AI/ChatGPT Virtual Summit

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Welcome. Welcome to another AI and chat GPT virtual summit. Great to see you all here. We have got a ton of stuff to cover today and some new stuff, but we kick off officially in five minutes. We'll kick off a quarter to the hour. Those of you that come regularly to my sessions will know that I always start with a giving a few shout outs. So let me go through the chat, let me see who's here today, what you've been up to. I think I asked earlier how much you're using ChatGPT and I can see here that Michael is here from Fredericksburg. Hi there Michael. Good to see you. And you say you use it several times a day. Just use it to write a blog. Awesome. And then I've got somebody who it says brcp. So I don't know your real name. I'm sorry but haven't used ChatGPT but tried Gemini and Copilot. Megan Myers is here. Hi there. She's used Copilot most often. Carolyn, great to see you again from Florida. Megan says she's also tried Deep Seek for a few things. That's the one that came out a few months ago from the Chinese company.

Brcp. Teachers Accounting course at Community college uses Gemini to help with student communications. Megan again. Megan's in Northern Pennsylvania. Philadelphia. Hi there Rob. Rob Herman's here. He uses it regularly, several times a day regularly. Kian is here and has used ChatGPT a few times to help answering questions and drafting correspondences. Lorenzo is here from the uk.

Hi.

Hi there Lorenzo. Good to see you. You use it for idea generation, then you use Claude for communication and Perplexity for report building. And as I read that, it's fascinating that Emily and I have been doing live streams and webinars on ChatGPT for two years now. Our first one is in March 2023 and it's amazing how gradually people are now shifting across and starting to use these tools more, which is awesome. Sarah Bridges is here. Hi there Sarah. Good to see you. She's from Louisiana. Says thanks to Mark for using AI. I'm using AI more and more in my bookkeeping business. Another person I know comes regularly is Linda Curtis. Hi to you. She says hi from Virginia. I've been learning about ChatGPT through the value Pricing Academy and using it on an ever increasing basis as I experiment with different prompts provided and create my own. Kyan says looking forward to this session and to see how AI and ChatGPT can help accountants and bookkeepers in the UK. Well, you're in the right place. We're going to start in three minutes. If you just joined, Rob says Rob Herman's from Indiana. Nydia is here from Clarksburg. Rebecca is here from Indiana. We have Kelly from Texas. So lots of people from the US which is cool. Donalisa yes, I've been using ChatGPT since 2018 for personal use. Rose Kemps is here for use it for research and rewrites. Lisa Barnes is here from Northern California. Is anybody from a country I've not mentioned yet? I've got Nazish is here from Manchester in the uk. Rose is here from Los Angeles.

Says woke up I guess because it's early morning for you. It's late afternoon for me because we're in Portugal. Amber's here from Michigan. Ilya's here from South Carolina in the U.S. mark, I'll connect with you on LinkedIn. Okay, I'll look out for that. Ilya, we have Marty is here from Michigan. We have Suzette. Roberts is here from Houston. Meliot's Is that Meliot or just Elliot? Not sure, but just getting started. Marty uses ChatGPT daily. We have Sean is from Johannesburg. We have Amber who uses it daily. Patina is from South Texas. We're going to start in about 90 seconds. Patina says from South Texas. I use ChatGPT daily for rewrites, business planning and SOPS. Tam is here from Maryland. I don't currently use AI. Okay. I think after day you will hopefully change your mind on that one. Sibus Siso used it for financial and strategic analysis. Steven Cannon is here from Montana. Hi there to you users. ChatGpt. Claude make an airtable daily. Oh great. So you're into automations as well I'm guessing. Yeah, makes pretty cool air. We love airtable. Some cool stuff you can do with automations. Rafael is here from San Diego. Katrina AI is my assistant. She says in multiple areas. Couldn't do all that that I do without it. Karen is here from Illinois. I'm going to hurry up because we're going to be starting very soon. Chris is from Johannesburg, just getting started. Benjamin's a beginner, not really used it yet. Mark Rayner. Hi there Mark. Good to see you and I can't wait to see you in Portugal very soon uses ChatGPT and started using Perplexity. Thanks to Mark and team. I just signed six clients that were due to renew and get on a plan. Awesome Mark, can't wait to hear more. Debbie's here from Virginia. Good to see you. We have Sandy is here. Hi Mark, I'm using AI more and more. Can't wait to see what you have to share. Sorry, I'm in Iowa. Don't be sorry about that.

Right, we need to start. So if I haven't said hello, I'm just flicking through, just see if any miss any countries, but. Oh, yes, Sydney, Juliana's here. It's 2:43 in the morning. Okay. So I hope you have plenty of coffee, Juliana. And I'm so pleased you are here. Any other countries? Canada. Katrina Cultes is here from Canada. Not seen many Canadians yet. Right. And Mark Rayner says I've graduated from note taking to doing. Okay. Those of you in the value pricing academy will know exactly what Mark's talking about. He is now an action taker, which is awesome. Okay, let's get started because we have so much to cover. And wow, the world is moving so fast. I know when I did, when I start these sessions, there's always something new to tell you about. I love what's happening in the world of AI and it's changing so many things, I think, for the good. So something I came across just yesterday. Nothing to do whatsoever with accountants, with bookkeeping, with tax, nothing whatsoever to do with any of those things. But one of the things that I am fascinated by is how AI will impact us from a personal point of view. And one of the things that I think is really exciting is how it's helping with health, with solving problems like how to live longer, how to eliminate diseases. And I just came across this, which was published yesterday. There's a new AI model that detects cancer with near perfect accuracy. And it's 99.26% accuracy in identifying cancerous tissue, which I think is just extraordinary. I just think it's extraordinary what AI is doing. And I've been teaching this for two years. Some of you know that. And the changes I've seen are just extraordinary. I was thinking just the other day, I was pondering on where the world's going, and one of the thoughts I had was, is this the end for lawyers? And I say that with a bit of a chuckle because I'm an accountant. I obviously look after accountants.

And one of the things that I'm thinking now is that lawyers are in serious trouble. Let me explain why. So I've used ChatGPT many, many times for all sorts of things, personal things, business things. I use it every single day for almost everything. And I was thinking just a few a little while ago that I live in Portugal. I've been here for five years and it made me think, you know what? My will is so out of date. I last did it 10 years ago in the UK. I also need a Portuguese will, and I've been putting it off. It's been on my list for ages to renew my will, to sort my will out. But of course it's always a hassle because you then have to go to a lawyer, pay fees and all of that. And I thought, I wonder what ChatGPT is like at creating a will. So I grabbed a copy of my last one. I crafted a prompt where I gave it the will. I asked it to ask me a series of questions to get some further context and so on. I answered its questions and it then produced a really good will. The whole thing took me just a few minutes. And. And so I thought, why would anybody go to a lawyer for a will? Now I've also used it for doing things like legal agreements. And I was talking to somebody who is in my business club here in Ericeira in Portugal, and he's building currently AI that's an advanced AI tool that's around creating contracts. And he also said that the legal profession has a real problem because.

When lawyers create things like contracts and so on, they use templates, they use and all the law. The AI knows all this stuff. So. And Rose says, I am a lawyer. I think that lawyers will survive, but they will have to adapt and change because there are things that I would have gone to lawyers for that I will now use AI systems for. And this is going to be just the same with us in, in the accounting profession because there are lots of problems with us as humans. We are expensive. For many accounting firms, probably if you've got a large firm, then probably your biggest cost on your profit and loss account is your labor costs, employee costs. Humans are expensive. Humans are unreliable. We sometimes have hangovers and don't show up for work the next day. We sometimes get sick. We're unreliable. And we are just so slow. And I say slow. When I say slow, I mean in comparison to the speed at which AI can move. It is extraordinary how things are changing, but it's also, I see it as just a tool.

Yes, it is a threat, but it's a threat really to those people, those business owners, those firms that aren't willing to adapt. And so I think we're in an interesting, interesting times at the moment. So today we're going to cover a whole bunch of stuff. I will look at a little bit about the future of the profession where I see it going. Some of the new things we need to tackle. We will be looking today at some practical use cases, a couple of really fun ones. We'll be looking at how to grow your firm using ChatGPT to help you with your marketing, with attracting better quality clients. We'll look at prompt engineering. We'll also look at. I want to talk a bit about privacy and security because there's some big issues there that we need to be aware of. So we've got a lot of stuff to cover before that. For those of you that don't know who I am, I think most of you do. Lots of people know your names, but those of you that don't, just a very quick bit of background. My name is Mark Wickersham. I'm an Accountant from the UK. Been in the profession since 1988. Went to work for a large multi partner firm in 1988 after university. Qualified as a chartered accountant after three years. Spent the next few years specializing in tax tax planning. Became a corporation tax manager of that large firm. Then in 1996 started my own as sole practitioner firm with no clients. Grew that from 0 to 200 clients in two years. Moved from a bedroom into one office, then bigger offices and.

Grew that quickly. But also I made lots of crazy mistakes. And if you know my story, I nearly went bankrupt in 1999. I was just growing crazy fast. I went from me to 13 team members. I had big officers, I was growing crazy fast. But I also made some crazy mistakes as well. I was working crazy long hours and not making enough money. And that was because of a number of mistakes. The single biggest one was I didn't know how to price. I was way too cheap. And that was until late 1999 when I met Ron Baker, who's now a good friend of mine, one of my mentors, he explained value pricing to me. This light bulb went on in my head and I realized there was a better way to price. I adopted value pricing at the end of 1999. The impact on my firm was extraordinary. Within two years it turned around from a complete mess to a profitable business. I also was doing advisory work at a higher level so I was making more money and doing less work. I was able then to sell it to my client managers. Steve and Jonathan bought the firm off me. It still exists today. I think it's still called Wickersham's. And I then started working with the accounting profession, teaching people the mistakes that I'd made and what I'd done to fix them. And it was then in the 2000, in 2011. I then decided to really focus on value pricing. It's when I wrote my first book, Effective Pricing for Accountants, May 2011. I've written, I think six or seven books since then, but these are the main five that I've written on value pricing. I then founded in 2014 the Value Pricing Academy and I work currently with about 500 accounting firms around the world, some of whom are here, like Katrina for example, and Mark. Some of you are here, which is great to see you. And what I do in the Value Pricing Academy is I help firms to understand value, to create more value for clients by mastering business advisory to price based on that value to master value pricing so we get more richly rewarded and then how we can use that to attract better quality clients clients. So why AI? Well, I got fascinated by AI when I first came across CHAT GPT at the end of February 2023. It had been out for about four months and when I came across it I thought, wow, this is going to change so much. And I certainly am not wrong because.

Completely changed the way that, that we work. Our Entire team uses ChatGPT every single day. My team are so much more productive, get huge amounts done. Things that might have taken before two or three days can be done in a matter of an hour or so. It is absolutely extraordinary what it can do in terms of productivity, getting better results and so on. So I've been teaching it for two years. I've been teaching the profession. I've seen the pace of change is absolutely mind blowing. It's extraordinary. So today we're going to go. I'm going to share as much as I possibly can in the short time we have together. We're going to break the day down to roughly about three separate sessions of about an hour. We will have a couple of short stretch breaks, just in case you need to get to the bathroom, refresh your coffee, particularly if you're in Australia. So I'm going to start off by talking about the future of the profession. We'll look at some fun ways and practical ways we can use ChatGPT. The next session I'm going to bring in Emily. We can look at how to grow your firm. And then in the last session, we're going to look at prompt engineering, how to construct better prompts. And also we'll look at something which I don't think people are taking seriously enough in the profession, which is security and privacy issues. So loads of stuff to cover and I want to answer your questions too. So on the subject of questions, please, of Course, use the chat box throughout. Please chat away. I will try to read the chat as I as I go through, but my team are here to also answer any questions in the chat. If you have a question for me or if you have a question for Emily when she's doing her session, then use the Q and A. So you'll notice in Zoom we have both a chat and a Q and A. So I would recommend open up both of those. Now you can detach them from the Zoom window, have them both open. And just remember, if it's a question for me or for Emily, use the Q and A. Because I will probably miss things that are happening in the chat. I'll check it during the breaks, but I'll probably miss it. Sarah will be checking the general chat and please do chat as we go through. Please share your experience, share things that are working for you. Let's keep that going. There's some great posts and comments I've seen already and also interesting to see how many people are using it and to what extent you're using it. Katrina says privacy and security are important issues. Absolutely. So we'll come that come on to that later. One final thing before we dive into the content is those of you that come regularly will know that we are part of the amazing B1G1 organization. And what that means is that whenever people come to a live session session, then we want to help make the world a better place by contributing to a project. And so we've chosen four projects and what I want you to do is to pick one of these projects and what happens as a thank you for being here live when you choose the project and hit the yellow button. I'll give you the link in a second. You might want to get your smartphone to hand if you have one. Then what will happen is we will make a contribution on your behalf to one of these projects to help people who are less privileged to than us. So either hold your phone up to the QR code, it'll take you to a page like the one I showed you and just pick one of those four orange buttons. When you hit that, there's no sign up or anything. All it does is when you hit the button, it then takes money out of our bank account and pays it across to that particular project. So you get to choose. If you haven't got your smartphone, Sarah's going to put a link into the chat at some point fairly soon. So please do that. Please make a contribution to or we will make the contribution on your behalf. Okay. The link is in the chat. Right. What else do I need to say before we dive in?

So we've talked about what we're going to cover today. I have some free resources for you, some bonuses, and also we have something very special today. If we launching something in this AI space and we have for those of you that want to take things at a faster pace, go to a higher level, we have an opportunity to enroll in a bigger program if that's something that you want to do. But I'll tell you more about that later if that's okay with you.

Okay, going back to questions. Yes, please ask questions as we go through. Put them in the Q and A box. My only request is try to keep questions short to one or two sentences. When questions are really long, it's hard, hard for me to read them all and fully understand it usually because there's probably multiple questions in one. If you have lots of questions, that's fine. Just put them all in as separate questions in the Q and A. Okay, let's get into the future of the profession. Let's just talk about that a little bit more. And one of the things that I've said before, the world is changing really, really fast. If you've been to we've run this summit a few times over the last 18 months now and we've talked about, for example, how research suggests 300 million jobs could disappear over the next few years. And there's a very real possibility that in fact not as real. We are seeing that all the time. There is news coming out all the time of large companies laying off huge amounts of people. I think I saw just the other day, Amazon is laying off something like 25,000 people at manager level because AI can do what they were doing. So jobs are disappearing right now. So when they said two years ago, 300 million jobs, that is a reality. I've also talked a lot about the speed of change with AI and in the past I've shown these slides where I've looked at if you just track midjourney, for example, image generation, and you look at. I put in a prompt for creating an accountant, a prompt about an accountant into version one of midjourney and then version five. And in just 18 months the the AI moved on so fast and this is an old image now it's got even better still. It's just extraordinary. The speed at which things are moving right now in every area of AI in whether it's image generation video is extraordinary, extraordinary. And it's going to be interesting what happens with things Like Netflix and the way that we consume videos will be very different in the future. One of the things that I think is extraordinary is robotics and some of the predictions from people like Elon Musk about how quickly we'll have robots in our homes, which to some extent, perhaps we already do. We have these vacuum cleaners that can clean without the need of a cleaner. Well, these things are getting more and more advanced at an incredible pace, largely driven by the Chinese. They are ahead in the robotics game. And this is happening right now. It won't be long before we start seeing robots on the streets, robots in our homes. I'm talking about just a couple of years away. It is moving fast. And then I mentioned health earlier. Health is. Which is one of things I think is amazing. Some of the things they are discovering now that will help us to eliminate diseases is, I think, really.

