The Future of Accounting in 2024 - How AI and ChatGPT will Impact Your Firm

Okay, so let's get started. Today we're talking about future proofing your accounting firm with.

AI. So.

Let'S dive in. What we're going to cover today, a lot of stuff we're going to cover. We're going to look at quickly a recap of last year, 2023, what happened in 2023. It was an extraordinary year. And then I'm going to look at, well, what's the future hold for us, what 2024 might look like? What's the future for the accounting profession? I'm also going to share with you what is the latest news that's going on in the world of AI and ChatGPT. Some extraordinary stuff happening. This year has really kicked off with a bang.

It's two months since we last did a live stream. I really apologize for that. It's been way too long. It's just been crazy busy for us trying to catch up with everything. I'm also going to share with you what are the things that you need to do right now? What are the things you need to focus on in 2023 to really make sure you capture the opportunity facing you in your accounting firms? I'm going to look at some of the top things to really focus on. So with that said, let's have a quick recap of what happened last year, because last year was a crazy year. In fact, if I think back to last year, February 2023, I just started hearing this word called chatgpt and I had no idea what it was until the end of February. I had no idea what ChatGPT was. And I guess that's the same with you. Perhaps you'd never heard of it, which wouldn't be a surprise because although it was created by OpenAI back in 2015, it wasn't until November 2022 they released ChatGPT3 to the public and it went crazy. It was the fastest platform to reach 100 million users, beat TikTok in January of 2023. Thirteen months ago, Microsoft saw the power of it and they acquired, they invested in it and they invested $10 billion. They are now the majority. They have a majority stake in OpenAI, in ChatGPT because they could see the power of it embedded into their Bing so search engine and the rest of their products. March 2023 we saw that ChatGPT released version 4.

In March and allowed people to upgrade to plus to access it at the same time. Similar time, Google were panicking when they saw what happened and they launched Bard in March 2023. Originally, earlier than they wanted to. It wasn't ready. If we then go on To May of 2023, what we saw with OpenAI is they launched their. They launched the ability to do browsing inside ChatGPT. Meanwhile we saw Claude was launched by Anthropic, another large language model. So we got now chatgpt, we got Bard, we got Claude in the summer, in July 23, OpenAI released custom instructions which was really powerful, meant we could personalize ChatGPT to us and then meta, Facebook meta, they launched Llama. They were getting in on the space and Llama was interesting. It was an open source, large language model and it's interesting what they're doing in this space. In September, one of the big things that OpenAI did was build in voice capabilities into the mobile version of ChatGPT. So I have it on my phone and it's extraordinary what you can do with the voice capabilities. Meanwhile, Google had launched a whole bunch of extensions which meant that both Bard now starts to integrate with a whole bunch of other stuff in the Google space. And then November was an extraordinary month because November, that's when OpenAI released inside ChatGPT all tools. What that meant is that previously, before November, if you've got ChatGPT4 and if you wanted to use browsing, you had to then say I want to use browsing and start a chat to browse. But you couldn't use plugins, you had to. You had to choose whether you want to do browsing or plugins or upload documents with code interpreter or create images or interpret images. And all these things were separate. They brought them all together. At the time it was called All Tools. That was a major step forward. Opens up so many possibilities, makes things so much better. And the other major thing they did, and probably the most important thing they've done in my opinion, is they also launched GPTs. Think of those as chatbots that you can build yourself inside ChatGPT. They are extraordinary. That was last year. That was last year. So much happened in the space of a year. And from the start of the year when I'd never heard of ChatGPT, by the end of it, it was completely transforming the way that we run our business. Some of the things that used to take us hours to do, we were able to do in minutes. The time savings is extraordinary. So what does this hold for 2024? Let's more important, what's going to happen in 2024? What's going to be the impact on us as accounting firms? That's really important to Understand this. And I think, well, I know it's going to have major implications for us, major implications, good and bad. And you may have seen last year, in 2023, there was a lot of predictions saying that large language models like ChatGPT are likely to replace 300 million jobs. And we are seeing that. We are seeing that it's happening extremely fast. And one of the things, if you've been to one of our AI and ChatGPT virtual summits, we did one just a few weeks back. One of the things I talked you through and showed you, I talked about another form of AI which is image generation. And I talked about what's happening, how fast has that developed, and I talked about Midjourney. Midjourney is the. Is probably the most widely used, most recognized image generation tool. Now OpenAI has one too, it's called Dall E and they integrated dall E into ChatGPT. So I guess many people are using Dall E now because we've got it inside chatgpt and don't have to subscribe separately to it. But I have a Midjourney account and one of the things that I did is I accessed Midjourney version 1 and I asked it if it could create an image of an accountant in a busy office talking to a client. And this is what it came up with. And you might think, looking like, looking at this, well, that's not very important. Impressive. By the way, this is version one of Midjourney, which came out, if I remember right, in something like November.

