I would do. As I said at the outset, at the moment you do need to have a paid for account with OpenAI to build your own GPTs. But it's so powerful, why wouldn't you? So I have a GPT that I've built which I call strategic development and Prioritization. It's for our business, it's the, for the value pricing academy. And let me, I'm going to just show it very quickly if you're watching, if you're watching listening on a podcast, then you can check this out on YouTube. If I go across to just show chat to you. So this is what GPT looks like when you're building a GPT. It's really simple. OpenAI made it so easy to build GPTs. It takes very little time. The time consuming bit is simply collecting the source knowledge, the business plan, the SWOT analysis, the ideal customer profile, and then writing the prompt, but other than that, it's really quick, you just give it a name. I call this one Strategic Development and Prioritization. And then I wrote the instructions for what I want it to do. I'll come back to that. And then you can upload into the knowledge base. The advantage of this approach, as opposed to creating just a prompt, is that firstly, you can upload more documents into knowledge base. I believe it's 20, although I'm not sure you'd want to do that. But I think the most important thing is once you put documents into a knowledge base. So for hour one, we have our business plan, we have our customer Personas for both accountants and bookkeepers. We have.

All of the wording from our websites, we have a list of our features and the benefits of what we do. The great news is that every time you use that GPT, even with a brand new chat, so you might do this every single year, do strategic planning. Each time you come back to it to do the GPT, you don't have to re remind it of the context. It's built into the knowledge base. It's already there, you only have to do it once, you only have to upload the knowledge once. And it's always there every time you start a brand new chat using your custom GPT. In this case, it's the one that I've called Strategy GPT Development and Prioritization.

And the only other aspect to it is then writing the task, the prompt, if you like, this is the prompt that it'll run every single time. And.

Whilst I've got quite a long prompt for mine, there's only really one important part of the prompt with this type of GPT. And so my prompt, it starts off by giving it a, give it a Persona, a role to play. I ask it to play the role of a business strategy consultant specialized in using a particular scoring model. Let's not worry about that. But then the task for it is its task is to develop and develop business strategies, ideas and tactics. That's what I want it to do.

But I want us to do it in a series of steps. And what I wanted to do is step number one. This is the important one. Step one is to review business context, in other words, to review all the provider documents.

That I provided you. And what I've actually written here is review all provider documents listed in strategy documents to understand the unique aspects of the business. And then further down I have a section called Strategy Documents and I've just listed the file names of the documents I've given into his knowledge base. And so it says here in this section of the, in this section of the prompt, under strategy documents it says ensure you understand the business by analyzing the following documents in your knowledge base. It then lists business plan, featured benefits, etc. And I've also added analyze the business website and it's got our website, valuepricingacademy.com and so every time I start a brand new chat with this GPT, step one, it's going to go and read, analyze those documents, which it does in seconds, which basically means it understands the business. And then you could go on to ask any prompts that you want. Now in this particular one, step two and step three, these are less important. Less important. What my GPT does is it will then generate a strategy list. It'll come up with some structures for the business. And in step three, it'll use something called the ICE scoring to rank each of the strategies. Not that that in itself is particularly important. The most important thing is step one, the GPT will read the knowledge base, understand the business.