For me, I think that's the thing that excites me the most, the fact that we can live healthier lives thanks to AI. But what about our profession? Because we don't tend to use a lot of those tools. We use large language models. That's mainly where we're going to use AI. And so one of the things I've done is I've just recently produced a research paper on the future of the profession. And some of the things that I see as being threats are jobs going. Jobs will disappear, particularly for the traditional bookkeepers and the traditional accountants, which hopefully isn't you because you're here. But we will see a lot of jobs going. Just like I mentioned with lawyers earlier, there's a lot of traditional things that will start to change. We will see a lower demand very soon for, for example, traditional bookkeeping, because the AI is going to do all the, is going to do all of the reconciliations and so on. The speed of change there is happening so, so fast that it won't be long, two or three years. And we won't be doing a lot of the data entry and the reconciliations that we used to do. We're going to see in our firms increased competition from AI driven firms. And when I say that, when I think about that, yes, I hope that will be you. I hope that you will be an AI driven firm and you'll be the ones affecting your competitors. But I also see, for example, India. We've already seen that India's great with outsourcing. They can do things at lower costs. But we also know that the Indians are very tech savvy and so they're going to be certainly investing A lot in AI driven, driven compliance work. And so we're going to see that increased competition. And what that will also lead to is downward pressure on price. That's going to be a big issue. Prices coming down as we see these other offerings. And then another issue I see as a threat is also the issue around AI reliability and accuracy. It's not perfect, as perhaps many of you know. And we know that within AI models there's human bias, there's also hallucination problems. And so we have to be aware of that.

When we're starting to build AI into our firms. So there are a number of threats. But also I see huge opportunities, I think it's really exciting for firms that want to embrace this technology and use it. I think there are huge opportunities around efficiency and scalability. We can scale what we do at faster levels. We can be way more efficient, get more done, be more productive. It's also a huge opportunity to expand into advisory. And that's because I think AI is one of its strengths. When I think about Chat gpd, one of the things it's best for is doing business advisory to do things like strategic planning. And so if that's something that you've never got into because you've felt you don't have the expertise to advisory, well, AI makes it so easy. It also gives us the opportunity to develop new service offerings, develop new service offerings because again, we can use AI to help us with that. Another opportunity is market marketing, marketed positioning and differentiation. If we embrace this technology, then we can start to differentiate ourselves from the traditional accountants, the traditional bookkeepers that I think will struggle. We can also improve, enhance the client experience with the use of AI. And of course, as I said earlier, cost savings. Humans are expensive and just like many other large businesses are laying off people we can build. I think this is really exciting times for the small accounting firm. We can be so much more more productive, efficient and we can scale faster without having to have expensive people costs in our business.

But it does mean we have to change. I think we have to change our skill sets and a number of things we have to do is we have to make sure that we are moving our skill sets away from data entry into more strategic insights, doing more strategic planning with clients. We also have to make sure that we are becoming increasingly tech sampling, which I know a lot of people. The accountants and bookkeepers I work with are very tax tech savvy when it comes to various apps. But I also mean including things like AI and also automation is interesting. I forget who it was now, but somebody said they use tools like make and airtable. There are so many wonderful tools that we can use that we can create efficiencies, streamline things not just for our business, but we can also help our clients in this area and turn that into a new service offering. And another skill we have to improve is, yes, we have to improve our skills with strategic insights and tech savvy, but also communication skills. We have to up our game with communication because words are so important. And as we move increasingly into this AI world, the human touch is going to be more and more important. And so those accountants and bookkeepers who prefer to sit behind a desk filling in forms, tax returns, doing data entry and sending it off to clients by email and not having to talk to clients, they're going to struggle because more and more we need to have that human connection. And that means we have to build our communication skills so we can communicate more confidently, including on things like zoom on. In this online world that we're living in, the more confidence you have, the more skills you have to communicate. That opens up so many opportunities. And then we also have to think about marketing, how we're going to differentiate ourselves, how we're going to grow our firms. And I think that firms that are embracing this, embracing technology, AI and the words, the communication, then there's a huge opportunity to use marketing to differentiate ourselves from all of the, not just traditional firms, but also the AI only solutions. Because there will be increasing AI only solutions. I think particularly some of the offshore companies like India, the Philippines and so on will embrace that technology. And so what we have to do is recognize that the human connection is really important and we can use that in our marketing to differentiate ourselves from AI only solutions. Solutions. We need to emphasize that human expertise, that human judgment, and highlight that human touch. So one of the things I talked about a lot of last year is three things that I think we have to do to stay relevant going forward in the profession. Three key things, and they are, number one, you have to keep abreast of AI. You have to, because it's moving so fast. This is not going away. It's moving faster and faster all the time. And I did a session just a few weeks back on my live stream on my YouTube channel where I was looking at some of the new things that ChatGPT had introduced in December, January, February, and all the things that they introduced in December, January, February, I think has been a bigger. They've introduced more stuff in those three months in the previous two years. If you look at some of the stuff they bring out, it's the pace of change is extraordinary and we might talk about some of those things later on. So we must keep abreast of AI. That's the first thing you must do. And the fact you're here suggests that you get that. Number two, we have to figure out new ways to create more value for clients because we will find the compliance work will disappear. AI will replace that. We don't need humans to do data entry to reconcile bank accounts in the future. We don't need humans to do that. We need to be doing other stuff. Using our skills with understanding numbers and using our communication skills, we can create more value for clients, which I think is really exciting. But then number three, the third thing we have to do, value pricing is more important than ever before because the more we use technology, and I've seen this over the years, the more that we automate stuff, stuff, the more the time it takes to do stuff goes down. And those firms that are clinging to time based forms of billing are going to find that prices will go down, they'll make less money. And so what we have to recognize is that AI gives us the opportunity to create more value for our clients. Whether it's business advisory, strategic planning, we can create more value.

But in a fraction of the time. And so the smart accountants, the smart bookkeepers will recognize they have to price based on value, not the time.

So one of the things I've done for you is we've been working on, over the last week, we've been working on a research report on the future of the profession. It's a 22 page guide where I go into much more detail on the things that I've covered, the things that you need to do, how to make sure that you are a firm of the future. So I have a rhetorical question. Would you like a copy of that guide? And if you do, put yes in the chat box and I'll tell you in a little while how you. Yeah, okay. Some of you want that. Okay. I thought you might do. It took us a while, a long time. My daughter Gabby did the hard work and it's just. No, sorry, Emily did. You'll meet Emily later. Gabby's done another one I'll tell you about later. Emily created this and I will share with you fairly soon how you can get a copy of it. We're going to give away some free copies today. It's the first of a couple of gifts that we've got for you for being here. Okay? So I have a question for you. With all that said, my question for you.

Are you ready for change? Are you going to embrace this? Or are you like other people in the profession who are going to be trying to carry on as normal, bury their head in the sand, be like King Knut and think they can hold back the AI tide? That's my rhetorical question. Are you ready for this? Are you ready to change? Are you excited by this? I am. I am very excited by what we can do. So let's talk about. Let's get practical. I want to show you some things with ChatGPT that we can do. A couple of cool prompts.

Because I want some. I want you to take away some ideas from today. And Christine is ready and excited for change. Awesome. We can use ChatGPT for so many things. And by the way, I'm going to talk about Chat GPT today. I know there are other large language models and I've seen already in the chat some of you prefer to use Gemini, some of you have mentioned Claude, the perplexity. There are so many different AI tools now. If we look at large language models, there are hundreds of models now. Okay, so there are hundreds. But the big ones are OpenAI's ChatGPT anthropics, Claude and Google's Gemini are arguably the big three. I'm going to focus on ChatGPT, a because it's the most widely used, secondly, because it is for most things the best model.

But at the same time, much of what we'll talk about is equally applicable to the other tools as well. So if you prefer Gemini or Claude, that's fine.

If I talk about ChatGPT, just assume, I mean any large language model unless I start talking about specific features of ChatGPT. So what can we use it for to save time? Well, we could save our time by using for ideation, coming up with ideas, brainstorming things is really powerful. We can use it for learning, which is great. I use it for learning all the time, researching things, learning new topics like longevity, health and so on are important to me. From a personal point of view, it's great for writing and I saw some people already have said in the chat they use it for writing blog posts, research reports and so on. Great for content creation, in other words, content marketing. If you want to grow your firm, then I would argue that the number one way to grow your accounting firm is through content marketing. And Emily's going to cover that in a little bit, a little while from now. It also can be used. I think it's great for financial analysis. We have to be careful with financial analysis for a number of reasons. And I for example, we just have to be careful that it's doing things correct. We need to understand the limitations of that. And also, and I'll come on to it later on today, we have to be aware of security and privacy. But nevertheless, it's great for financial analysis, it's great for research. And my favorite use case is business advisory for strategic planning. And when I say business advisory, I actually mean there's two sides to this. If you want to get into helping clients build a more successful business, it's brilliant for that. But also we can use it ourselves. If you want to start to delve into strategies to grow your own firm, it's brilliant for that strategic thinking advisory. It's great at so I'm going to do let's do some practical examples and I'm just going to open up Chat GPT. I'm also just going to check how I'm doing with time. I'm doing pretty good. Oh, I'll ask, I'll do a question as well. So Sarah Bridges says, what AI program do you do you use for image generation?

I. I don't, I don't much. I have an I have an account with Mid Journey and arguably it's the best. When I had used, I did use midjourney. I went through training courses, used it, really enjoyed it. I don't tend to have a business use case for creating images, so it's not something I use much. But if I wanted to go back into creating images, then Midjourney would be my favorite. I do tend to use Dall E more, which is OpenAI's. And the reason I use Dall E more is just because it's embedded inside ChatGPT, which I use every single day. So if I wanted an image to go with a social media post, for example, I would probably just use Dall E.

Just because it's there, because I probably then used AI to help me craft the ideas and whatever and then it can create an image. But if I want to do better quality images, I've always found midjourney really, really good. There are other tools. Now there's no end of tools for doing image generation, but I would say Midjourney is the market leader. Dall E3 is probably the one that's used the most because it's inside ChatGPT. Sarah I hope that helps. But if anybody else uses different tools for image generation, then just share your thoughts into the Chat. Right, let's move across to ChatGPT. So I'm just going to.

Open up here and I'm not going to, I'm not going to walk you through how to use Chat GPT. I'm going to assume, and I can tell from the chat that most people here seem to be, at least those of you chatting in the chat seem to be familiar with it, using AI frequently. And so I'm going to, I'm going to assume that certain level of knowledge. But I do know that there are some people who have not even started yet. And so don't worry if that's you. I've got you covered. Because just last week I did a how to video on how to use ChatGPT. I walked through all the buttons, what you can see in the left hand, all the various options for renaming chats. I talked about the different.

Models that you can use. I talked about what's in the settings and so much more. So if you are a newbie to ChatGPT, then I'm going to share with you in a little while, 10 minutes or so where you can get a video. And this is everybody where you can get a video compliments from me that I did last week, walking you around, showing you every single button inside ChatGPT and how to use it. So let's just assume you've got that knowledge right now. If you haven't, then before the day's out, you'll have a video that will help you. I want to dive into a use case. Let's look at. And I just need to grab it my prompt first. I don't want to type away because it will. You'll get bored watching me type. So I have one that I prepared earlier. So I just need to grab it and grab the copy to clipboard. Okay, I've just done that. And I'll just paste it quickly as. Let me pull this back up. Here we go.

Okay, I have a prompt in here. Let me imagine somebody said earlier, I noticed in the chat somebody said that they use it for writing SOPs. Okay. Standard operating Procedures. I'm a big fan of Michael Gerber and the E Myth revisited. In fact, it changed my life when I came across it in late 1998 in my accounting firm. And so I'm a fan of having systems and processors for automating things of which AI and standard prompts are great systems. So one of the things that we can use it for is to build our own SOPs, our standard operating procedures. And what I've written For people in my academy is a whole bunch of standard prompts that you can use. So let's imagine that you want to build some standard operating procedures in your firm and you want to create as part of that some standard emails. There may be situations where in a certain workflow, in a certain process, you'll want to send an email out and you want some help with writing an email rather than you creating the email template. You want ChatGPT to help you with it. So I've created a prompt here. It's a long prompt. For those of you who have not been to my sessions much, I talk a lot about prompt engineering. We're going to get onto that later. I'll share with you some key elements of a prompt, but I'll also mention some. Now, you'll see my prompts are usually quite long. This is a long prompt. Now please don't be scared by the length of this prompt. There's some reasons why it's this long, which you will see in a second. And you might then be thinking as well, I haven't got time to write prompts that long. And I would agree with that. If what you are doing is just something quickly, you want to do something very quickly, you can write a quick prompt. I know Emily's going to do that in her session later. There's a place for quick prompts. But I'm a big fan of, from spending two years studying prompt engineering. If we want to get better results from, from our LLMs from ChatGPT. If we want better results, more consistent, more predictable results, then we want to craft better prompts. And so I'm a big fan of creating prompt templates. In other words, carefully created prompts for anything, any task that you're likely to do more than two or three times. So an example might be you might do a report after every meeting with a client when you go through their end of year financial statements. Well, if you do that report for every client, let's create a prompt that we can just cut and paste in as quickly as I did this one because it's going to save us time. So think of a prompt template like this as a little mini system to do something fast. So in terms of SOP creation, if you want to create various emails to go into your SOPs, then rather than creating a new prompt every single time, what if we had a standard prompt that we can use for writing these emails? So here we go, here's one and let me walk you through this to explain the purpose of some of the of the prompt. So it starts off by saying, act as a business systems analyst specializing in workflow optimization with knowledge in creating SOPs for cross functional teams. Okay, so what's that? Well, that is what I call the. The role or the Persona that we want Chat GPT to play. So by default, Chat GPT in its system prompt is a helpful assistant. And it does a good job as a helpful assistant. But we learn from prompt engineering that when we ask the LLM to play a different role, we get a different answer, we get a better result, we get a more nuanced result. In this particular case, if we tell it to act as a business systems and analyst, it will create the sort of output that we want, in this case, part of an SOP that a systems analyst would probably write, rather than just a helpful assistant. So that's the role or the Persona. Then we have the task itself. So here we go. The task is, your task is to craft a standard email to be used within a standard operating procedure sop. The SOP is, and then we've got this bit in curly brackets. And the purpose of email is this. These are variables. Okay? So one of the things that if we want to create prompt templates that we can use over and over again, in this case, we've got a prompt that's going to create an email for us that we can build into an sop, and we want to use it multiple times, each time we use it will be for a different SOP for a different purpose. And rather than having to then rewrite the prompt every single time, one of the things we could do is build in variables so that all we have to do is just change the variable and we can do that in one place. I always do it at the end because it's simple. Then in other words, if you wanted to use this to write an email to go inside an sop, all you would do is cut and paste it from wherever you store it. A prompt library, you cut and paste it, which takes probably 60 seconds. And then you go to the end. And then I have a section called variables. I always put it at the end because it's easy to find. It could be at the start. And in this case I've got my variable standing sop. My variable sop. Let's imagine that we want to create an email.