I forget now, it was in 2022. No, it was early. I think it was January 22nd. January, February 2022 was Midjourney version one. Now, although this might not look impressive, and I actually asked in the prompt, I wanted a photorealistic image of an accountant in a busy office talking to a client. But what we have to remember about AI and Midjourney is it's not going to a database of images and photos that have been created and picking one that's pre exist. It's building something that's never existed before just from a simple text based prompt. And when you look at this, it's obviously interpreted that an accountant is a human being. So there's a human being. And it obviously has worked out that an accountant probably wears a suit and a tie. It probably has as an office, a messy office with lots of invoices and paperwork. And so yes, this does look like an accountant in a busy office. So whilst it might not be brilliant when we think about it, it's quite extraordinary that from a small, simple prompt that it can create an image that never existed before. Now, that was version one. That was version one from when it first came out in early 2022. It's now on version six, I believe version six is still in beta, but a little, a few months back I was, I asked it the same prompt. I actually did it in version 2, version 3, version 4, but I also did it a few months back in version the latest version of 5. And this is with the same prompt in version 5. This is what it created. Now this is extraordinary, the improvement. And this is 15 months after it was first launched when I did this image. 15 months, you can see that that's a pretty convincing photo. And yes, it looks like it could be an accountant in an office talking to a client. A really impressive photo. And I show this just to demonstrate in just 15 months how fast this technology is moving. Now some people will be listening to this on my podcast and can't see the images. If you're on the podcast, then you can go and check out my YouTube channel and see the images. So that's in a year and a half of when we first saw AI in image creation. That's amazing. Let me just blow your mind a little bit further with something that's been big news in the last few weeks. Because that's, I mean, that's mind boggling to me. How AI can generate an image from a prompt, a still image, a photograph.

What about video? That's so much harder. How can you create a video? Well, about. Well, less than a year ago now, there was something going around the Internet where somebody had used a.

Video AI video creator to do a 19 second video of Will Smith eating spaghetti. And I thought for a bit of fun I would actually show it. It's actually amazing. And this is less than a year ago. Less than a year ago, from a simple prompt of Will Smith eating spaghetti, it created a 19 minute video. Let me just show you it. It might be, oops, wrong thing. I need to press that button there. It might be a bit jerky, I don't know. Let me just watch this and it's okay. You can tell it's not real. It's not really Will Smith. It's a little bit, it's a little bit blurry. It's not the best quality, but this is just staggering. This is staggering that just from a simple prompt we can create a video. That was 19 months ago. That was 19 months ago. Sorry, 19 months ago, not 19 months ago. 10, 11 months ago. Just under a year. I can't count. I used to be an accountant. Anyway, the big news is that OpenAI. OpenAI have just announced Sora. Sora is their equivalent, that is their video creation tool. Now it's not yet available to the public, but we could go and check out what they've done. Look at this. This is from a prompt. A stylish woman walks down a Tokyo street filled with a warm glowing neon animated city signage. This video was created in just seconds. And look how real. You wouldn't know this wasn't a real video. And it's 60 seconds. That's pretty long for an AI generated video. But it's not just that. Look at this.

This is several giant woolly mammoths approaching treading through a snowy meadow. Look how realistic this is. It's extraordinary. This is a movie trailer featuring an adventure of a 30 year old spaceman wearing a red wool knitted motorcycle helmet. Just created this. This is just. I think this is mind blowing. We've got. This is a cute one. Animated scene featuring close up of a short fluffy monster kneeling beside a melting red candle. This is so cute. It's really, really cute. This video that's just been created just from a simple prompt. This just blows me away. And you can go onto the OpenAI's Sora website and you can, you can go and check these out yourself. This is pirates having a battle in a cup of coffee. Okay. This is, it's, it just, it is extraordinary. Okay, now why do I show you that? The reason I've shown you that is because this does have profound implications. If, if they can, in the space of less than a year, develop video based video creation from prompts. And by the way, SORA can do many other things. It can create, it's going to be able to create images. It can create video, video, some images. There's a ton of stuff it's going to do. I can't wait till this comes out on general release. But when you think of the what's happened in just less than a year, it then makes you think, well, what more can possibly happen? And it then makes you think, well, what about the impact on us? Because if AI can do that stuff with video, what about the stuff that we do as accountants, as bookkeepers? And some of you will know that I have said over a few times in recent, in our, in our ChatGPT virtual summits that I don't just believe. I know that by the year 2030 we will not be doing bookkeeping. That will be Gone, it's gone. Doing bookkeeping will go. Doing tax terms will go. We won't be doing those in 2030. I actually think the timescale is much, much closer than that. And sometimes people say, yeah, but Mark, there's no way because of all the. You just look at Intuit and QuickBooks and the mistakes it makes with coding and stuff. What we saw last year, what we saw last year was all the major players are now getting into AI in big ways. Whether it's large language models like Microsoft buying up a chunk of OpenAI, whether it's Google, whether it's anthropic, which I know that both Google and Amazon have heavily invested in. Facebook have got meta.