I think this is particularly powerful if you are doing business advisory. So as well as your business, let's say you're doing business advisory and you probably at any point in time only work with a small number of clients. You may have a portfolio of 100 clients for tax returns and annual financial statements preparation. But business advisory, you tend to spend spend time working with less clients. It might be working with 3, 4, 5 clients with business advisory. What I would do, and I've done this with some businesses in Portugal I work with, I have built GPTs for specific businesses. And that means that every time, say two, three months later, you've got a meeting with your client and they've got another challenge. They want some help from you or some ideas or some advice to help them with a particular problem. Then you can just go back to your GPT, open up a brand new chat and just say, my client is struggling with this particular challenge. Can you give me some ideas? And it'll take you seconds to do that. The result will come back in seconds and you do not have to do all the training because the documents are already in there. So that's why custom GPTs are really powerful. I think they're great for strategy. You should definitely have one for your business. And then if you're doing advisory, think about building a GPT for specific clients. Okay, that's ChatGPT. That's how we might use ChatGPT for strategic planning. There is another tool that we could use. You see, there are some downsides or disadvantages, weaknesses, if you like, perhaps a better word, weaknesses of ChatGPT. The weaknesses of ChatGPT are, firstly, we can only upload so many documents into in a prompt. I believe it's 10. If it's a custom GPT, it's 20. And that's a little bit of a weakness, probably not a huge weakness, because in reality you probably won't have 10 documents. I listed six earlier, six strategy documents. That's probably more than sufficient. But a more important weakness, and this is a big weakness, is again, this idea of the context window, and that is one of the weaknesses of ChatGPT is if you feed it long documents, it doesn't necessarily read it all. And so if you're feeding it a business plan, if it's a three or four page business plan, that's great. But if it's a long business plan, then there's a danger of that. ChatGPT will not, whenever you ask a prompt, it won't consider every aspect of the business plan. So it tends to. When you build putting documents into a knowledge base into a GPT, then what I've discovered is that it's better to keep the documents you upload into a GPT relatively short, 1, 2, 3 pages. The longer they are, the more likely they won't read all the information.

And interestingly.

Large language models, they have some. Because they've been trained by humans, they have some of our quirks. So research shows that strangely, they also suffer from the laws of primacy and recency. And what that means is that.

Whenever we learn something, perhaps you're watching webinar, perhaps this, perhaps today's session, you'll probably find a week from now, you are likely to remember, most likely to remember what I said at the start and what I said at the end, but everything in the middle, you will probably forget. And interestingly, it's very similar with large language models. When you feed them really long documents, they tend to miss the stuff out in the middle. Interesting. It's the same with prompts. If you start creating long prompts, which I do, then sometimes the longer they get, elements get ignored, missed, usually the stuff in the middle. Which is why I always, if I have a long prompt, at the end of the prompt, I repeat the most important parts, the most important things. I have a section which I call the rules. I give it the rules, the reminder of the most important things. Which of course is the same with humans. If you give one of your team members a job to do and you explain it with a lengthy explanation. The longer that explanation is, the more likely they'll forget things. So what we tend to do is at the end we'll say and remember, most important, do this, this and this. We summarize and remind the main things because that way they won't forget. Okay, so let's talk about this other tool because we have this weakness of the number of documents, but most important the length of documents. One of the strengths of Google and they have their Gemini product, Google's strength is that they have much, much bigger context windows, which means we can feed larger documents, which is great if we've got things like a big business plan. And they brought out a tool back in July of 2023, which until recently almost nobody really heard about. It was in beta. It hasn't been talked about a lot until I noticed that social media YouTube exploded in in October of 2024 with this particular tool. You may have heard of it, it's called NotebookLM. It's a Google tool, NotebookLM, and it's really powerful. It's great for this type of work which we're talking about today. And it's free at the moment. It's free. It's become talked about because they introduced some new features in the last few weeks. During the course of October, early November, they built in new features, making it really, really powerful. So what is NotebookLM? Well, it's essentially you create notebooks and notebooks, you then feed with context and then you can ask questions. So.

Go and search on Google for NotebookLM and Go and get yourself an account. It's free. I suspect as it's getting more and more popular, Google will charge for it at some point in time, I guess they will probably do the same as ChatGPT. They'll still probably keep a free account, but they may end up having a paid for account for premium features. I don't know. I don't know what Google strategy is with this, but as at today, you can get all the features for free. So why wouldn't you? And so if what we can do with it, and there's lots of use cases, it's great for learning. It's great for learning. One of the things that you can do is I was recently learning about behavioral economics.

Which I'm a big fan of. And I was fascinated by the teachings of one of the leading marketers called Rory Sutherland. And Rory Sutherland has it on his YouTube channel or on various YouTube channels. There are lots of amazing presentations, interviews, podcasts with Roy Sutherland Very often they're over an hour long. And so if I wanted to research and learn more about his approach to behavioral economics and marketing, I would have to watch hours and hours of YouTube videos. But with Google LM, you can just upload the link to them and that then becomes context, then you can ask questions about it. So I grabbed half a dozen great YouTube videos, all about an hour or more long. I put them into a notebook and then I could go and.