For getting client feedback. Perhaps we want to do a standard operating procedure for getting client feedback. And as part of the process for getting client feedback, we want an email to go out. So that's what this particular email is going to be in our sop. It's going to be getting client feedback. And let's then give it a purpose. The purpose is to request a client for their feedback after a meeting. The feedback is to be via an online feedback from form, so include a link to the survey. Okay, so that's all you need to change. If you were going to do another SOP and perhaps you were going to do an onboarding SOP and you wanted to write an email, a standard email that goes out to welcome a client on board, then all you do is you cut and paste this prompt again. And then all you do is put something like client onboarding email there you put there. The purpose is to welcome a client and whatever, whatever it might be, you just describe it and that's all you need to do. This is what variables are. They're really powerful in your prompts. Whenever you have a prompt you might want to use multiple times. Okay, Jennifer says can you share this example? I will tell you where I will. Yes, if you. If you'd like a free copy of this prompt, I'm going to give you a free copy. I actually have lots of free gifts for you today and I'll tell you in just a few minutes. So yes, you'll get a free copy of this prompt and it will be coming your way soon. I will tell you. Right. So I have these two variables, getting client feedback and the purpose of this particular email. And so we could just change this for every email we want to build into our various SOPs. Hope that makes sense. Let me go back. But this just means that I can now use these two variables throughout the prompt without having to keep changing the prompt throughout. Hope it makes sense. So here we are. We have our role. We have. Our task is to create a standard email. I then put some other. I also wanted to include appropriate placeholders for personalization such as the recipient's name and follow the specified writing style for tone and professionalism. So because this is a template, this isn't an email I'm sending to a client. This is an email to go into a workflow. And therefore because it's a template email, we want it to put the various placeholders for things like client name. Because we'll probably then in our workflow either link it to a CRM system. We might use a tool like make or or N8N or Zapier to then do all of the mail merge for us and automate our process. So we want placeholders in this. And then I also wanted to use the email template provided to guide your response. So that's essentially the core of the prompt. It's not actually that long a prompt. We've got the role to play and we've got a very specific, well written task that's very clear on what we want it to do. But we also want it to then use the writing style of our emails and follow an email template. So let's move on to writing style. Next. I have a section called Writing Style where I put the tone and the style. I want the tone to be friendly, I want the style to be professional. Now we can go much further than this because I think that writing style is really, really important. When you are creating any kind of report email, you. You want it to be written as if it's written by you using your writing style. So it may well be that.

You can get the results you want just by specifying the appropriate tone and style. And that's great. That will help go a long way. If you're a little bit more advanced with using these LLMs, then one of the things I teach in the Value Pricing academy is how we can create a writing style style guide. And that's something I strongly recommend that you create a writing style guide. I have one on my desktop because if I ever wanted to create something, if I was building this, I would. Instead of having my writing style is friendly and professional, I have a much more detailed one page word document that describes my exact style which I would then just drag in to this particular prompt and it will then use my style. Or if you're even more advanced with the usage of ChatGPT, you can build your writing style very specifically into custom instructions. Okay, a couple of advanced things, but this will still do a great job. And then what I've also got is an email template. So here we go. This section is the email template and what I've done is I've shared with it. Sorry, I went too far there. I've shared with it what I how I want my emails laid out. So I want a subject line and I wanted to insert a suitable subject line for the email. I want it to be hello, first name. I tend to use hello, but you might have something else. I like to start with a friendly and empathetic opening sentence related to the topic of the email. Then the main body of the email clearly explain the purpose of the email, whether it's to provide information, ask for assistance, give updates or any other specific message and then end the email with a call to action and a friendly and positive Close. And then if it were me, you would change this, by the way, the prompt. But I would say best wish, which is Mark Wickersham, fca. And I like to end with a PS that summarizes the main point or benefit or emphasizes the next step. That's the framework I like to do emails in. You might have a different one. So when you get a copy of this prompt, which I'll give you later on today, when you get this prompt, put it somewhere safe, put it in your prompt library. But you will want to change. You will want to change the email template because you certainly won't want to say, best wishes, Mark Wickersham, please do change that. Okay, hope it makes sense. Then we have the variables. So let's see what this prompt does. So remember, we're just creating a template email that we can build into an SOP for getting client feedback after every meeting that we have with a client. Okay, let's send this prompt off.

And.

Here it's gone. Okay. You can see how fast it is. This would take me ages to write. I mean, just I said humans are slow even with a prompt template. So with this process, when you've got a prompt template, It'll take you 60 seconds to copy and paste, probably 60 seconds tops to change the variables. That's 2 minutes and then probably 10 seconds. So you're looking at less than 3 minutes to create this part of your SOP. This is why I love AI. Once you know how to craft prompts and what to use them for, we can save so much time. So subject could be quick favor. We'd love your feedback on our meeting. Hi, George. I really enjoyed our recent meeting and hope you found it helpful and informed, insightful to help us to continue improving the way we serve you. I'd be incredibly grateful if you could take just a couple of minutes to share your thoughts. We've put together a short feedback form you can complete here because I said that was the call to action. That's what I said. Then it says your feedback means a lot to us and helps ensure we keep adding value in the most relevant way possible. Best wishes, Mark Wickersham. P.S. it only takes two minutes, and your input really helps us tailor our service to better support you. I think that's a pretty good email. Now, it might not be your writing style, that's fine. It may be that it's not the way you structure your emails. Just change the template in the prompt, change the instructions in terms of the writing style, perhaps you want funny rather than friendly. If You've got a sense of humour, whatever it might well be, but that's how quick you can create an email template. Right, how are we doing for today? Time we have a break in coming up very soon and I do want to tell you.

Let me see.

Yes, I have another one I want to share with you. I have another one I want to share with you, which I'm going to do it quickly just because I want to give you a really useful use case. We are breaking in eight minutes.

Let me share another one. I just have to grab it. Just bear me a second while I grab the prompt. So copy go to here, go back to screen share. I'm going to start a brand new chat and I'm going to do control V. So this prompt is a really cool one because.

If you are looking to improve your service in your business, hopefully you are, then one of the things that'll be quite useful is to analyze what are the things that people don't like about dealing with a firm like you. Not necessarily you personally, your firm, but a firm like you, like a bookkeeping firm or an accounting firm. And so we could get ChatGPT to help us identify what are the things that people find frustrating and then we can start to work on how we can fix them and make sure we don't have those problems. So if I go to the end the variables, we want an industry, so I'm just going to go with bookkeeping. If you are a tax advisory firm, change that to tax advisory. If you're an accounting firm, whatever it might well be, just put your industry there. That's the only thing you want to do. And then you run the prompt and basically the role is now a customer experience expert. And I want you to identify and explain the most common pain points that customers experience in the bookkeeping industry. And then I broke it down to some specific steps and that's the prompt. Let me just run this and again I will share this one with you.

So here we go, customer journey and touchpoint. So it's going through now and it's talking through the customer journey of potential client to a bookkeeping business. And what it's then doing is going to. So step one, it's looking at the touch points, it's mapping out the journey of every time there's a touch point between your firm and a potential client. So we've got awareness, research and evaluation, initial contact, onboarding, service delivery, communication and reporting, issue resolution, renewal or exit. So all of these are touch points that we could improve in our SOPs give wow. People really impress people from right at the start where they're just becoming aware of us through to when they leave. What can we do when they leave to really impress them? So we've got these key touch points and now it's going through and explaining things that people will probably find frustrating with dealing with a bookkeeping business. Unclear value proposition, slow or confusing onboarding, poor communication, lack of real time insight, inflexible or misaligned pricing errors or missed deadlines. This is really valuable stuff. If you want to build great SOPs in your business, then starting off here first would be a great thing to do. So that in all of these different areas you have done something in your systems, your SOPs, to make sure you don't create these problems, these pains, and instead you do something to wow the client. This is, I think this is a really powerful prompt, does some great stuff there to help you improve your customer service, improve the customer journey. Okay, how can you get all this great stuff? So firstly.

I've got another great thing for you. Lots of bonuses here. So we also wrote a little research report for you called 2027 practical use cases. So I've gone into two in detail but if you want some more ideas of how to use chat GPT, we've written this for you. So I have for you at least four free things. We have the the research report that Emily's just created on the future of the profession. We have this guide with 27 practical use cases for you and I will be sharing the two prompts that I've shown you in if you want them. So how can you get them? Well what we've just set up just in the last few days and today is officially going live. We've just set up a new community. We did have a Facebook group before. We still have a Facebook group, but Facebook, we don't like the algorithms and I know some people don't like Facebook. So we created a community which I just need to open up. Here it is. When I hit this button we create a new community on a platform called School which is great because it allows us to do some amazing things. And what I want to do is invite you to join this for free. We may well charge for in the future but the moment we are letting people have access to it for free. Now my Sarah is going to put a link to how you can sign up for free into the chat. While she's doing that, let me explain few things about what you can find here. So in the first tab community I posted a few things already. For example, this post called the Future of the Accounting Profession is here. If you go into that, you'll be able to download the 22 page research report on the future of the profession that I showed you earlier and talk through it's there. What I've also done for you is I've created some video training. So if you go to the click classroom, firstly I recommend you start by watching the start here or working your way through that video. One of the things that I've done in there as I go through to it is there is a video I recorded last week which is my quick guide to using Chat GPT. So if you don't know all the features of Chat GPT, I've done a video for you and I've also done a research report on which is the right plan for you on Chat GPT. And then we've also done it doing a video course for you called Use Cases where this is where I will be putting those two prompts and I will then do a little video for them. And there's also I put in a prompt in there just last week, a video last week and a prompt for doing financial data analysis. And there's more to come. We're going to be giving you lots of content through this particular platform. So we're about to go to a break in two minutes. My. Let me just check Sarah's. Yes. So Sarah's put a link in the chat. It's called Chat GPT for accountants. Click on that. What I want. Here's your, here's your. Your homework for the next few minutes because while we go for a break I want you to click on that link and it should take you to a page that looks like this and it's free. Okay, so join the community. Will probably charge in the future, but you can get in for free. Free forever. So join the community because this is where I want to help the accounting profession keep abreast of what's happening. So go here first and then what I want you to do once you've joined because we're going to have a three minute video in a second where you can do this. Once you've joined.

What I want you to do is go to the community where it says start here. I just want you to put a post just. Well, just to introduce yourself in there. Why? I can see already 22 people have done that already. Introduce yourself. Why? Because one of the things I like about school is that the more you interact with the community by posting things Asking questions, liking other people's stuff. Then there's also a leaderboard. Why should that interest you? Because we will be creating some even more powerful video training for you which will add to the classroom. Some of that video training will be for people at a higher level, people who are engaging in the community. So you can start that process straight away by introducing 46 people there now. So get into the join over the next two or three minutes and then just welcome. Put something in that first post. Just click on start here and introduce yourself here. That'll get you onto the leaderboard as well. Okay. And then after today you can go and check out those free resources, if any. If ever you can't find anything, you can always come here and you'll see you can ask questions and support. This is where I'm going to help you. Me and my team will help you with AI.

And one of the things that's nice about school is that once you're on the platform in the top right, you can manage your own profile. So school will send out emails of updates and things. If you find you want emails less frequently, that's fine. You're in complete control. I'm in a number of other communities and I love the fact that with some of them I want daily updates, some weekly, some monthly. It's how important this stuff is to you. You're in control. Okay, I'm going to go to a three minute video. We're going to have little countdown music while you do that and then I'll come back and answer a couple of questions and then I'll introduce Emily. Don't go anywhere. Don't close down the zoom. We are in the same place. I will just have a quick three minute break and see you very soon.

Sam.

Sa.

Sam.

Hey. Okay, welcome back. Right. I think everybody who has so far requested is in. We had to hit the approve button, but I think you're all in. So, Linda, it says gotmessage that membership is pending. I'm not seeing any more membership requests at the moment. So you should be able to get in.

Refresh your browser. Try refreshing your browser. I've had to do that a couple of times. Sarah was letting people in.

No, I can still see more people. Okay, I might need to.

Why is he not doing that?

Okay, we've got 94 people in already. We've got 94 in. There's a few more people I think aren't in yet. I will keep trying. Perhaps during the next break between Sarah and I, we will get the rest in I think we perhaps had too many people wanting to join in one go. Probably overwhelmed the system, I suspect.

Okay, we'll get you in, we'll get you in, don't worry. Right, we're going to start now. Let me just shut my door because I'm getting some echo.

Okay, Neil says I'm in. Okay, so most of you are in. I think 119 are in the numbers going up. Okay. You will all be in. We're doing our best. Obviously, so many people want to join. Right. And, and so we're going to keep putting some more great content there. But for those of you that want to move even faster still, then we have something very special for you that we're going to mention later on on today. If you want to get even more training, if you want to go deep on things like prompt engineering and so on, we've got even more stuff. But this is a great place to start. Okay, we're going to talk about now we're going to be looking at in a second. We're going to be looking at marketing. I'm going to introduce Emily in a second. I do want to. I'm just looking at the questions that. There's a few questions. Let me deal with those in the Q and A box because I think they're quite quick ones. So Kyan says, is that the standard layout when asking ChatGPT, the titles, the asterisk, the commands, and somebody that says anonymous attendee says, hi, Mark. Are the asterisks caps essential? What do they do? Cayenne said, it reminds me of coding and computer science. Is that the way we should be using chatgpt commands and variables? Okay, let me answer those three questions because it's essentially the same question. And okay, so what you saw, those of you that noticed the hashtags, the asterisks and so on, that's called markdown language, markdown languages used by programming languages like HTML. And it's used to then denote things like when something should be bold or in italics or. Or different styles of heading, heading 1, heading 2, heading 3.

So why do I build those into the prompts? They're not essential, but they do improve your outputs, particularly if you have long prompts. Because one of the things we discovered in prompt engineering is that the longer your prompts become, then whilst it creates more specificity and more clarity, sometimes AI starts to forget things if the prompt gets too long. So we can use markdown to structure the prompt and to highlight things. If we make something bold by putting a pair of asterisks around it. ChatGPT knows that asterisks means that means bold, and it knows that means this is important. And if we use different heading styles, that's really useful because we can structure our prompts with greater clarity, then ChatGPT will understand. For example, if this is where the example starts, this is when it finishes. Now we're going to talk about the variables. It really helps to break up the prompt and it creates that clarity for AI as well. Okay, great questions. I'm sure we'll have more later on, so if you've got more questions, please ask. Remember, if you've got questions for me, then put them in the Q and A because I won't be reading the chat.

Boring to do now is I'm going to introduce Emily, who's going to talk about how we can grow our firms, how we can use chat GPT for winning more clients for marketing. She was going to be live, but we had a chat last week because Emily is. She is here, by the way. She's here, but she's traveling in her caravan and she was a bit worried about the WI FI connection, didn't want it to be fading in and out. So instead she did a quick video which I'm going to play, but she is here. I and then when it's finished, I'm going to bring Emily on and I've got a couple of questions that I might ask her. I'm sure I will. And you may have some questions too. So Emily is our head of marketing. She's also a bit of an AI genius as well, and she does a lot of the live streams on YouTube with me and also creates a lot of the AI content as well as marketing. So with that said, let's learn a bit about how we can grow our firms. Let's go and listen to Emily.