There's been a race to develop these large language models. We're seeing the same things happening with videos, with image based and with many other forms of AI. And the speed of development in 2023 was frightening. And what I can tell you with certainty is 2024 will actually move faster still. It'll move faster still. If we just go back five months ago, all the major players are really heavily involved in AI and that includes our profession. So you may have seen five months ago that Intuit, they announced Intuit Assist. And if you've not checked this out, I recommend you go and check it out and go and watch the video that Sazan Ghdazi did, because he didn't say it in so many words, but essentially what he said early on in the video is that they're going to bypass the accountant. They're going to bypass the accountant. They're going to, they're developing AI, they've already developed. They're, they're building their own, they've built their own large language model. It's now in Intuit Assist. And what that is enabling the business owner to do is to get tax advice, to manage cash flow, to manage emails. Because they bought mailchimp, they can do email marketing with prompts and you can ask it questions to give you get feedback on your email marketing. It will file tax returns.

This is doing all the things that we've done before and it's not perfect. And at the moment they also have the link where you can then go, and if you're a business owner, you can talk to an expert. But this was launched five months ago. You only have to look at the speed of progression with image generation, like midjourney or what's going on right now with video creation.

Intuit's current version is probably equivalent of Midjourney version 1 or Will Smith eating spaghetti. But what I can guarantee with certainty is that by the end of 2024, all the major players in our profession, Intuit, Xero, Sage and all the other software companies, they are going to be developing AI like crazy. And that's going to have huge implications for us as a profession. And so let me give you some of my predictions for this year for 2024. And this is really hard to do because in the past you could probably look forward to the end of the year and make some reasonable predictions about things. The trouble is it's now the pace, the acceleration is so fast now I have no idea what December 2024 will look like. And the speed at which things are developing are extraordinary. But what I can tell you with, I think a reason of certainty is that every major tech company will have their own large language models.

So there'll be chatgpt, they'll be Intuit with their large language model, they'll be Sage with their large language model. Everybody's developing large language models, okay? So all the extraordinary things we can do with ChatGPT right now, we'll be doing them with whatever piece of software that we are using. I also predict that one of the major companies that we've not seen much of is Apple. I think that by the end of the year, Apple will be the number one player. The number one player. And that's because Apple have a history of never wanting to be first to the market. They never want to be first. They want to make sure that they bring their, their technology out when they are ready and they want to bring theirs out so it's the easiest to use the most. The ux, the user experience is so important for Apple and so, and they are already buying up AI companies like crazy. You can bet they are really heavily involved in this game. And so I currently use ChatGPT on my phone. I'm fairly sure that by the end of the year I won't be using ChatGPT. I think I'll be using Apple because their AI will be better, it'll be more user friendly. So that's my next prediction. I think Apple will be a big player. What we'll also see is that generally speaking, whichever platform you go with, the, the user experience will be much better. So my One bugbear with ChatGPT was that it's not actually very user friendly. It's amazing what you can do. But there's some really clunky ways you can't manage your chats, for example, they're a bit of a Mess. And that's because it was originally a not for profit. Back in 2015, they were just researching this whole area of large language models of AI. And so they weren't thinking initially of it being a commercial thing. And so that's why I think Apple, when they develop theirs, they'll be thinking about the user experience and then others will have to follow suit. They'll have to make it much easier to use the tools.