Have a conversation, ask questions about the content by viewing the chat, and then I can save those chat messages as little notebooks. So I have a notebook about. For example, he talks about Uber and how their marketing is so clever and what we can do to learn from Uber.

I have a prompt with five practical ways that accounting firms could use the teachings of Roy Sutherland to help with marketing in their firm. So that's an example of we can use it for learning stuff.

But let's get back into the context of today. It's great for strategic thinking. I have one called the Value Pricing Academy. It's a notebook and it's one that I've been using for my strategic thinking over the last few weeks. And here's some things about NotebookLM. So when you start a brand new notebook, you can think of it as building a, think of it as building a GPT, a custom GPT, but really fast. You just start a brand new notebook and the first thing you do is you feed it sources information. And just like ChatGPT, you can drag in documents, you can drag in PDFs, for example, text files, markdown audio files like MP3. You can also attach Google documents if you use Google. I don't, I'm an Apple user. But you could, you can also attach links to websites and you can also attach YouTube videos. So there's lots of different types of information that you can give it and you can feed. And here's the, here's the interesting two points. Thinking about the weaknesses of Chat GPT, you can upload up to 50 pieces of information. So plenty of information. You can upload 50 documents or 50 documents, YouTube videos, websites, whatever. And you also, because of the context window, they can be long documents like for example an hour long YouTube video, which if you were to get the transcription, you would see it's a very long transcription. So what I did for Value Pricing Academy is I uploaded the business plan, the customer Personas, the features and benefits and I also uploaded five of our websites. Our website and then pages for the Value Pricing Academy and so on. And then I can go in and I can start a chat and just like ChatGPT, I can ask it a question, any question I like and it will give me the answers based upon the context that I've given it. So if I said, if I said a chat, like give me, I don't know, give me three strategies for growing the business, then I wouldn't need to give it. I can keep the prompts really simple because it's now going to go, it's got all that context, it's got the information about the business and it's going to go and do exactly that. It's going to give me some ideas and it's going to give me, it always gives you the links to where it's got the information from. So citations, you can always, it'll tell you which of the documents, the informations, if it's using source information. And then just like with ChatGPT, we can then.

Add further prompts. We could take idea number one and we could say, tell me more about idea number one. Let me know how I could use that particular idea.

So that's NotebookLM. I love it for strategic planning because of the fact it's so quick and easy to create a notebook. It's so easy to add documents. We can add up to 50 documents. We've got so much context. So my recommendation to you is grab yourself an account while it's free. I can't promise it will always be free, but grab that upload, start a notebook for your firm, drag in some strategic documents and start having a conversation with it and seeing what it comes up with.

Okay, I think it's time for questions. I can see we've had a few questions. Before we dive into questions, I have.

Just two quick things and then we'll spend the next 10, 15 minutes on questions. Two quick things. Firstly, if you found this valuable so far.