Hello everybody. I hope you've been enjoying the virtual summit so far. Thanks for the introduction, Mark. Just to reiterate, my name is Emily Cross and I am the head of marketing in the Value Pricing Academy. And I also teach a lot in the AI sessions on as well that we do as well. So that's kind of my role. I teach marketing and AI. So therefore, in today's session, the next 30 minutes that I have with you, I'm going to try and combine the two and teach you how we can use AI to help grow our accounting firms and our bookkeeping firms. So how can we use AI to help us with our marketing? Now, we know that for a lot of accountants and bookkeepers. Marketing isn't something that comes naturally to us. We know that a lot of accountant bookkeepers were more kind of numbers orientated people. Whereas marketing is very wordy, which is where ChatGPT and other large language models come in. Really, really useful because it's really good with doing those wordy things and making sure that things are phrased in a way that will help get that engagement and to pique people's interest and to get them to make those decisions, to work with us and convert. Okay, so marketing is really important to get right now. The first thing that I always teach when it comes to doing any of these kind of marketing sessions, the very first, first thing that I like to talk about is having an ideal client profile. So what this means is having a really crystal clear idea of who we like to work with so that we have complete clarity in who we're bringing into our business and who also we don't like to work with. When we bring in people that we end up not liking to work with out of a desperation because we feel like we need more clients, we end up working with people that don't bring us joy, the business becomes a drain, and so, and so on and so forth. They also don't really appreciate the work you do, so they're more likely to, to complain about pricing and things like that, or they'll, you know, they're just not the kind of clients you want to work with. So we want to have a really good idea of the kind of clientele that we want to bring into the business, because then what we can do is really target the people who are going to appreciate the work that you do and value the work that you do, and therefore are more willing and more happy to pay that higher price because they want to work with you, because they recognize your expertise and your authority in that subject. So those are the kind of people that we're trying to bring in. And that's why it's really essential to have a really crystal clear idea of who your ideal client is before you start doing any marketing. So when you understand at a really deep level who that person is that you're trying to attract, you know, what their pain points are, what challenges they have in their business and obstacles that they face, what kind of emotions do they go through, what things make them stressed, what are their ambitions and their goals, what is their attitude towards work, what is their personality? Also demographic things like, you know, the ages, the genders, the locations of people that you're working with. Once you've got a really good image. As a good outline of the criteria of the person that you like to work with, this can help guide the content that you create. So we know that content creation is.

And using content in our marketing is a big part of marketing.

Okay?

So referrals is actually the number one form of marketing. But content marketing is also incredibly powerful. So when we have our ideal client profile that can help shape the kind of content that we create so that we can attract the right person by addressing the things that we know they struggle with and giving them solutions to problems that we know that they have. So having the ideal client profile helps guide the content that we create. It also helps us to reach our target because the algorithms and such will pick up on the fact that, that the target market that you're aiming for are actually clicking on the things that you're posting.

Right?

So when people click on the stuff, it means it's successful, it means it's working, it's doing its job. So we will get a better reach. And when you start doing things like ads and budgeting, you'll get a better reach for your money and for your budget when you are using efficient and effective wording in your marketing. So having the ideal client profile is essential, essential to getting to that point. It's also going to help convert those people when we do reach them, because the wording that we use is going to really speak directly to them. Okay? It's going to speak towards.

The problems that they have, the pain that they're going through. They're going to feel really understood and heard and seen, which means that when you then offer the solution to that exact problem that you know they have, they're going to jump on that and they're going to think, this is amazing, I really want to work with this person. So by speaking directly to them, by understanding who they are, speaking directly to them, and then providing a solution that is directly targeted towards them, you're overall just improving that conversion, making it an easier job, making your marketing more efficient in doing so. Okay? So the ideal client profile is so important because of all of those key points. So what I want to do first with our demonstration of ChatGPT, what I'm going to do is I'm going to try and just spend the next sort of 20 minutes or so just in chat GBT showing you exactly how to use it. Now, I know that over the course of this summit, Mark's going to teach you prompt engineering and all of the clever things that you can do. You how we have you know, a prompt library as well where you can copy and paste prompts. What I'm going to do in this session is I'm actually going to just strip it down to the basics and show you how powerful chat GB can, chatGPT can be even with really basic prompts. And once we have created our ideal client profile. So that is step one, Step one is creating our ideal client profile. So let me bring up ChatGPT.

Okay, here we go. So you can get really complex with your prompts and the more complex you are and the more in depth you go with your prompts, the better the responses are going to be. Generally. Now I want to show you a really beginner's level version of even just asking questions in a simple way can really get the ball rolling and help you create these resources that you really need for your business. So things like your ideal client profile, your writing style, if you want to have that, so that it can teach chatgpt how you like things to be written. Okay. Essential things like that that just become a part of your business and a resource. So this prompt that I've used Here, this is ChatGPT, by the way. So we've got all my conversations on the left and on the right hand side is the conversation on that I'm having right now. I've asked it and I've asked this by the way on the free version. So on the model that I get access to on the free version is 4o. So I've asked this on the free version of ChatGPT and this is the response I've got. So all I've said, can you help me create an in depth ideal client profile for my business by asking me a series of questions? Okay, you can create a much more in depth prompt. We have more in depth prompts, the academy that you can just copy and paste and use to get you more started. But if you want to go through this with, you know, a bit of a breakdown and really understand yourself what, what business you're trying to draw in, then this is a great way of approaching that. So it's going to give me now a series of questions that I can go away, think about and answer in order to come up with my ideal client profile. So we've got, and it's put it in sections for me as well. So we've got the business overview. What is your business name and what services and products do you offer? What problems do your products or services solve for your clients? What makes your business unique compared to competitors? Demographics. We've got what age range, what gender, where are they located, what is their income range, what is their education level? So these are all important things that we want to think about, about when it comes to targeting people. Psychographics. So what are their core values and beliefs? What are their biggest challenges, frustrations and pain points? This is a really important one because that's going to really help shape what content we create to address that pain. What are their short term goals and their long term goals? Equally important, you could be looking into businesses. You could really like working with businesses who are actually at the point of exiting their business and you like to help them with exit strategies and delegating work and that sort of stuff rather than growth strategies. Okay, maybe they've got different goals based on where they're at in their business and their life. What kind of lifestyle do they lead? Are they really family, family orientated, in which case they really value having extra time and, and maybe that means that they really value automation tasks and things like that in their business. That can really help the content that you create for marketing, but also the services that you're creating for them as well. What motivates them to buy or take action? What objections or hesitations might they have before purchasing? Buying behavior. Okay, where do they typically search from? You might need to do some research for this or you might go into ChatGPT and do an extra bit of research using ChatGPT to get these answers. What type of content do they engage with most? How do they prefer to communicate with? What influences their purchasing decisions and how often do they make purchases related to your industry? So obviously when we put accounting and bookkeeping in there, it's going to be, you know, whether we pay on a monthly business or as an annual annual subscription, that kind of thing.

You can look at your current clients and see which of the answers you can get from your current clients. You know, what are the common questions they ask? Do they engage more with? Do they communicate with email or over the phone or in social media? How do you engage with those people? Because if you have great clients and that's the way that they interact and that's the way that they found your business, then other people might also find it in the same way. Okay, current client insights. Okay, so who are your best current clients? What do they have in common? Have you noticed any patterns in your client base? Are there any clients you've worked with that you don't want to attract in the future? Future? So it's also really important when we do our ideal client profile to outline who we don't want to work with, because then we can make sure that our branding and our messaging puts those people off and we just attract the people that value our work, that are going to appreciate us and value us and be willing to pay more to work with you. That's the kind of people we want in a business. So what kind of branding and messaging here? What kind of language and tone resonates with, with your idle client clients? So what resonates with them? But also what, what is your style? You know, are you more fun and friendly and laid back and chill, or do you prefer to be a bit more professional in how you come across and quite formal? What is your style? What emotional triggers work for the audience? What social media platforms do they use? How do they perceive businesses like yours, etc? Okay, and then we have targeting and refinement here as well. What brands and influences or thought leaders do they follow? So it might mean that you need to now with these questions, go and do a little bit of extra research. But at least you've got a starting point.

What I actually did here is because I don't have a business and I'm doing this for demonstration purposes, I then went to ChatGPT and asked it to just do an example client to answer all of those questions for me. So if you didn't want to take the time to go through and do all of this yourself and answer all those questions, I would say having an ideal client profile is a really important part of your business and you should dedicate that time. And it's probably only going to take you, you know, half an hour, maybe an hour to answer all of those questions in detail. If you wanted to do it in detail, if you wanted to save even more time. I'm just going to show you this other conversation that I had with ChatGPT in preparation for this is I just asked it to answer those questions for me when with a specific niche in mind. So just quick note about niching. People are often very worried about niching. They think, oh well, if I niche then I'm going to reduce the amount of people that I can work with. But what actually happens when you niche is you become more expert in that particular area and people that fit that niche will pay more to work with you because you're more suited suitable for their specific circumstances. Okay, so that's a really quick note on niches. It's really, really powerful to have a niche. But just for this example, I've copy and pasted all of those questions that it asked me and then I've said, can you help me respond to all of these questions in order? I've explained that I'm only doing this for demonstration purposes, but we can remove that sentence if you just want to.

Give it the example and say this is the niche I work in. Can you give me a suggestion of how to answer these questions? So with this in mind, give me an example client that fits into the digital nomad niche. So that's just one I've chosen at random. This is travelers who work from multiple different countries, generally solo entrepreneurs. That's all I've told it. I've given it all the questions and said my niche is digital nomads. Can you create something for me with that? And then I've pasted all of those questions into there. So it's then just given me an example client which answers all of those questions. So the problems that we solve in our business for a digital nomad business would be helping them navigate complex international tax laws and avoid double taxation when they're moving around countries, keeping income, keeping a track of income, expenses and compliance whilst traveling, structuring businesses in tax efficient jurisdictions. So where are you best to be based for your taxes? Managing financial planning with irregular income streams. So maybe they work, then travel, then work, then travel, that sort of thing. So it's, it's taken into consideration the kind of problems that that audience might struggle with without me having to actually do any of that myself. So you can go through those questions individually and answer them if you have a clear idea already of those struggles, which with your experience you probably will have some great answers. But this is a, a great way of just saying this is the niche I'm going to go for. Can you give me an idea? It's given me lots and lots of information here. It suggested a demographic, okay, 25 to 45 year olds, all genders globally, generally changing locations, but often in tax friendly hubs. So it suggested popular places might be Bali, Portugal, Dubai, Mexico and Thailand. What might their income range be and what might their education level be? We've got psychographics, okay, Their, their challenges and pain points, the short term goals, their lifestyle, motivations to action. Okay, so the fear of penalties and unexpected bills, desire to maximize tax, word of mouth, recommendations from other nomads, objections before purchasing, etc. So it's answered all of those questions for me. I now have all of that information and I can just take that as it is if I like and, and use that as my now my ideal client. Profile, obviously you can go through it. I've just used an example 1. So maybe you use that as your starting base, but then you go back through and you think, well actually let me just tweak these areas here.

I know that here it says preferred payment method methods. One of the options is credit crypto. Maybe you don't like to work with that. So you just remove that. Okay, so you just go through and, and make sure that it does really work for your ideal client profile. Or you use the previous option and you sit and you go down, go through all of those questions that it asked and just give a long answer. So what the way you would do that, you would just type into the response number one and then you'd answer question number one. So what was question number one? What is your business name? Okay, so that's an easy one. It would be abc, Accounting, Accounting. And then hold the enter key because if I hit enter, then it will send that off and then I do two and I just go through like that and I just answer all of my questions and then post that as my response. So what I did in this particular.

One was I went, I went to.

That other chat, made my example, brought it back here, and I then posted all my answers. What it's then done automatically because in that first prompt I asked it help me create my ideal kind profile. It's then used a tool in chat BT called Canvas. So what Canvas does is as, as we've been seeing this conversation here, I've got all my chats on the left and the conversation that I'm having is here on the right. What I can do with Canvas is I can open a document so that this is now the document that I'm creating. My chat is now on the left and the document that I'm creating is on the right. So it's now created for me that ideal client profile as a document. So again, I can go through this and tweak it. If I want to make changes, I can just highlight things. You know, I can make that a bigger, a bigger headline if I want, make that a big headline like that. I can X things off and rewrite things on here and I can edit it all from here, or I can use Canvas's tools here to add a final polish, add emojis if I want. If it's something about social media or whatever, my reading level I can change, I can make it longer, shorter, etc. But what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take this as it Is and I'm going to copy that and then I'm literally just going to save that to a Word document. So if I just go to, to.

Word.

Bear with whilst I open a new word new. There we go. Blank document create. So hopefully you can just, you can see that there. Blank document. I'm just going to paste that in. I've hit the copy button, paste that in and then I'm just going to save that to my files. So I already have an example of this, so I'm just going to delete that off. Now what I can do the super powerful thing that I can do now that I have my ideal client profile, we're going to use another one of ChatGPT's newer features here.

So let me just bring that sidebar back up along the sidebar here. So up at the top I have what are called custom GPTs, which are things that we would use for repeating recurring work that we want things to be done in a duck or the same way. But just below that I have here projects. So this is a fairly new feature they added in the last sort of month or so, which helps me organize my conversations into folders first of all, which is super, super helpful. But the great thing that I can do with project is I can upload files that are relevant to the project I'm working on and then it will have that information in its store whenever I start a new conversation. So I would just click this plus icon and I would make a new project. So I'd call it Marketing Projects because what I'm now going to do is create a, a folder, the project that whenever I create marketing copy, I can go to that folder and, and use that because it's going to have my ideal client profile in there and it's to going to have a clear understanding of what to do. Now I'm showing you with projects just so I can show you this extra feature in in Chat gbt. Another way of doing this is actually if I go to my diamond icon here in the top right and I go to customize ChatGPT, I can add information here about how I want ChatGPT to respond to me and things. I can add information about my ideal client in here.

But to go a level above is to import the document that has that entire profile. So let me just go into one that I've already created for you. All I do is I make that new project, I give it a name and then you enter this area down here, you can see it says Project Files. If I click that button, I can add any files that I need to. Now, there is a limit. I think it's something like 50 megabytes or something like that, which generally is about 20 documents.

I don't have the exact numbers with me right now, but you can upload a series of files there to give it up that information before it starts any of its conversations. So when you have a conversation, generally with ChatGPT, it's drawing off its training and its knowledge. Whereas with this, what it's going to do is it's going. It's going to use that knowledge, but it's also going to draw from the project files that you have given it whenever it does a task. So essentially what I've done is I've uploaded that ideal client profile so that now every time I ask it to do something, it's going to refer to the profile first and then give me my response. So when I'm creating marketing copy, and copy is just wording, that is marketing.