I know that we will see that Intuit Assist will be way more powerful at the end of this year than it is right now. And right now when you watch the video from Cezanne, it's pretty powerful what it can do right now, but it will be better. That's version one. Think about version five, like Mid Journey version five. That'll be at the end of the year and that's just going to be even more powerful. Another thing that we're going to see in 2024 is so last year, I think the big trend last year was the growth in large language models. Particularly everybody was talking about ChatGPT, Bard, Claude and Llama and other large language models. That was the big thing last year. Another thing that I think we'll be talking about a lot more this year is rpa. RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation. Robotic Process Automation and how that will be combined with AI. I think the simplest way of thinking of this is think of Zapier. You're probably familiar with Zapier, where we can start to link various things together and get it to do a series of steps. Well, rpa, when it works with AI, what it's going to do is AI will start to perform repetitive office tasks. So it won't just at the moment we can use ChatGPT to come up with an email, for example, it can write an email for us. But what we'll be doing by the end of the year is we'll be able to then complete a whole set of processes, extracting data, writing an email based on it, sending out the email without us doing anything whatsoever. And the AI will figure out and learn the process. Different to Zapier, where we have to program it, Zapier is grab this file, do this with it, save it in a Google Doc, but this will take things to another level. And so what will happen is by the end of the year is we'll find that a lot of office based repetitive tasks will be gone for good. Will be gone for good because the technology will do it for us, which I think is a great thing that's going to be a huge time saver. A huge, huge time saver. So I think that's really exciting. Okay, so a lot of stuff will happen this year and we have to keep abreast of this, which is why we're going to try and do two live streams every month this year to keep you abreast of what's happening. Just a couple of things that have just happened in the last couple of weeks that you might want to know about is interestingly, Google launched Gemini 1.5 just a few days back. And what was interesting about that, that came one week after Gemini Ultra. And that's really impressive with ChatGPT. They're not standing still. The big news of last week was OpenAI announced ChatGPT getting memory, which I think is really cool. What that essentially means, just so you know. And I posted something in our Facebook group, ChatGPT and AI for Accountants and bookkeepers. I hope you're in it. I actually posted a link to the article chatgpt get memory. I am really excited by this because what it means is it will learn things from your chats, which you can apply to other chats. And so, for example, and you can either give it memory or it will just learn memory. So this might be useful where perhaps you have a chat where you tell it about your business, who is your niche client? You. If you say in a chat that you specialize in e commerce businesses, for example, and then in another chat you ask it to create some blog posts for you, it will know that you specialize in e commerce businesses. So you won't have to build that into your prompts. It will learn stuff. And I think that's really, really powerful that you can. It'll learn across different chats. Extraordinary.

And the other thing that came out recently with ChatGPT that I think is an improvement is you can now upgrade to teams. I think it's called teams or team workspace. And if I get a chance, I might tell you more about that later. We did it internally just a week ago, and from what I' scene of it, I think it's awesome. I think if you want to be using it in your firm and using it not just for yourself, but your team, if you have other people using it, you really want to check that out. And I'll tell you a bit more about why you might want to use teams later. If I get time I might forget if anybody's interested in my thoughts on teams and whether you should upgrade or not, just put it as a question with the two QQ's in front. And that'll just remind me to tell you about it later on if I do forget. So.

This might seem a bit scary, what we're talking about. You look at, you look at the speed of development, of images, of video creation I've talked about. That's going to be. We're going to see that with the AI being developed by the Intuits, the Zeros, the Sages of this world. And Cezanne effectively said we're going to bypass the accountant. He didn't say that, but that's kind of the implication if you watch what he said, reading between the lines, which is probably no surprise. I know a lot of pro advisors who don't like the direction Intuit are going in, but they're a commercial business. That's what they're going to do. And so how does that impact on us and how do we protect ourselves? Because I think that increasingly the tools that we're using, like the Intuits and the Sages and so on, they will start to become competitors because as they develop the AI to do these things that we used to do ourselves, then that's pretty serious competition. So what are we going to do? What are you going to do to safeguard yourself? So the first thing, and the first thing you need to think about as part of Your strategy for 2024 going forward is you need to focus on your strengths. What's the strength of your accounting firm? And I know that most of my audience people who watch me are, are small accounting firms, solo bookkeepers, small accounting firms. Well, what's your number one strength? If you are a small accounting firm, your number one strength is very simple. It's you. It's your relationship with your clients. And one of the things that will happen going forward over the next few years, we are going to find that the more this technology takes off. I was watching a review recently of the Apple Goggles. We're going to spend more and more time in this AI world. We spend a lot of time just looking at our phones right now. And so what we're going to find is that increasingly going forward, we're going to value human connection, because that's disappearing. So people are going to value human connection. And so as a small accounting firm, that's your strength. And so what you need to be doing as you think about your strategy for your firm is how can I make sure that we are having as many touch points with our clients as possible? You do not want to be running a firm where you're sat behind your desk, doing everything by email to the client. You need to be talking to them, whether that's Zoom or real. But you need to have as many contact points as possible, because that's what's going to make you different to the AI. It's the human connection. Please do not underestimate the power of the human connection. And that's what you need to bring out in your strategy. You need to be making sure you have more touch points than ever before. You need to be jumping on if it's not physically practical to travel all the time, because increasingly I'm seeing people running virtual accounting firms. You need to be jumping on Zoom calls regularly with your clients, more so than ever before. The more that you jump on Zoom, the more that you talk to your clients, the more you're going to strengthen those connections, the more that they will see you as their trust advisor and keep coming to you, rather than using Intuit Assist to ask their tax questions. So that's the first thing that you want to do. The second thing that you want to think about in terms of your strategy going forward. The second thing is you want to increasingly be thinking about, how can you create more value for your clients? What more can you do? We have to move away from the compliance work because AI is going to do it for us. How do we create value for our clients? There's so many ways we could do that. Business advisory, tax advisory, helping clients with technology. One of the things that you could do is you could help clients get the best out of ChatGPT. I've been doing that in Erasera in Portugal. Here there are a few people that are friends of mine now that run businesses. I've been helping them build their own GPTs for their business. And wow, are so impressed with that. There's so many things we can do to add more value to our clients. And if you don't know what those things might be.