Please let me know by hitting the thumbs up, the like button. Whether you're on YouTube or wherever. I really appreciate, appreciate that. So let me know if you've enjoyed it and also let me know in the comments what's been your biggest insight today? What's been your takeaway of all the things we've talked about, which is a lot. Of all the things we talked about, what's the thing that excites you the most? Always the takeaway, the learning point. Because that feedback, I'd love to get that feedback. I want to know what it is that you found really interesting. Second thing, as well as give me some feedback through the thumbs up button, through Some what you've enjoyed. Let me just very quickly also say if you are I've mentioned a few times the Value Pricing Academy. If you are not yet in the Value Price Academy and you want to learn more about how you can build a more successful accounting firm. If you want to. If you want to learn how to make more get more out of AI things like ChatGPT. If you want to do more business advisory, then check out the Value Pricing Academy and join and join the other almost 500 accounting firms I work with around the world. I know some of them are actually here. I recognize your names. We do have three levels. A mastery level of the I'm going to get Sarah to put a link to this page so you can go and explore it if you've not already. Level three is our top level membership. That's mastery and the main feature of Mastery. This is for firms that want to be at the leading edge. In mastery we teach you in detail how to add huge value through business advisory and also leading edge topics like how to get the very best out of AI tools. Level 2 growth is for you where we focus on how to just grow a great compliance firm so how to value price and systemize and grow a profitable compliance firm. And all of that content is in mastery as well. And foundations is a great place to start. If you're not sure about level three or level two, I always recommend start with level one, start with the foundations and on the topic of AI, what we do is with all levels you get access to a prompt library with ready to use prompts. We have a monthly curriculum now for 90 minutes a month. You get live training from Emily on how to get more out of AI and many many more stuff in foundations. So go and check those out and it'll be great to have you on board as part of our community of accounting firms around the world. Okay, let's dive into questions. So just bear me a second while I go back through and look for the first of the capital Q's. There were lots of comments. I can see Catherine hall hi Catherine, great to see. I did an interview with Catherine a few months back. She's a great success story. She's in the academy getting great results. QQ Jim said hi Jim. Upload CSV format I think that was when I was talking about you can upload spreadsheets. And so with ChatGPT it will accept both CSV and Excel.

I found that when uploading Excel spreadsheets, firstly I understand that you get a slightly better analysis using CSV Files versus Excel. So if it's in CSV, if you can get the data in CSV, I would use that rather than Excel because that's what I'm told. But they both work. When you upload an Excel spreadsheet, when it analyzes that, it's going to use code interpreter, basically it writes some Python code in seconds to then do the analysis you asked for. So if you give it, let's say, a profit loss account and you want it to calculate for you some ratios, then what it will do is it will read the Excel spreadsheet, it'll figure out writing a little piece of software in seconds with Python to then give you the ratios. And then what you can do is you can ask it to amend and change the Excel spreadsheet to put those ratios in there.

And that's great. It's really powerful. What I sometimes find is that it does sometimes time out it sometimes if the data in the spreadsheet isn't formatted perfectly, it trips over things a few times. It can be a bit frustrating, a bit trial and error.

If what you want it to do is, let's say you want to upload a cash flow forecast because you want to ask some questions about just the trends. I found saving the cash flow forecast as a PDF is, gives you better results when you're just looking for trends, when you're looking for strategic insights. So to summarize, I prefer spreadsheets as a PDF. If I just want it, if I just want it. Strategic thinking. If you want to analyze, if you want to analyze, do calculations, then of course open up, feed it a CSV, an Excel file. Just bear in mind it can be a little bit frustrating sometimes. Okay, that was Jim's question. Let me.

Okay, I have some people on LinkedIn, I think, and for some reason LinkedIn doesn't send the questions through to my system. So Sarah said.

This is from Shahid. Can you provide AI with your company's website URL and can it use it as part of the strategy business plan document? Yes, you can. I think I showed you that in my custom GPT. So yes, you can inside any prompt, all the instructions of a GPT. You can provide the URL for your website. Just cut and paste it into the prompt. And then what I would say is, I'd say something like.

Read the website here and analyze the business, something like that. And.

It'S very, very good at reading websites. Shahid just very occasionally I've come across websites where it can't read it and I think it's just to do with the way the website's been set up. It's very rare. Most websites it's good at. And Shahid, you may have noticed if you're using Google's notebook lm, you can also, as I did with mine, is you can feed websites there as well.

Okay.

Next question I think is from Keith. Keith says thoughts about directing GPTs to use web resources for market analysis and statistics to incorporate in strategies, business plans. Thoughts about directing GPTs to use web resources. Yeah. Well, going back to Shahid's question, you can certainly feed websites and.

There'S nothing wrong with doing that.

I think most of the time that works really, really well. Sometimes if you send it to websites and it's also full of adverts and other stuff as well, it sometimes makes the result you get not quite as good. So.

If you can take the text of a website and save as a text file, that's sometimes better, but that takes a bit of time. Most of the time I will just give it a website. When I'm doing demonstrations of how to use ChatGPT for business advisory, I will often grab a website of a real business and just put it in there and get to analyze the website. And so Keith, I think that's answered your question. So you can direct the GPT to websites of the business you're working with your business, but also any other resource for analysis. Okay, hope that helped. Keith.