This is so powerful because it's always going to refer back to the type of client I am trying to bring in, the person that I'm interested in bringing in before it creates any of its content so that the content that it does make is targeted and optimized to bring in that specific client. So I have my project file in here. Now you can also add some instructions if you like. This might be where you give it information on how you would generally like it to respond. So just a couple of paragraphs you can fit in here. I've just told it. When creating marketing copy, generally use a combination of shorter and longer sentences to break up the rhythm of the wording. I also like it to use small paragraphs with no more than two sentences before a break so that we don't get big block chunks of text. Keep a conversational tone as if you're speaking directly to one person, and make it professional, but fun and friendly, so you can change that however you like. If, if you have different preferences, if you wanted to use bullet points really often, or you like the longer paragraphs because of however you're laying things out, or you want to change the tone so that it's more professional and less of the fun and friendly style, then you just make those changes so that it suits you.

So what we can now do.

Is it now understands who my ideal client profile is.

So let me just. It's not loading like, there we go. So I can now ask it to suggest content that would help bring in that ideal client. So again, here we've got a really simple prompt because we already have now that extra information with the profile being uploaded. This prompt can be fairly simple because it already has that extra context behind the scenes. So suggest content ideas for my target audience. I want to know the types and formats of content that would work well for my audience. The platforms that I can promote on that will target my attract that will attract my target audience. And a selection of top topics to cover with my content. Give me a detailed response. So I actually for this one used O1 which is the advanced reasoning model just to see how it would perform and it did pretty good job. So we've got short form videos and reels. So things like for the suitable for Instagram and tick tock or YouTube shorts. These can be 60 second videos that might be a good style of content. We've got blog posts, case study, success stories, webinars or longer form video, Live Q&As, podcasts, downloadable guides and checklists, infographics. Okay, we've got lots of great types of content there. Where might you promote? Okay, so it suggested Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups knowing the nomad and remote work communities are thriving here. So it understands where those communities are going to spend their time. Obviously you are going to want to do further research on that yourself as well just to make sure that you are putting your efforts into the right areas and you can use ChatGPT to do that research. We've got YouTube, Instagram, podcast areas as well if you're doing that. Places like Reddit where people ask lots of questions. Now the topics, it's giving me a range of a couple of different topics I might create. So we've got one here for international, international tax basics for nomads. So and we've got tax treaties and how they help business structuring 101 bookkeeping on the go. And by the way.

I can.

I can create, I can ask it to. To write 52 different topic ideas for me. So with that prompt it was telling me a lot of different things. It was telling me the type of content I might want to create, the topics and also the platforms because I asked for quite a few things. If I simplify even further, it already knows that I'm working with tax digital nomads. But I now want to create 52 blog posts to attract my ideal client profile. And I've got 52 great blog post ideas. The Ultimate Tax Guide for Digital Nomads in 202510 tax mistakes Digital Nomads make and how to Avoid Them all the Way down to why tax planning is essential, even if you don't think you need it. So, and it's sectioned those off for me in different themes so I could maybe rotate those themes throughout the year. So taking this last one here, why tax planning is essential, even if you think you don't need it, I can then go and create a blog post.

Let me just find the right conversation that I did for that.

Well, let's make a new one then, just so you can see how quickly it works. So.

Create a blog post for my audience with this title.

Oops, I've not copied the title. That would be helpful, wouldn't it?

Let me go back to here. Why tax planning is essential, even if you don't think it is.

There we go.

And paste that in there. Create a blog post for my audience with this title. I give it the title. So it's searching the project file. If you saw there it said searching project files. So the first thing it does is it looks at all of the files. So it's looking at my ideal client and it's then going to create the blog post for me. You can see it formats it quite nicely. Sometimes it will even open Canvas as well here and create that in a separate file. If it doesn't, you can instruct it to do so in the prompt you can say create a blog post using Canvas. And it will, it will make sure to use Canvas if that's how you want to do it. And then it's just going to go ahead and create a great blog post for you. So.

Bearing in mind your ideal client profile. Right. So all it had in this prompt was the title why tax planning is essential. But now it's saying if you're a digital nomad, remote entrepreneur or location independent professional, taxes might be the last thing you want to think about. Okay, so it's created a really, really powerful blog post. Now to go the next level. Creating blogs are so easy. Two years ago when ChatGPT first came out, you could really, really maximize on using this and creating blog posts. I think as AI becomes more and more prevalent and more used, widely used, especially in the accounting industry and booking industry, it's becoming ever more important that you differentiate yourself. And we suggest you do this by using video. Video content is going to help you stand out because it shows your personality. It shows that you're a real human being and that you're talking to people. It brings back that human element. Okay, so let's say you're really nervous about doing a video. You're not sure how to do that. But you know that a webinar would be course of really great idea. You could create a webinar and use it as a lead magnet to bring in new people. So they have to opt in. They have to put their name and email address to get that webinar. You then have their contact details and you can continue to market to them. That's a really powerful strategy in marketing. Let's say you don't really know how to format that webinar. You can ask for tips from ChatGPT, you can help for a structure. So I would like to create a 30 minute webinar on this subject. Can you help me out by giving me a breakdown of the topics I need to cover and some speaking points? So I took one of those topics that we got from the other chat earlier, International Tax Basics for Nomads. So it suggested now a breakdown for me of that.

That webinar that I might do. So we've got welcome and introduction with greeting. What's the purpose of the webinar? Some speaking points. It's then suggesting different sections that I would cover and how long I might take to do that. So this might be five to seven minutes. The next section, how these factors impact impact on your tax. That could be seven to 10 minutes. And then strategies for tips would be seven to eight minutes. And you would cover all of these points here.

Okay.

And you're the expert and you know this information is going to be within your niche. So you will have the information to be able to talk about those things. The because it's suggested it in that way with these three kind of segments of around seven to 10 minutes you can film the entire webinar. Use that as a, a full webinar that you promote. You can then split it into three shorter videos that you put on YouTube. For those three main categories you could take snippets from it where you've said a really great one liner and put that on your Instagram or your TikTok or wherever and use that video as content as well. Well, you could turn the webinar into a podcast. Okay. We can do so many different things with all of this stuff. So creating content is easier than ever. And it all becomes so much more powerful when you start with that ideal client profile. So I think that's all I've got time for. I'm going to pass it back over to Mark, but hopefully that's been really good for you and I hope you all enjoy the rest of the summit. Thanks Everybody.

Whoa. Great session. She covered so much stuff. I hope you're making notes. And we have at least one question in the. In the Q and A. And I've got a couple of questions as well. I thought I'd just pick Emily's brains on a couple of things.

And then we'll move on to our next topic. So, yes, Emily's here. Hi there, Emily.

Hi.

You all right? Can you hear me all right?

Perfectly well. Yes. Okay, so the WI fi is working in your caravan. Good stuff. Okay, Sandy said. Thank you, Emily. I always learn so much from you. Let me ask this question because I know you spent quite a bit of time talking about idle client profile, which is critically important, and hopefully people now have a better understanding of why they should do that as the starting point. So once they've done that process, I know you went through a whole bunch of things they could then do in content marketing, but what's the smartest thing that people should perhaps do first when it comes to marketing once they've done their ideal client profile? What content should I do first?

Yeah, so I kind of touched on it a little bit in that video, but there's what we would call a lead magnet. So this is a piece of content that you would give away for free in exchange for somebody's name and email address. So this could come up in any kind of format. It could be the webinar that we suggested with the. The script that we got it to help there. It could be an ebook or even a full book. If. If you want to use ChatGPT to create something like that, or a checklist or something, you know, a piece of value, a podcast, maybe you can get ChatGPT to help you create that. And then what you would do is use that piece of content to. To attract the people that you're trying to attract. So using the ideal client profile, we know what their pain points are. We can create that content around one of their pain points and then.

Advertise that, you know, promote that piece of content and get them to put their name and email address in order to get that content, get access to that content, which means that we can then continue to reach out to them and market to them, because we now have that contact detail. So that's a really powerful way of growing a list of people that you can continuously reach out to and beginning a journey with somebody because they're not likely to buy from you immediately as soon as they see from you. Some people need a bit more time to warm up to a point ready to buy. So getting, using that content to then get there.

That information, allowing you to contact them further is a great way to start. So you can use ChatGPT to help create that piece of content or give ideas for that piece of content and then create the content, you know, create a nice headline, then create the content around promoting it. So the social media around promoting it and all of that sort of stuff, everything can kind of lead on from there. And if you're going to host that piece of content on a web page, then you can create the webpage content from it and so on and so forth. So it kind of spirals. But essentially starting with that piece of content is a really good place to start with your marketing, I would say.

Absolutely great advice. And you then talked about lead magnets and so on. And we've got a question came in from Helen that I think builds on this. Helen said, can you use Chat GPT to create the lead magnet in Canva based on your brand, colors and format? I know you use Canva a lot, so perhaps you can talk to that a little bit.

Okay, so yeah, so what I would suggest doing, if you were going to do it that way, is use ChatGPT to create the wording and then you can take that wording and import it into Canva. Not to be confused here, Canvas is the. The tool that I was showing you that is in a part of ChatGPT that allows you to create that document. Canva is a design tool, completely separate tool, and that's what she's asking about. So you can create your wording with ChatGPT and then in Canva as a tool, you can already preset your colors, your logos, things like that. You can have templates for. If you create a lot of workbooks or resources like that, you can create templates so that essentially you can just copy and paste the wording from ChatGPT and very quickly create it using the templates in Canva. So, yeah, that's a really.

Quick and easy way. I believe that Canva does have some AI features to it now as well. But we do use Canva a lot and we haven't really been using the AI features as part of that because they're still a little bit.

Not quite refined. So. But yeah, I'd suggest doing it that way. Create your wording in ChatGPT and then use the template features in Canva to create a resource over in there.

Okay, thanks, Emily. Another question that I think you started talking about towards the end anyway in your session, but let's Explore this a bit more. So somebody says anonymous attendee, so I don't know their name says with a lot of things now so easy, like making blogs. Won't many people have very similar blogs and patterns even if they get detailed and particular in their ask, as you've expertly shown.

Yeah, so it's really about kind of making yourself stand out now. So I kind of mentioned it. You know, if you were to jump on the boat right when AI and Jack GPT really started kicking off, you could really take advantage of ChatGPT as a tool to create blogs and get content out there. And whilst I do still think it's really crucial that you get blogs out there because it can really help with keywords and SEO and you know, getting your, your website found and things like that. Really important to have blogs. You can, we can start utilizing different forms of content to try and stand out. And that's why we talk about video and having that different content form. Having video on your website, you know, having a YouTube channel where people can watch you discuss those topics rather than read them in a blog. You know, doing webinars or live streams where you talk to clients and answer their questions for them. Having video content in this kind of AI saturated world, as we get more and more AI content in the world, having video content just brings back that human element so that they know that they're talking to a human being. And when we're in the relationship industry that accounting and bookkeeping is, you know, you're working one to one with these people. Showing your personality and your energy and your passion through video is a really great way of helping you stand out. So putting a video on your website or having YouTube videos or something like that, really great way of helping standing out. But to go back to the blog content as well, your blog content, you can help make that stand out by having things like an ideal client profile, by having a writing style guide, you know, by taking the product that Chat GBT makes and editing it further yourself. Okay, so there are different ways that you can make those blogs stand out as well. But then also having that other mode of content, the video content is also going to be a really powerful way of, of standing out in the industry as well.

Yeah, great answer, Emily. One of the things that I've been saying for 18 months, about 18 months, two years ago, I was telling Value Pricing Academy members that I see there being a window of opportunity to use AI to get as much content out there as possible to really ramp up your content marketing. But I did Say that within a year and a half, two years, we're going to, and we're now getting to that point, point there's going to be so many people doing the same thing that the content is now saturated. And I did say a year and a half ago that, and I still believe this, that video marketing, video is going to become more important than ever. And I said to you at the start of today that the human connection is going to be increasingly important. We have to learn communication skills because people buy from people, people buy from people they like. And so AI is a great tool. Yes, we should get the content out there, but we also have to have the human touch. So the way that we do it, the way that we've been doing always done content is we start with the video. When we create a, if you ever read a blog post, for example, that we've done, what we do is I do a video first. I teach, I love teaching. It may be a YouTube video. I create a video and then from that video we take the transcription. Emily, Gabby, the rest of my team, they'll take the transcription and before AI, they edit it manually. Now we use AI to then create the blog post, to create the social media posts. So that means that we're creating all this content, but it is based upon my knowledge, it's based on the video. And very, very often we drive people back to the video because that's how people, people want to, people want to buy from people. And I think we're going to get to that stage. Emily I don't know if you agree, but I've got to the stage now where I almost never read blog posts because in my mind I'm thinking, I'm sure this is just done by ChatGPT, so why don't I just go and ask ChatGPT the question? I don't look at blog posts much now. I watch lots of videos. I would rather see a human being talking to me. And I think that that's going to be an increasing trend. What are your thoughts on that? Emily?

Yeah, I, I agree to an extent. But I also do think having the different modes of consuming that content is important because some people, I do still read blogs and articles, but sometimes I watch videos. So there are people who prefer one mode of content over the other. So I think video is probably, generally speaking, a lot more powerful and you can do a lot more with it. Like you say, you can repurpose it, take the video, turn that into a blog, get the transcript, get the podcast out of it and stuff. So video is a really great place to start. But I do think having the written version is also quite useful to have as well. So I just think the more content you get out there, the better.

Absolutely. Everyone's got different modalities. I can see. Kayan says I prefer watching over reading. Some people prefer reading.

Yeah. So let's see if we can. We've got eight minutes left.

Let's go with this one. Ek if you have multi, this is an interesting question. If you have multi ideal customers, how do you tell it which project or profile to use? If it's learning one, do you just tell it in the prompt? So I know we teach people in the academy that you probably will have lots of different Personas. So how do you deal with that? Emily?

Yeah, well, so first of all, the comment, if you are niching, if you have lots and lots of different niches, you're not niching. So first of all, just a comment about that. But if you did have, let's just say, you know, one or two different types of clients that you like to work with. I would say create an ideal client profile for each version and then what I showed you in, in the video earlier where I created that project and I uploaded that file, you can create a second project. So a separate one and you can have project the first project which you'll call Client A marketing and the first and the second one where you have client B marketing. So you can do it in that way where you upload a different file to each one and then whenever you're working on each of the different clients for marketing or writing an email, whatever it is, you just refer to that project instead of the other one. You can also do a very similar thing with GPTs. So you can import the files behind the scenes. So this is custom GPT. You can import the file behind the scenes and then when you go to have a conversation with that GPT, it will pre already have the knowledge of your ideal client in there as well. So they work in a similar way and it's kind of your preference which one you choose. There are some different things I won't go into, but yeah, I just say have, have duplicates and just make sure you pick the one that you're working on and have the different files for each one.

Great, thank you. I.

I can see a question from Pam that I will probably answer because I think I. Yeah, let me answer Pam's quickly. She says what software do you use? Do the videos and transcript. So when I do videos I use ECAMM which is what I'm using right now. I've taught a lot of people in the, in the value pricing academy how to use ecamm. Emily uses ecamm as well. And what's nice about ecamm is it enjoying enables you to do videos but also do very professional videos because you can set it up so you can switch between different scenes. So the things that you might have seen me do, where I might switch from me and then open up ChatGPT, I use that as the source. So that's how we've, that's how we record the videos with ecamm. And then if we want to do transcripts and editing, if it's editing.