Ask them. Ask them. You need to be having more regular touch points. And as part of those touch points, keep asking your clients continually, what more could we do for you? How could we help you more? What are your biggest challenges? How could we possibly solve those challenges for you? You need to be continually talking to your clients, listening and getting feedback as to how you can create more value, what will be valuable for them. And over time, as you collect this information, you'll start to see recurring themes coming along of the things that clients are looking for. And you can start then figure out how to solve those problems. That's what we have to do we have to figure out how to solve a different set of problems? Because it will be different problems in the future than it was in the past. So that's number two. Number one, focus on your strengths. That's the personal touch, the relationships. Number two, create more value for your clients. Number three is tap into the opportunity of AI. Some of you have heard if you're regulars, you know, I've said this many, many times before. I'm a big believer that it's not actually AI that will replace you, despite all the stuff we've heard about. It will replace 300 million jobs. Yes, it will. It will. We are seeing it. It is replacing jobs like crazy. But I see it as not the AI that's going to replace you. It's how your competition is using AI. And so what you need to do is be one step ahead of the game. You need to be at the leading edge of this profession. Because what I can tell you, and you are here, which is great, you are here, and you are in the minority. You are in the minority in a good way. And I say that because I have been doing dozens of webinars over the last seven or eight months on ChatGPT for many organizations. Sometimes I've had nearly 2,000 people on those webinars. And when I run webinars on ChatGPT, the first poll question I ask is, to what extent are you using ChatGPT? And question number one is, I don't have an account yet. Question number two is, I'm just playing around with it. And what's fascinating from the thousands of accounting firms I've been doing webinars for is consistently 60 to 70% don't even have a ChatGPT account. And about.

The next 25% are just playing around with it. The number of people using it properly is really tiny. And so that tells me that the profession is really slow to change. And actually, we know that. We know the accounting profession has always been slow to change, and we can't afford to be anymore. The great news, you're here. You're listening to this. You know what's happening in the world right now, the biggest change that we've ever lived through. And it won't be AI that replaces you, it'll be the competition. But in your case, you will be the competition replacing them. Because, you know, you're figuring out now how to change your strategy, how to adapt your accounting firms. So that's the three things that you need to do. Focus on your strengths, which I believe for the small accounting firm, you is the personal touch. Number two, create more value. We have to do different things. And number three, tap into the opportunity that AI creates. For example, I teach to people in the Value Pricing Academy, and I'll be talking about this certainly at length at the Business advisory masterclass. IS AI IS. ChatGPT is an amazing tool to help you with business advisory services. When you figure out the right prompts, it can do some extraordinary things. You can create complete strategies for any business, any client with just a few carefully crafted prompts. It makes business advisory easier than ever before. And that creates a huge opportunity for us to create more value in a way that's easy for us. Even if that's something that you've had a lack of confidence before or lack of experience, you now have this tool that's extraordinary for helping you with strategy. Okay, let me talk about a couple more things just before we wrap up.