I think Shahid asked another question. Was it. Is there a size constraint in the 10 documents you can upload? There is. Shahid. I have forgotten what the size limit is because it keeps changing. These large language models are getting better over time and you can feed it larger and larger documents. Google, I forget the number now, but Google claims you can add documents of something crazy like.

I'm tempted to say 250,000 words.

I've never read a book that long before. I wouldn't want to. A lot of books are kind of 50, 60, 70,000 words. Google boasts a very big context window. Now, there was some research I came across earlier this year that's we have to be careful of because somebody created a test called the needle in a haystack test. And what they found was that they were testing all different models, ChatGPT versus Claude versus Google. And because some of them, like Google, claim bigger context windows, you can feed it bigger documents. And so they created the needle in a haystack test, which is really interesting. What they did is they would take a document and they put somewhere in it, hidden in all the text, something that was so out of context. And then they'd create a prompt that would basically say tell me, which is the sentence that says yes. So just be careful about context Windows. It's not always as people think.

So don't put huge documents in there, keep them manageable. Okay, let me see what was next. Why would the LLM be susceptible to human failing? Should it not have capacity to process all inputs more thoroughly? Again, Shahid?

Yeah.

That'S an interesting question.

LLMs are really irrational. There's some really strange things that we have been discovering over the last two years. So there was an interesting study done about a year ago looking at techniques for better prompt engineering, little techniques that we can use. And for example, one of the things they found is that if you were to put in your prompt a bribe to say something like I will give you $50,000 for a better answer in people's testing, it would actually give a better answer. Now, it makes no sense whatsoever that we can bribe an AI system, but apparently we can. And there are dozens of examples of things like that. Weird. It is, but that's what we are finding, that LLMs are susceptible to human failings because it's learning from humans. Okay, so it also copies, mirrors, learns our failings. Very, very strange. Now, of course it is getting better all the time. It's getting more and more powerful. New models come out and these issues become less and less of an issue.

Catherine says I'm starting advisory services. Good for you, Catherine. And you're going to explore Notebook. Awesome. Okay, we've got time I think for one more question.

Complete balanced bookkeeping. And this might be the last question. Oh, my questions have come back. I'm a bookkeeper. I'm a bookkeeper with my own firm that is morphing into a consulting firm as I run three other businesses. How can your academy help me? So if you want to do a consulting advisory in our top level value price Academy Mastery, I go deep every month for 90 minutes teaching you how to do business advisory, how to use AI for that, how to use AI for example, to do SWOT analysis, all sorts of things. We also have a six month video based training program where I teach you step by step how to build a very profitable advisory service. So for anybody wanting to become better at biz advisory, to understand strategy, to build up a profitable advisory service for clients, then that's what our top level academy really one of the key things it focuses on. So that was complete balance. And then you said, can you help me? Oh, I think I was just repeating. So I think I've answered that. Okay, I make it. I think I've answered all the questions, I think. But there are lots of great comments of things that some of you are doing. Like Keith says, loving the idea of referencing YouTube videos I've watched. I'll be using that for sure. Yes, Keith, I do as well. I love learning. I would rather watch YouTube videos and learn stuff than watch Netflix series. So I watch lots of YouTube videos on AI robotics, health span and longevity, cryptocurrency. And what's a great thing you can do is you can then put those videos into a notebook and save you loads of time learning stuff. Right?

It is on the hour, five o' clock in Portugal we always finish these sessions on the hour. So what I'm going to do if you're new I play out with some music for a few minutes. Just give me a chance to read your various comments and acknowledge them. I hope you've had some value from this. Remember, if you've enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. I know many of you have and I am doing another live stream in a few weeks time in December and what I think that's going to be about is I haven't yet finalized but something I'm going to do something for the year end along the lines of five things you want to do to make 2025 your best year ever. That could may not be the title but that's essentially what I'll be doing on my next live stream. So I hope to see you there. Otherwise have a great rest of the week. See you soon.