Our team uses descript. There are lots of video editors, but we really like descript because it enables you to. Basically it creates the transcript for you and then you can edit the video based on the transcript, which is really cool if you want to make video editing much, much easier. The alternative is if you don't want to, if you're not doing editing. The other thing that we tend to do is we can get a video done. I can record a video and then we can import it into a tool like Otter AI, I think we use, don't we Emily?

And Otter AI will do a transcript.

So Pam, hope that helps there. We have four minutes left, I think. Time for one very quick question while Emily's still with us. And that is just very quickly. I know that I've Talked just about ChatGPT, you were talking about ChatGPT, but I also know, know that you've got, you do use other models. So just very quickly an overview. When would you use ChatGPT and when might you use something else?

Yeah, so my two favorites. I like using ChatGPT and I also really like Claude. And what I tend to do is I will create my prompt and then I will put the prompt into both platforms and just see which one I like the output more. So generally speaking, when it's something that's quite long written form, so I do things a lot like emails, website pages, long form writing projects. I do tend to prefer Claude just because of how it, how it turns out the answers. I just, there's a slight preference. If I'm doing tasks that are more kind of numbers based or a little bit more complex, then I might use ChatGPT because I think it's just got a lot more features to offer and especially if you're on the free plans of either the free plan of ChatGPT has a lot More extra features. So somebody was talking earlier about image generation. You've got that in ChatGPT. You've also got Internet access on ChatGPT, which you don't have in Claude. So I might use ChatGPT for something if it's a research project or something like that, but I tend to just have them both open and I post my. My prompt if. If it's relevant into both of them and then just see which one I prefer so that I can take the. The best of the. Of the bunch. Really.

Awesome. Emily, that was amazing. Thank you so much and I will catch up with you very soon.

Okay, thanks.

Bye.

Bye. Okay, we have a couple minutes left and. And then we'll have a quick break. What I'm going to do after the break is we're going to look at this area of privacy and confidentiality. Privacy, security, confidentiality. And also we'll look at prompt engineering. So we've got a lot still to cover. I did see a question pop into the Q and A that I. A couple of questions that I will deal with right now. Christine said, is it possible to get a copy of the client profile prompt? I'll need to talk about with Emily on that, but we have recorded a session and we will probably put it somewhere and perhaps put the prompts there as well. But at the moment, Christine, we hadn't planned to do that, so I'm not sure we'll figure out how best to do that. And Sean said, what are AI agents and how can we use them for bookkeeping and sales tax reports and other accounting functions? Okay, AI agents are really cool. This is the year of AI agents agents. Apparently in AI, this is kind of the next level. When OpenAI brought out GPTs in November of 2020 23, that was their first signaling that this was where they wanted to go with Chat GPT and make it more. Agentic is the word. And a lot of people been saying that 2025 is the year of agentic AI or AI agents. And simply that means creating little bots, if you like, that do automations. And you're probably familiar with things like Zapier or make. So Zapier does automations, but where we embed AI into it. And so the tool I use for doing automations is N8N. It is very advanced stuff to do automations. We do need to really understand about API calls. We need to understand a bit about JSON and XML formatting and so on. But once we do, it's actually quite easy. Now, once you've understood that to create some really cool little agents that do things. I will be teaching this at some point, either this year or next year in the value Pricing Academy. We're doing some cool stuff with agents right now. So watch this space, Shaun. It will become a big thing, but for most people here, it's probably a step too far. It's getting a little bit advanced now. Let's just get the best out of ChatGPT for the moment. Right, so we're going to go into the final session where we'll look at those two big topics of prompt engineering and client confidentiality, security and privacy in this AI world. I am going to go to a quick three minute break so that you can, so you can have a stretch break, get a cup of coffee, go to the bathroom, don't go anywhere else, leave the zoom open and I'll be back in three minutes. And if you think of any questions in the meantime, stick your questions in the Q and A box because I will be doing another Q and A in a short while. Okay, see you in three minutes.

Okay. Welcome back. We are into the, the last session of the day. Wow, it's going by really fast. I hope you've got something of value so far. In fact, what would be really interesting is if you could type into the chat what has been the most valuable thing so far. I'd love to get your feedback of all the things we've covered so far. What's been your key takeaway, your key thing? And while you're doing that, we'll start in about 30 seconds. I do want to give a quick shout out to interesting name, Tara the Tax Slayer. So just so you know, we are. This is actually being live streamed, my YouTube channel. We didn't publicize it, but it's simply because we're going to make the recording available for a couple of days afterwards if anyone wants to catch up. So it's, it's in the live section of our YouTube channel, but there is actually one or two people watching it. One of them is Tara and she's commenting like crazy. So Tara, I just want to give you a shout out. So good to have you here, if not in zoom. Okay, we are going to. Yeah, let's get into the last session. I did see a question as well from Beth in the Q and A.

I will come to that. Beth said, apologies if I missed this, but exactly how can we best use ChatGPT to fulfill advisory services? Okay, I will get to that. We're going to have a, we'll have a Q and a session before we wrap up today. And I will definitely answer that one. And if anybody else has questions still, remember, put the Q and A. Sorry, the questions in the Q and A, because I don't have time to read everything in the webinar chat. Sarah's doing that and she'll probably tell me if there's anything really important. But lots of things going in there right now as to what you found has been the most valuable part, like identifying ideal client profile from Christine. Okay, so we've got lots of stuff to cover. There's so much more that we could cover. Hopefully you're getting the idea now that there's a lot of stuff that we can use ChatGPT for, or AI generally in our firms to get more done and to be at the leading edge. I have a question for you, and that is, would you be interested in me and my team guiding you at a deeper level through this process? And if so, just say yes in the chat. I'm going to get onto Prompt Engineering next, but before I do, I can see lots of people saying yes in the chat right now. Benjamin, Mark, Helen, Tammy, Julius. So, as I said at the outset, if you want to go even deeper still, then we have something brand new for you that we are launching today. And that is, so we talked about earlier, how we've got this community that we've now set up that you can access. And I think so far Today, I think 175 people are in there, which is great. And we're going to put some great stuff in there. We'll keep adding to that. But what we've also done is we've created a second community for those people that want to go even deeper still, that want to learn AI at a deeper level. It's called the AI Academy, the AI Academy for Accounting Professionals. That's for you. And the big benefit is really what we want to do is really help you stay ahead of this in this space by giving you even more training, even more resources.

So that you stay at this leading edge so that you can avoid all the problems that the other firms will have. Because AI is going to swamp some firms, there's no doubt about that. So our job is to make sure that you stay ahead and that you thrive in this AI world. So we've set up a second community on the same platform.

On school. Let me just quickly show you some of the extra things that we are doing on that platform. So let me just go across to here.

So I know some of you are now in the Other one, this is the AI Academy and what we'll be doing is posting some of our best training and best resources here. If we go through to the classroom, for example, you will see that we've already got a lot of training there for you. We've got ChatGPT for accountants, which is our core training for getting the most out of ChatGPT. We have the foundations. I think there's a couple of hours of training there. And now we've started doing training videos around advanced features where we'll look in more detail at things like how to set up projects, how to do financial analysis with advanced reasoning, how to do scheduled tasks. And we've got so much more coming your way in the classroom in that there's also my training on prompt engineering where I teach you how to craft amazing prompts and get better results. We also have use cases. So if you like the things that I've shared so far today, those prompts, those use cases, we're going to be putting many, many more inside. Inside here we've got something like 50 prompts lined up. I just have to find the time to film all the videos. So that's all coming. And then what you also get access to is every single month for 90 minutes, I believe Emily goes live where she'll show you the latest in AI and also answer questions live. And those live sessions, as well as being invited live. We will be putting the recordings in here so you can go back. We started back in November so you can also access any of the previous recordings now. Build up month in, month out. So a lot of deeper stuff. I know there are some people here in the Value Pricing Academy, if you're already a VPA member, please don't worry. We're going to put you in here automatically so you're not missing out if you're already in the Value Pricing Academy. If you're not though, and you want to get access to this deeper training, then we're inviting you today to join the AI Academy. And we have a Because we're officially launching today, we have a very special founder member, Price. As many people in the Value Pricing Academy tell me, which we've been doing for nearly 11 years now. Our members tell us one of the things they love about our academies is that we put the price up every single year. We add more content. But when you join the Academy, you lock the price in. The price never changes for you. So people have been with me for 11 years, for example, in the Value Pricing Academy get so much more than they did Back then. And so this is your opportunity to join the AI Academy at the founder member price. We have got so much more coming your way, a lot more training. This world is evolving fast. So we are going to keep you up to date with new stuff, new training as we create it. And you'll get all the new stuff in the academy and your price won't change. Okay. Your price will be the same. And.

So that's maybe. Let me show what it is I'm going to get my team to in a second. Put the link in the chat.

Here'S the details of the page that you'll go to. You can watch a video from me. You'll find out more about all the training, the resource and so on. And we've decided for founder members, we're going to keep the price crazy low. It's going up very, very soon. But because you are going to be the first people here, we want to do something special. And it's just US$47 per month. Okay, it is going up, but that won't affect you when you join today. So.

Links coming very, very soon. I think Sarah's actually Sarah's put it in there. If you are in the Value Pricing Academy already, we will be putting you in here. So please don't worry if you're not in the academy. Grab today as your opportunity to get in at the lower, lowest price it will ever be. And there's much more coming soon. And of course, if you find at some point in the future you're not getting value, you can always change your mind and unsubscribe at any point in time. So if you want to go deeper, now's the best time to join because it's the lowest price it will ever be. And we've also got some additional training and resources coming your way at various your way very soon, which I will tell you about in a few minutes. Okay, I think that's that. If you've got any questions, put it in the Q and A box. I will get to questions very, very soon.

But I think that's covered everything. What I want to do now is talk about prompt engineering. Okay, how, how do we construct our prompts? What are the key things we want to do with prompts? And let's start with a definition. What do we mean by prompt engineering? Thank you, Mark. Mark's just joined straight away. That was that Ching. I get a little notification when somebody joins. So good to see you, Mark. Prompt engineering simply means how we communicate with AI systems and prompt engineering. I believe Is one of the most important skills that we need to develop. I said earlier at the outset of today that we need to, we need to increase our skills with communication. Katrina. Hi there, Katrina. That was you. We need to increase our communication skills. Why? Because we. I may need to turn this down. Going to get ka ching kaching. When people join and Sandy's just joined. That's cool.

Where was I? Yes. Communication is so important in this world because we're going to value more human connection. And that means we've touched on already the power of doing videos, for example, to build your brand to be more confident doing live streams. We have some members doing of the academy doing some extraordinary things, growing their business crazy fast off the back of video because we've taught them the skills to do that. Well. Communication is the number one skill.

Why?

Because everything you do when it comes to building a business is communication. If you want to scale a big business through people, then that's leadership skills you need. Leadership is about communication. You have to communicate your vision because to inspire people. If you want to attract more clients to your business, that's about marketing. And marketing is about words. Communication. When you have a potential client come to a meeting with you, then you're in a sales process. The sales process is about the communication, the words you use to get the best results. And as we move into this AI driven world, then we also need to learn how do we communicate with AI systems. And that's what prompt engineering is. In fact, just to give you an idea of how important it is, there were a lot of articles back in 2023 reporting how in the US companies are willing to pay up to $375,000 salaries for prompt engineers. And those numbers have probably gone up by now. This is a really important skill and yet it's not that difficult. It's not about programming. It's basically about how do we structure prompts? What's the language we use to get the best, best results. So one of the things that I've been teaching for 18 months now is prompt engineering. How do you craft great prompts? And my full course on this is in the AI academy, which Helen's just joined as well. We'll get access to it, but I want to share with you some of the essential elements of crafting great components. And we've touched on some of this already today. So we looked at the Persona, why you want to give ChatGPT a Persona, and that's because we get a better result when we tell it to act in a particular Role. I gave a couple of examples earlier. We had. I'm trying to think which examples I gave. We had somebody who's an expert in business processors for building our SOPs. If, for example, you want to. Let's say you want to analyze financial statements and do a report for clients. If you tell ChatGPT to play the role of a financial accountant skilled in understanding financial data, then the sort of report it will create, the output it will be create, will be the sort of output you would expect from a financial accountant. It will be a better output input, it'll be more nuanced. So Persona is really important. I always put a Persona in not just all my template prompts, but even if I do a quick prompt, I will always give a Persona. It's become natural to me to do that, to tell Chat GPT what role to play. Now then, we have the task. Now, that goes without saying. That's what you want it to do. I want you to give me 10 ideas for a blog post. That's the task. I probably don't need to talk much more about that other than the fact that the more specificity, the more detail that we are in our task, the better the result. Let me just skip over context for a second audience.

That's probably to some extent obvious now from Emily's session. If you are doing marketing, then knowing who your audience is, your ideal client profile, having an avatar is critically important. So whenever you are getting ChatGPT to create something, then think about who is it for? Is this for a client, Is this for marketing, or is it just for you? And when we understand who the audience is, we can get it to put it in the format that you want. If it's just for you, you might want ChatGPT to always do things in a way that's either explained very simply or very detailed, or to always give you, for example, the reasoning behind what it says or to give you citations.

And we can build that into custom instructions. And then we have the response format. This is how you want it. Formatting this could be things like the writing style, the writing tone. What is the format of the output? Is it going to be an email? Is it going to, Is it a research report you're creating? All these things can impact on the output you're going to get. And so we need to understand how to build up our prompts and we need to think about these as a checklist. When you create a prompt, think about, make sure you've got a Persona in there. Make sure that you have thought about the audience and have been specific in the prompt. Think about the output that you're looking for, the writing style, the writing tone. Think about is it a report, is it an email, what sort of structure do you want it to be?

And then last but not least, I've missed out the middle one on purpose because I want to go deeper on this context. Context is so important. What do we mean by context? Context is the background information. The more context that we give, the better the result we're going to get. The better result that we will get from. From ChatGPT. If you say to ChatGPT, I want you to give me 10 ideas for a blog post, it'll give you 10 ideas, but they may be of little use to you because you have to give it the context, the background. So you might want to, for example, say to the, say to ChatGPT.

I am an accounting firm specializing in, in forecasting. So if you then said give me 10 ideas for a blog post, it's going to give you the sorts of ideas that an accounting firm that does a lot of work in forecasting. It's going to give you much more appropriate, much more relevant.

Response because it's now got a bit of context. It knows what type of business you are, what you specialize in. That's context. And the more context that you can create, the better. Welcome Julius. I'm still getting the bell going, so let's show, let me show you a prompt that you can use.

If you're going to start a new chat in ChatGPT. And let me, just for a minute, let me start a brand new chat and go across to ChatGPT quickly. So one of the things I love about ChatGPT is, is that when you have a chat, a conversation, it remembers the previous things in the trail of correspondence. And that's why it's really important to have some systems in your own systems for how you label and manage your past chats. And one of the things we can now do as of December 2024 is we can put chats into projects, which Emily touched on. Project is one of my favorite features. That's these little folder icons here. And so we can use Project to organize our chats as well as all the powerful stuff like having project files and project instructions, which Emily touched on. So I certainly use that for organizing chats. Not all of them, some of them are here. And when you create a chat, when you start a brand new chat, remember it's going to remember everything in that chat. Actually, that's not Quite true, because one of the shortcomings of AI is something called the context window, which is measured in something called tokens. Okay, now a token is roughly. Roughly a token is 0.7 of a word. So 10 words is about 7 tokens.