And. Yeah, so one of the things that I suggest you do is get into the habit of using this technology. I am finding there's lots of people in the Value Pricing Academy who are now telling me amazing stories of how it's helping them, what they're using it for. The firms that are getting the best result out of tools like ChatGPT are the ones that are just building into their workflows and using it. The more you use it, the more confident you'll get. The more you use it, the more you'll figure out other amazing things that it can do. So get up and running with that. I also strongly recommend, if you haven't already, to go for a ChatGPT plus account. Yes, I know that's going to cost you money, but it's only 20 bucks plus tax a month, which is crazy low for what it can do. There's some amazing things you can do with ChatGPT plus account. You access ChatGPT 4 for starters, which is a better model. But you also get a lot of amazing features that you can use in your accounting firms, of which my favorite, my favorite is GPTs. We are building them like crazy. We have so many GPTs for doing little tasks that do them so, so well. And the other thing that you need to do is make sure that in 2024, you learn as much as possible about prompt engineering.

Right. What we're going to do now is move to questions. If you've got. If you had some value out of this, by the way, if it's been valuable, if you've learned something, please, please do click the like button. Whichever platform you're on. Please hit the like button. Please also tell me in the comments what's the best thing that you've learned? What's been the standout thing that's made you think, oh, or the light bulb moment. What's been the most valuable thing that you've learned from this?

And before I answer the questions, there's lots of questions come in. So let's deal with questions. Just a quick reminder, some things I mentioned earlier, plus one more thing I didn't mention. So smartphones at the ready or Sarah's going to give you a link. Wrong button. That one there. We did build a couple months ago a training course called ChatGPT for accountants and bookkeepers. It's a two hour course with I think 70 page of workbooks full of prompts and things that you can do. And so if you're new to ChatGPT, that course is available to buy and we decided to make it a really low, crazy low price. It's just 50 bucks. $50 if you want some really powerful training to get you started. I'll get Sarah to put the link into the chat box. It's two hours of me teaching how the best ways to use it in your accounting firm with example prompts and 70 pages of workbooks with all the prompts that you can use straight away. It's just 50 bucks so you can find out more. Click on the link and find out more. Remember as well, if you haven't got it, grab the ebook. Sarah, I think put the links in earlier for the ebook. Remember as well that we are currently giving away free tickets, free tickets for our conference next week where we'll be teaching you how to build a more profitable bookkeeping service, mainly how to value price bookkeeping.

And if you're interested in the value pricing academy level one again, we put the link in earlier. Right? Let's do questions. We have 17 minutes. I will answer as many questions as I can. Let me just go back and scroll through and find out what was the first question that I got. Remember, if you ask a question, put two capital Q's in because there are lots of questions. Comments from people like Ron saying, hi, it's Ron here. Good to see you, Ron from Idaho. I just noticed. Where's the first question?

I think it's Lisa. Lisa says, mark, you'll probably cover this today, but I'd like to know how ChatGPT can help me. Help me other than for marketing. Great question, Lisa. And if you get that course, I think I give you lots of different uses but Let me give you a some of the best things you can use it for, as well as marketing, by the way, is extremely powerful, which is why we teach that quite a lot, particularly Emily, because she's our head of marketing and our team is doing some amazing things with marketing. You can use it for creating content.

Anything that's written. So let's say, for example, you have a meeting with a client. Perhaps it's a meeting for an hour where you talk about some great ideas, some strategy or whatever. You have a meeting with a client and you record it. You can record it with Zoom. If it's, if it's face to face, just get some sort of Dictaphone and record it. And then when you get the recording, you can get the transcription. Lots of tools for doing, getting transcriptions, like Otter AI. Once you got the transcription of a meeting, you can feed that transcription into ChatGPT and ask it to create meeting notes or research report. Now, some of these tools, like Zoom, are building that into Zoom as well. You've got. Zoom has got AI built in, so you might want to use what they've done. But if you use ChatGPT, then you can start to create some interesting prompts that take your meeting notes and turn them into a professional report where you want it broken down to subheadings and you want bullet points and recommendations. You can specify exactly how you want that report to come across. So report writing is great, Lisa. It's also great for answering client emails, particularly difficult ones, like what happens if a client complains about your price going up. Then you can answer client emails. And one of the things we're playing with at the moment is building a GPT that will do that. Very specifically, you can also. I said, Lisa, Biz advisory, any form of advisory is amazing. If you want to advise clients on stuff, it's great for that. It's just great for ideation, creating ideas. If you're thinking about your firm right now and you're not sure you want to make it more profitable, but you're not sure how you can get ideas from ChatGPT, it's great for that. I hope that helps, Lisa, but please feel to ask more questions if you've got more. I don't know how many questions we've got.

Jail says, wow, big improvement.

Katrina, who is in the academy, she agrees with me that compliance will be automated. And as bookkeeping accountants, we will need to change our services. I know that's a scary message, but it's going to happen. It's already replacing other jobs by the bucket load right now.

I can see a question from Phil. The better and better AI gets, the greater the risk of increased criminalization of user received product. Now what? Yes, Phil, yes, you are right in some respects that there are always bad actors in the world that will use any form of new technology to do bad things. But that's always been the case. For example, take guns, for example. Guns aren't evil. It's the people that use them for bad things who are evil. But not all people who own guns do them for bad things. Any piece of tool technology, some people will figure out a way to use it for criminal activities. There was a brilliant.

Episode of the Soul of Enterprise from my friend, my friends Ed Kless and Ron Baker. I think it was last June or July, I forget when it was, but they had an episode of the Soul of Enterprise. It's their radio show podcast, if you like, where they were reviewing a book from somebody who I think it was a book or it may have been a blog post where they were talking about what are the. I think it's the seven big things that people worry about their AI. Like for example, it will replace us. Like people use it for criminal activities. And this person gave, who's an expert in this space, who gave reasons why all of those things we shouldn't worry about. And it was interesting hearing Ron and Ed's take on that. And I agree with that, that yes, we're going to see perhaps increased criminalization, but I think that we'll also find that there will be a significant increase of protection as well as a result of AI. And I'm a believer that AI, yes, it can be something to worry about. Some people worry about the Terminator. Phil, could that come to pass? Skynet? It's possible. It is possible. But I also think that the potential for doing good is extraordinary. When we just look at the use of AI in medicine, for example, and there's some extraordinary things happening right now where there's a lot of experts believing that by 2030 we will slow down the aging process, which is kind of mind blowing to think about it, but there's actually a lot of. There's already been. This has been partially cracked with some experiments that slowing down the aging process with experiments on animals and so on. We're already seeing that a lot of diseases we will start to see in the next, between now and 2030, a lot of diseases disappearing. For example, thanks to AI, they just. They now know what causes Alzheimer's and they can slow that down. And thanks to AI, we'll probably find that by 2030 that's a thing of the past. So I think there's so many things to be really optimistic about with AI. But yes, Phil, there is likely to be things like increased criminalization. And so we just have to be aware of this. Particularly.

We'Ve had to be aware for years now about spam emails. And what we do know is that the spam emails will get more and more clever. We will see that because of tools like ElevenLabs where you can clone your voice, which is really. I've done that. It's really interesting. You can now, if you're a criminal, you could ring up your, your grandmother with your voice and she will think she's speaking to you. And so we just have to be aware of those things. The more we are aware, the more we can protect ourselves. Deborah says teams. Okay, so, and Katrina. Hi, Katrina, good to see you. Says, I now have teams. So let me tell you a little bit about teams.

The good, the bad and the ugly. One of the things I find about OpenAI is when they do new stuff, they're not very good at telling you how to use it or why you should use it. You have to really search around and there were a lot of questions I had about teams that I didn't know the answer to until I tapped into some other communities. I'm in AI communities to figure out the answer. But let me just tell you, it's actually not, in some respects it's not mind blowing what teams does, but I think it will get better. So here are the big things, the reasons to go for teams. Firstly, there's a higher message cap. So it goes from 40 to 100. Is that important? Well, yes, if you're a ChatGPT+user and using ChatGPT version 4, ChatGPT4, if you use it a lot, you'll find you reach a message cap where suddenly it'll say you can't use it anymore, you have to wait. And you've got so many messages in a three hour window. I've had that a few times. Emily's had it. We've been playing around with ChatGPT and then we're going to demonstrate stuff on a webinar in the afternoon and then it says you've reached your limit, which is really frustrating when it happens. It happens without warning. And so you have to stop what you're doing. You can't carry on. It's frustrating. So I think that's a big thing about the team plan, because it goes from 40 to 100. I think a really interesting thing is that you can share GPTs amongst your team. You can always share GPTs anyway. But there's now introduced a fourth option with GPTs where. So GPTs, when you create them, you can, you can have them just for you. You can have them where you create a share link and share them with other people. So I share one of my GPTs in my YouTube video a few months back, or you can make them public and put them on the GPT store, which I don't get excited by. But the fourth option now is to share with your team. And what that does is it means that every member of your team that's using ChatGPT, they'll always have access to any GPTs that you've created to be a team GPT. Why is that useful? Well, let's imagine, for. Let's imagine that you've created a GPT to answer client emails, which has been trained up in your writing style and how to structure the emails and so on. Then that little GPT can be made available to anybody who answered client email, which means they're answering it using a consistent way of doing it, language, style, tone.