Anyway, that's getting technical. You don't have to worry too much about that. But all large language models have a context window. In other words, they can remember so much stuff. A bit like human beings. Yes, they forget stuff. And so when we're using a chat, the great thing is it remembers our previous chats, but only up to a certain point. And so if we're doing really long chats, you may find that it starts to forget some of the earlier stuff. And there's tips we can use to get around that. Sometimes I'll start a brand new chat. If it's got too long, sometimes I'll ask it to summarize the chat because it will then remember. Because when it summarizes the chat, then that summary becomes front of mind. If you like, it'll then remember that. So there's little tips we can use. Anyway, let's forget for a minute about context window. When we're starting a brand new chat, then.

You'Re going to want to make sure you start off and give it the context. And one of the things that we can do is we could start off with a prompt that is designed entirely to provide that context. And I'm going to give you that prompt. I just need to grab it from my system.

And I caught.

I need to grab it and I need to also. Yeah, here we go. I've got it. Let me just copy and paste into ChatGPT. I call this one, I call this prompt Context Starter.

So let me just put the screen back on. Okay, so this is context Starter. This is, this will be a useful prompt to start off a, a longer chat. And this actually links a little bit perhaps to what Beth said. Beth asked in the Q and A. Q and A which I'll get to. She says, apologize if I missed this, but exactly how can we best use ChatGPT to full advice fulfill advisory services? And I also said earlier, if you remember that I love chat GPT for business advisory because it's great at strategy. And that can be strategy not just for your clients, but for your business. Okay, so let's imagine, let's think about your business for a minute. Let's imagine that you want to do some strategic planning for your business. You want to ask a series of questions. You want it to come and come up with some ideas for your business and you're going to have a backwards and forwards chat to come up with strategies for your firm to grow your firm, to improve your firm. And so we want to start off by doing some context first, because when we give it context, context will get better results. So I've created this prompt which says you are a business consultant specializing in supporting accounting firms in developing growth strategies and overcoming operational challenges. So that's the role. I want it to help me in my firm with strategy, with operational efficiency, all those kind of big picture things we might want to deal with. Your task. Here's the task. Your task is to analyze the provided business context. Okay, I'll put that in square brackets. Why? Because when I put things in square brackets, it then signals to ChatGPT that there's going to be another section about context. Okay. So your task is to analyze the provided business context and confirm your understanding of the business model and target market. Once you have analyzed my business, say I understand your business. How would you like me to help? For example, you could ask me for ideas for overcoming your biggest problem. Now, the only thing this prompt is going to do, in some respects it's not that exciting because what it's going to do when you run this prompt is basically say to you, I understand your business. How would you like me to help? For example, you, you could ask me for ideas for overcoming your business problems, what that's doing. And this is why I like this type of prompt. It's basically chatgpt, confirming to me that it understands my business, it understands the context. It's read it, it's understood it. So now I'm going to. Let me Bear me a second. The screen has just gone off. I'm hoping that's not affecting your experience in any way. But I am now down to one screen for some bizarre reason. Let me just check.

It has.

We'll be back in a second. I think we're okay. We're okay. I just can't see as much on my screen. So forgive me as I fumble around my different things. I don't know why it's gone off. Weird. Okay, so where was I? Yes, context. So now I'm telling it what I want it to do. Let me give you some click context.

And you could change this. But one of the things I could do is here is our website address. Use your browsing capability to analyze every page and all you do is insert your website. So I'm going to pick a different website. I often use this for demos I don't know who this company is. It's a accounting firm in the uk. So let's imagine I was the owner of Harrison Co and if you're here, let me know. I do use your website a lot. It's just no particular reason, it's just one I picked so you could put your website there and it says here's our website. Use your browsing capability to analyze every page. Then it says my business is. So I'm going to put. It should get this from the website. But is a UK accounting firm, my target market is. And I'm going to just go with just to save time typing owners of small businesses in the healthcare and hospitality industry. Okay, now of course you've now done Emily's session. You could upload your custom avatars. I employee I employ. I'm going to just go for six people. Okay. We currently get new customers via. I'm going to just say via new customers. How? We currently get new customers via referrals. Referrals.

And networking. The biggest problem, and this is the last bit, the biggest problem our business is facing right now is let's say finding new customers.

And.

Productivity levels with low employee motivation. Okay so I've now just given it context. Okay, I've got. So it now knows that I'm a small accounting firm in the UK. It's got my website, it's got my target market, etc. Etc. If I now hit this button here to send this prompt off, it's going to take a little while because it's now reading the website first so it'll take a bit longer than normal. Hopefully not too long. Here you go. So now what it's doing is it's confirming it's reviewed the website, it's summarizing sometimes, remember I said just tell me you understand my business but sometimes it'll go a bit further, it'll actually go and analyze it, which is fine. What this is now telling me as I look through this is it's confirming that it understands the background of my business. Because I can read this, if I was Harrison Coe, I'd say yeah, that's about right. It's correctly. Got that from my website. Yes, I know I use Xero in QuickBooks and I know that because I've used this quite a lot for case studies and then it's confirmed.

My ideal customers, my team size and so on. Key observations from website. Okay, I didn't ask for any of that. But the point is I now know that ChatGPT understands my business. Its Context. So now I can do fairly short, simple prompts. I could say, for example, give me five ideas to grow my business. Okay. And I don't have to put context in there because it's got the context. Okay. I could still do a better prompt, for sure. I could use all those other things we talked about in terms of the structure of a prompt. We could certainly build these other things in. But even with just that, see, we've got things like, I could launch a mini series of free Downloadable guides like 7 Key Mistakes Dentists make and how to Avoid Them and How Restaurant Owners can boost profits in 2025. Because it understands my business, my type of clients. It's read the website, it knows what are the sort of clients I like to work with. It's giving me start a referral accelerator program and so on. There's going to be lots of great ideas here, and they're going to be great ideas because it understands the context. Okay? So I hope that makes sense. If not, ask me some questions. We'll get to Q and A fairly soon. Let me just go back to here. So that's. Where was I going? Back to here. That's the power of context. I would argue when we look at constructing our prompts, when we look to construct prompts, I'd say that context is one of the most important, important components. And one of the great things about ChatGPT now is we can provide context in so many ways. So we can do it via a prompt like that. We can provide context by.

Giving it a website because it has its search functionality, and we can also provide context by uploading files. And I think Emily hinted at that you could drag in your ideal client profile, your customer Personas and so on to provide context. And then of course, at a more advanced level, we can set up things like projects and upload project files.

Right. Anything else on?

No, I think that's what I wanted to cover on that particular topic on context.

So I'm hoping that's given you some thoughts and some ideas on how to construct your prompts. We've covered some of those essential elements. We've looked at several examples today, and I'm just going to very quickly just see if I can turn my screen back on. I don't know why it's crashed anyway. It's difficult when you used to work with two screens and then suddenly one disappears. Anyway, I'll carry on. Let's talk a little bit about the final topic of today, which I wanted to cover because I think it's becoming Increasingly important. And I've seen lots of discussions on social media around this topic recently in Facebook groups of accountants and bookkeepers, and that is the issue of security and privacy. I've done sessions on this before, but I know I get lots of questions, so I thought I'd do a slightly longer session on this. It's something that there seems to be a growing concern around, and quite rightly so, there is a lot of worry around AI. And I know that the various professional institutes now are increasingly talking about it because there are a number of risks involved with AI. There's risks over breaches of confidentiality, obviously very important to us. If we're accounting firms and I think we have a lawyer here as well, client confidentiality is very important also. We have to be aware of things like GDPR and other data protection regulations and the consequences of violations against them and potential data leakage. And so I spent some time over the last week or so going really deep on this and we're just putting the final finishing touches to a really detailed research report on this. So, for example, when I looked at different institutes around the world, if. And this research report, we looked and researched not just the uk, but all over the place. If I'm not there, where's my screen gone? Here we go. So, for example, in the uk, I'm a chartered accountant, so I'm governed by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. And if you go to their site, then they're basically, they're saying that. I'll just read the last sentence. If any of the information you are considering inputting into AI tools includes client data, then it's very likely that this will breach client confidentiality. So that's what the ICAW say, the.

AICPA code, which for the us, they're saying that using AI could run afoul of Rule 1.700, the Confidential Client Information Rule. So we have to be really careful because of this client confidentiality, not just with our professional institutes, but also we have to be careful because. Because of things like GDPR and so on, it's a really big issue. So I did this research report for you. It's 35 pages where I go really deep into all the issues that we need to be aware of. But how do we deal with them? What are some of the things that we need to think about, consider when we using AI? So let me give you some practical steps to consider. So, number one, we should never input real client data into a public AI system. Public AI, like chat GPT, like Claude and particularly the, the free versions. So be careful about client data. We should not be putting that into an AI system. And so sometimes people say to me, ask the question, so if we're going to analyze financial data, an Excel spreadsheet, then how can we do that? And the advice is, the advice I would give is that it's okay if we're using anonymous data. So, yes, you can upload an Excel spreadsheet of financial data into ChatGPT to analyze. You just make sure there's nothing on that Excel spreadsheet that makes it identifiable to a particular client. Okay. We have to anonymize the data or use synthetic data. Okay. I think that's common sense. Also, we want to make sure that we're using secure versions of software. So there are all sorts of different LLMs, AI tools that we can use. We can, for example, use LLMs that are open source, that we can download onto. If we have powerful computers, we can run AI locally. And if we do that, then that's safer, much safer, because we're not training models or anything like that. Unfortunately, for most smaller firms, that's outside of either our budget or our skill set on how to do that. For most small firms, we are using systems like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. And so what we need to therefore be aware of is which are the safer ones of the different tools. And also we have to think carefully about which.

Options do we use. So, for example, with ChatGPT, we have the free plan, we have the plus plan, the team plan, the pro plan, and the enterprise plan. There's five different plans that we can have. With CHAT GPT.

The free plan is the one that's the, the least secure, the one to be careful of. So it's a great plan, it's a great place to start. And if you're new to this world of AI, then yes, use CHAT GPT, use the free plan. It is amazing, but you have to be more careful about client information or even your own personal information. Now, if you go for, if you decide to use the team plan, which is what we use, or even the enterprise plan, although that's for very big companies. One of the things about the team plan is your prompts are not used to train the models. So if you are serious about using ChatGPT, and you have a team of people, you're a larger firm and you do want to use it for analyzing client data and so on, then you might decide that it's worth using the teams plan. Okay? So that's the Next thing, in terms of practical steps, think about which is the right plan for you. And what I've done is I also did a little report for you week or so ago which I've just uploaded into the community. I did put that into both of the communities on which is the right plan for you of ChatGPT. I looked at the pros and cons of each. Which one, where should you start? Which is the best plan to go with? So if you've got that as a question going through your mind, then I've done a report for you. It's in the community. What else should you do in terms of practical steps? Well, you should definitely have an AI usage policy in your firm. You should create an AI policy and you should also, if you employ people, you should have employee training, you should train people on the policy, how they can use AI. You also have to make sure that you, you comply with GDPR and also whatever your institute guidelines are. And for that you'll need to research that because all the institutes around the world are different. So if you're a member, if you're like me, a chartered accountant, then go and check out what the ICAW's guidance are. Excuse me, I'm going to sneeze.

Apologies. I can sense that one coming for a while. Okay, so you have to be aware of, if you are in a professional institute, what are their guidelines, go and check them out. And then you should also my final point around this area is you should still maintain human oversight because again I said at the outset of today, one of the threats is sometimes AI gets things wrong. And so yes, we can use it and it can save us so much time, but we have to make sure that we use our own professional judgment and expertise. And that's particularly the case in high level stuff. You can use ChatGPT to do tax research reports, for example. And the more sophisticated models do this really, really well and they give you citations, the links to where it got the information from. But nevertheless, I would always recommend just double checking some of those links, double checking the facts. If it states something in a report and it doesn't tell you where the information came from, you can ask it for that. You could say, where did you get, where did you, where was the basis upon this particular fact? If you're using ChatGPT to do some calculations, for example, carry out some ratio analysis of financial data, then I would do check some of the calculations, just be sure that it's doing it right. It's pretty good. But sometimes we should just Double check these things. We should be using AI as a tool. It's an extremely powerful tool, but it's not going to replace us yet. We still, we need to have. Sometimes it's referred to as hil. Human in the loop. Okay, there should be a human in the loop. And so which I think is one of the things going back to an earlier thing about opportunities is this is how you differentiate yourselves from those firms that might go down the AI only route. Let's make sure that in our marketing, our positioning, we, we tell people about the fact that there's a human that will talk to them. Okay, so I've done this, I've done this research report which I'm going to be putting in the AI academy. It's going to be uploaded. It's just being, the design is just being finished off today. I think it's been finished by time I'm delivering this. So if you are in the AI academy, if you upgraded to that particular community, then we will be uploading this probably tomorrow, this report. And then what I'm going to be doing in the next few.

Probably, possibly next week could be this week. I'm going to do a series of training videos and also resources to make it really easy to go through the practical steps. I want to make it as simple as possible for you to do things like create your AI policy and other practical steps. I want to make it simple for you because it's not difficult to do. A lot of it's common sense. It is quite scary when you read the report and you look at the various, what things like people like the ICAW say and if you. And so on. But I want to simplify it for you into some very, very simple steps. You do need to make sure you've got an AI policy. You do need to consider things like to what extent do you disclose to your clients that you're using AI? I think this is really important. Once you've done it, of course, once you've got that in place, that policy in place, once you've decided how you disclose to clients and so on, once you've decided that internally, then it opens up this world of using AI for all sorts of amazing things. I think it's so powerful. The opportunity is extraordinary. Hopefully you've seen today that there are many, many things that we can do with it. But we are professionals, okay, we are professionals. Let's use it responsibly. Let's make sure that we are doing the right thing, that we are aware of the guidelines, the client Confidentiality, the privacy, the security issues. Okay, I hope that report is useful to you. And as I said, I will be publishing that within the next day or so in the AI Academy community. Okay, I'm going to go to questions next. I just want to go back to finally this slide I showed earlier, which is, and I, many of you did comment is, are you ready for this change? Are you excited by AI? Are you? Or are you going to try and resist it and hold it back like King Canute holding back the waves, which is pretty futile. AI is here, it's coming extremely fast and so we need to be ready for it. I think you are ready for it because you are here. If you're here, you've been listening for the last getting on for three hours. So I congratulate you. Thank you so much for giving up your precious time and I look forward to be able to support you through either the AI Academy or if you want, the other, the other community we talked about. I want to support you and help you and guide you, as do the rest of my team, Emily, Gabrielle, Gabby, Sarah and so on. Right, I'm going to wrap up now with questions. I'm going to wrap up with some questions. I just have to. Because my other screen disappeared. I have to. So Sean says ready in capital letters. Awesome. I can see six questions in the Q and A panel. I will try and answer all of them before we wrap up. So Beth said, Beth said. Apologies if I missed this, but exactly how can we best use ChatGPT to fulfill advisory services? Right, That's a great question, Beth. So there are so many things that we can do, so many use cases that we can do. So one of the things that.

Some of the things we can do is we, first of all, we can create, create a prompt that helps us do some research into a client's business and their industry. I have a prompt that I share with people in the Value Pricing Academy on how to industry research, which is really powerful. If we're going to have a meeting with a potential client and we want to do advisory work, then we want to make sure that we come across as being an expert, that we understand their industry well. We can use ChatGPT for doing the research. Then when we do advisory work, all advisory work starts with strategy. We have to have a strategic planning meeting. And that means there's certain things we need to do as part of strategic planning. And.

When we are helping a client come up with strategy, there are a number of different business consulting models that we really help us Here, lots of different consulting models and we can use ChatGPT to help us with these. Let me give you one of the models, the one that's the most widely known and that's swot, the SWOT analysis. Please do not dismiss it based on its seeming simplicity. Yes, it's a simple model. It's extremely powerful when we use it in the right way. And so when I do strategic planning with a business, one of the things I will do is I have a standard prompt I use to carry out a SWOT analysis on their business and on their industry. And then when I have the meeting with the client to go through strategic thinking, I will then do a SWOT analysis with them and I will use what I've got from the AI system to start the conversation. I might say to the client, I've been doing some thinking about your business and I want to do, I want to look at strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. I've been thinking about the strengths of your business and what I see as being the strengths. Let me go through those and you can tell me whether you agree with them or not. And then let's talk about any other possible strengths I've missed. And so by going through what I get out of AI, it then looks like I've done my research, I've done my homework, I understand their business. And it also means that I get something to start the conversation because if I just said to a client, hey, let's do a SWOT analysis, tell me what are your strengths? They might look blank and think, I don't know, I can't think of any. But when you give them four or five based on your research into their business, their industry, then they're going to say, oh yes, that's a good one, yes, we are good in that area. And then that's going to help them think about other related areas. So, Beth, we can use it for strategic planning using business consulting models like swot. I love the SWOT analysis. There are many, many others that we can use to start to build up a strategic plan for a client. And then advisory is really about, once you've done the strategic plan, it's then about working with them month in, month out to help them work through their plan, to help them work through their plan towards achieving their goals. So if anybody wants to go much deeper on how to do business advisory, then we teach that at a deep level in the Value Pricing Academy in our top level membership. I know we have many people here who've commented in the chat in our top level of Academy. We teach, amongst other things, how to deliver and master and make money from business advisory. Anyway, Beth, I hope that helps. Right, let's move on to the next question. Kayan says how best to use ChatGPT as a UK practice chartered accountant. Examples of uses in day to day activities as practicing accountants. Well, Khan, I've given you I think hopefully lots of examples so far and we've gone, I mean Emily's done some marketing ones. I've looked at SOPs, standard operating procedures and what else did I look at this morning earlier? I can't remember. And also if you want more ideas, there's that when you. I put into the school community, just go to the classroom, click on the use cases course. And I think in the very first one there's an introduction to use cases. I uploaded, I uploaded a document called 27 use cases. I'm just going to see if I can find it just to show it to you.

Just so you can see where it is. So if I go to the classroom.

And if I go to.

Yeah, I've moved my screens around now so I don't know if it will show you it. Yeah. So if you were to use cases, you will see in the very first post this one here at the bottom, resources 27 practical use cases. So Kay, and that should help you with that. That's a great place to start. And I will be posting over the weeks and months to come more use cases in the community.

Jacqueline, what do you see in the future for bookkeeping and reconciliations with scanning in and sorting back bank statements? Which part of Chat GPT would you utilize to set this up, to automate it? That's an interesting question, Jacqueline. So I do believe that in the next two to three years bookkeeping as we know it will cease to exist because AI will do it all, all the data entry AI will do. And I mean we this if, if you, I've been following AI for the last two years now and the, when you look at the, when you see what the experts are predicting for the end of this decade, 2030, our life is going to be very, very different. And so it's clear to me, seeing the pace of change, that certainly anything that's rules based like bookkeeping, AI will just do that perfectly. Now when it comes to what tools to use, Chat GPT can help us with this and I've got prompts and things that will analyze bank statements from a piece of and so on. But ultimately I think we're going to find that the best tools are going to be developed by the companies dominating this space. I remember going to Mountain View in 2019 as a guest of Intuit and in 2019 they were rolling out the start of their AI journey. That's when they first drew, revealed the plan and I saw a presentation by Sasan, I think about 18 months ago where they gave an update on where they're at with that. And it's clearly gathering space at a huge rate of knots. And I think that over the next 12 to 18 months you're going to see big changes inside QBO, inside Sage, inside Xero. They are all on doing, they are all working on this AI and it's going to get faster and faster and faster. And so I think we'll find anyway it's going to be the accounting tools that will do this. Now there are lots of other people I just saw, I was going to show it today. I came across yesterday a new app, I think it's called Reconcile, which is R E C O N X I that will then reconcile your bank statement. But I looked into it this morning and I thought that's not very good that one. So I didn't bring it to your attention. But what I am seeing is there's a plethora of new AI based tools hitting the market every single day, including in our space, tools that promise to automate bookkeeping, to automate reconciliations. Many of them are rubbish at the moment, but there will be some good ones. And we know that the big companies, the Intuits, the Sages, the Zeros, they're investing so heavily in this. So it's coming, it's coming.

So they're the tools. I would just recommend that you would just use the tools that we've already got access to because you could, you, you could craft your own prompts or even build automations to do it using ChatGPT and so on. It's a lot of hard work, I think. Okay, Sean says. Sean, sure. Oh, I don't know. Are projects on the free version of ChatGPT?

I can't remember. I know you did that, I did the report last week. But I've written so many things for you lately and I'm not on the free version, so perhaps somebody else can say in the chat box who's got a free account, do you have projects? You'll know if you do, because on the left hand side you'll see either you've got your folder set up or it'll just say Projects with a plus icon next to it. So you can start and open up your first project. Sean, I don't know. I don't know if projects are part of the free version. I'm really sorry. I don't know if Emily's still here or not. She might know. Sorry, I was useless on that one. Chintan says will the accounting software like Xero and QuickBooks will integrate AI in the future. Oh, I've covered that. Yes, they will. I mean, they're already doing that. I'm closest Intuit, I follow them. I used to do a lot of work for Intuit and as I said back in 2019, my last visit to their premises, yes, they were rolling out their AI. So watch this space. It's just going to develop so fast in the next 18 months. Right, Helen, if you create a chat, can other people access it? There is the facility in ChatGPT.

Where you can share your chats with other people. Now, again, I'm not sure off the top of my head whether that's available on the free account or not, but certainly. And let me just see if I can.

Let me see if. Yeah, so if I just go to ChatGPT right now, this is one I chatted earlier. You'll notice in the top right, can you see. Yes. In the top right, you've got a share button and I can't see it because my screen is covered. If I click Share, what's it going to do? It's then going to ask who I want to share it with. I can create a link and then I can share with other people. Why is this useful? It's really good for internal collaboration with your team. So we do this every now and then. It may be that I'm working on a chat, doing some research. Perhaps I'm researching.

Perhaps you're researching ideas for what might be your latest blog posts. For example, you've done a whole bunch of stuff, or perhaps you're doing some research in some tax or whatever, and then you want a member of your team to then create a report, design it in Canva for your clients or whatever. Then what you can do is share the chat with your team member and say, I've done the initial research and now want you to then build out the final report and they can just carry on the chat and they can see the previous chat, they can see where you've got to. So, Helen, I find that really useful. I don't use it as much as I should do, but it's a neat little feature that you can share chats. Rebecca says, did you see ChatGPT as being useful for assisting with providing payroll analysis for S Corp owners. Okay, well, first a quick heads up. I'm not familiar with US stuff. I know S Corp is a company, it's the equivalent of a UK limited company and I'm not an expert in payroll. But is it useful for assisting with providing payroll analysis? I guess it depends on the analysis that you want to do. Certainly with ChatGPT, if you can get your data into a CSV file or an Excel spreadsheet and you can fill feed it armed with the right prompt, you can do all sorts of analysis. Or if you can download it as a PDF.

I like doing P. I use. I prefer PDFs. I find it's just quicker to get the answer.

But what I would do first and foremost is before you think about getting Chat GPT to analyze your payroll and so on, go and check the software you're using. What's the payroll software you've got? Are they building AI in? Because if the. If the tools you're already using in your tech stack are building AI in, then there's no point reinventing the wheel if it's in your original initial tech stack. Okay, if it's not, then yes, you can certainly do analysis with ChatGPT. Peter says. Oh, Peter just says no projects available on the free version. Thanks for confirming. I didn't think there was. I didn't think there was. The free version is a great place to start, but it doesn't have all the functionality. And my advice is I've got this report, you could go read it. But I think that the.

For what you can get, the value you can get from the plus and the Teams account, it's only $20 a month. I think it's extraordinary. The time it saves me is hours and hours of time. And I love GPTs, I love projects, all these extra features we can get. You also get more advanced models. I don't think Emily mentioned it, but they're just rolling out chat GPT 4.5 now. I don't know if you're aware, but up until May of last year, 3.5 was their default model. I think it's the default model still in the. In the free cop free version. And then In May of 2024, they brought out 4o ChatGPT 4.0 and that was a major step jump. It was extraordinary how good it did. It was. They brought it out very quickly after Claude brought out their Sonnet model, which temporary temporarily beat OpenAI in the scores. But then when 444 came out. That was amazing. Big step jump. And you can use GPT4.40 in the free account. You just got some limited usage, but they're now rolling out 4.5. And so if you want a Plus account.

You can change the model. Let me just go back to here. If you go to do a new chat, you can change the model. So I've got 4.5 as well.

And I tend to use that for most things because I'm finding the step check jump from 4.0 to 4.5.

As big as the jump last May. It's extraordinary. So.

Go and read the report I've given you in the community on which is the right model for you. You'll need to decide. But personally, I think that once you start using this regularly, you'll realize it's worth investing to get the extra features. Okay. How should firms change their hiring processes to make sure they're bringing in professionals with tech AI expertise versus just technical knowledge? That's a really interesting question.

I'm a big fan of the idea of hiring for attitude, not skills. We can teach the skills and we had a big conversation on this about a year ago in the Value Pricing Academy that we should be looking to hire based on attitude.

Yes. If they've got some skills already in AI, that's great. But it's actually quite easy to teach. So if I think about my team, Emily, for example, she's got amazing attitude. She's much younger than me, so she's got a greater capacity to learn new stuff. Just so you know. By the way, our business is a family business. Sarah and I. Sarah's my partner in life and business. Emily's Sarah's daughter, and my three daughters, Gabby, Tasha and Emily work. Gabby, Tasha and Lara work in the business. So there are six of us, me and Sarah, and our four daughters. And they're just amazing. They're so enthusiastic at what they do. They knew nothing about AI when they came to join the business. In fact, they didn't know anything about the marketing industry or the accounting industry when they first joined. But they've got great attitude. So everything they know is because they've learned. I'm a big fan of learning. I learn every single day. I buy video training courses and I pass them on for them to learn. So what I would do is focus on hiring for attitude, not skills, but then systematically train your people on how to get the best out of AI. So if, for example, you've joined the AI academy, then you can start working through my prompt engineering course. Well, you could then share elements of that with your team. Okay.

They can watch those videos as well. Just train them up. Hope that helps. I don't know your name. I'm sorry. Because it says anonymous. Julius, I do advisory services and want to know if there's an existing in the market to do bookkeeping cleanup. I do advisory and I want to know if there's a. I'm not sure by existing.

I think you're missing a word there. An existing something in the market to do bookkeeping cleanup. Julius, can you put in the word. What's the missing word there?

And I'll try and answer that. I've got one more question from Sonia. So this will be the last or penultimate question if Julius comes back. A client could use our tools or new ones to do bookkeeping. However, why would they want to do that? QuickBooks has had the suggested matches for a long while and clients mess it up. Isn't there a way a bookkeeper can walk alongside them? Okay, I'm not. Let me. Not sure if I've interpreted that right, but let me give you my thoughts. Thank you, Julius. I've seen it now. My thoughts are this is that even though AI will replace the data entry and the reconciliations, that doesn't mean that bookkeepers will be redundant. I know there's a lot of people think that when the reports were done, about 300 million jobs will disappear. People said accountants and bookkeepers are near the top of the list. I would suggest no, traditional accountants and bookkeepers are at the top of the list. Traditional ones, just like the lawyers. I started off today with traditional accountants, bookkeepers at the top of the list. But the switched on smart accountants and bookkeepers are not going to be made redundant. And I've said before many times, it's not AI that will replace you, it's how your competitors use AI. So AI is a tool. Accountants, sorry, clients will always still need accountants and bookkeepers because of the human connection. Okay, it's the human connection. So we need to build on that.

And yes, we will find that increasingly that some businesses, the small ones, for example, like freelancers, might start using AI tools. And so there will be a smaller marketplace in some respects we might find that. But clients will still want us to help them at a deeper level. We have the opportunity to help them solve bigger problems. And also whilst they can use AI to then do their tax return, return to do their bookkeeping and so on, they will still want help with how to interpret those numbers. What do those numbers mean? My gross margins are Going down. Can you help me with that? And so that's why I said earlier that increasingly we're going to have to move away from data input skills to strategic insights, and AI can help us with that. I think it's a huge opportunity for firms that are willing to change, to relearn, to stay ahead of the curve. I think these are really exciting times. So I hope that helps Sonja with that. I know that another objection people sometimes say is, oh, AI will never replace the data entry bookkeeper because Intuit QuickBooks still makes mistakes with matching things. Yes, it does, because it's still relatively new. They started the AI journey in 2019, but the money they're putting into it, it's developing so fast. You will see big changes in the next year or two. Okay, it's going to change. This world is changing fast. Right. Going back to the final question, because I've now got the missing word. Julia says I do advisory services and want to know if there's an existing AI tool in the market to do bookkeeping cleanup. I don't know. Okay. So I'm not sure on that one. Julius. I know a few people in the academy who are geniuses when it comes to cleanup work. I don't think she's here, but one of our star students who's now one of our trainers, Jessica Fox, is amazing with both tech stack and cleanup. So she will know the answer. So what I suggest, Julius, is I think you've now joined the group Community.

I would recommend that what you do is just put a post in there with that particular question, and you can perhaps make it a bit longer, and somebody will answer that, or I will find somebody who can answer it for you, and that will go to anybody here.

If afterwards, if you've got AI questions, then that's what I built the community for. So that me and other community members can help you with AI, with helping you with what are the practical tools, the practical steps. Right. I think we're done. I want to thank you so much for your time. I know your time's precious. You've given up three hours of your time to listen to me. I really hope it's been valuable. I hope I get the chance to help you and work with you in the weeks, months, and years to come. And I look forward to hearing your stories, your successes. What I will do now is close out with some music for three minutes. I always do that because I want to just read some of your comments in the chat, and then we'll close the zoom down in three minutes. Okay. I will see you online again sometime soon. Goodbye for now.

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