Framework or whatever. Or it might be that I'm trying to think of what we do in our, in our business we have, for example, we do a lot of webinars, events where we have to write the synopsis to tell you what we'll teach. And those of you that follow me in the value pricing academy know I talk about the importance of blind bullets, how you create those to create intrigue. So we have a GPT. So if Emily wants to write the synopsis for a webinar, she can use that same tool to create the synopsis in just a matter of minutes. So I think that's quite cool. The fact you can share GPTs, a big one for some people, not for me, it doesn't bother me, but a really big one for some people, and probably a big one for accountants, is with a team plan, you will not. They are not using your chats to train your data, is not being used to train the model. So with ChatGPT, when you use it, and the reason why they launched it to the public in November 2022 is suddenly they got millions of users training up the model, which improves the model for everybody. Now, some people didn't like the idea of that. So in April or May of last year, they introduced in the settings where you can turn that off, where it doesn't train the data. The problem with that is if you turn it off, your chats are only available for 30 days. And I often go back to old chats, so I'm happy for my chats to train the model. But if you have the team plan, well, that goes away anyway. That goes away. So that's a big thing. There's also an admin console which means you can add team members remove if they leave your firm.

So they're the plus sides. There's a few other bits and pieces that are useful, but they're the main things. There is of course a cost to it, but interestingly, it's actually not that expensive. So it's $20 plus tax for a plus account and for a team plan it's $30 plus tax, but it's only $25 a month if you pay annually, so $300 annually. And if you're not in the US then you don't have to pay the tax because they say, are you a business? Yes, I'm a business. You put in your sales tax code and we don't have to pay the sales tax, whereas we did before. So actually for us being outside the U.S. it's not really much more expensive. It's about the same, but it centralizes the billing and the paperwork. Before we had Emily had an account, Gabby had an account, Tasha had an account, I had an account, Sarah had an account, we had five chatgpt plus accounts, which obviously the paperwork with invoicing and whatever bookkeeping, we now just have one annual bill for five times 300. Much, much easier. I like that. Okay, Jack. I like simplification. So there's the team plan, Deborah. Hope that helps. Let's see, we've got five minutes left.

Jean says I'm an accountant searching job. You're helpful. Thank you.

Douglas says, is the seminar next week the same as ChatGPT for accountants and bookkeepers? No. No, it's not. Yes, we sometimes do run our ChatGPT for Accountants and Bookkeepers virtual summit. We did a one day event a few weeks back. We have one planned for I think in late March. But next week is a three day event. It's called the Profitable Bookkeeping Conference. We're not planning to talk about ChatGPT. It might crop up in some of the optional sessions. But next week's conference is for accountants and bookkeepers who want to learn how to value price bookkeeping work and how to build a more valuable bookkeeping service. And we've got some amazing. It's not just me speaking, Emily speaking. We have some amazing Speakers like Teresa Slack. We have Jessica Fox speaking. We have Kim Lafayette, we have Neil Criddle. All accountants, bookkeepers in practice doing this stuff and teaching you the results they're getting and how they're doing it.

Katrina says, just to confirm. Definitely worth it. It is. Ralph says please give examples of tasks done by ChatGPT. I think I did that earlier with Lisa's question. I did cover that or gave you some examples. If you want more examples, there's my course that you can buy. Or if you go and check out the YouTube channel, we have done some videos on things like 5 uses for.

Accountants and bookkeepers. So you could check out some of my other videos that we've done. If I get time at the end, I might throw in some other ideas for you.

Rhoda, is this free to Academy members? Unfortunately, I don't know what you're referring to. If you're talking about the mini course, yes, of course. If you're a. Is it, Is it? We have a bigger course that's available to Academy members, so yes. And if you're a value person, Academy Member Level 3, which is our mastery, you get everything that we do. Come you can you get any courses we do.

How to learn more on prompting. Okay, how do you learn more? Well, prompt engineering is probably the biggest skill we need to master because prompt engineering is essentially how do we communicate with machines and that's becoming increasingly important. And so how do you learn about prompt engineering? There are a few people around doing courses on that. It's hard to find them. I have a few people I follow. In fact, I just had a coffee earlier with Igor Pagani of the AI Advantage. I've learned a lot from him, but I teach it. So if you want to learn more about prompt engineering, then I teach a little bit of it. In that course, that two hour course I mentioned, I cover prompt engineering and I also go, we go deeper in the Value Pricing Academy. And if you are a Value Pricing Academy Level 3 Member at Mastery level, then I do a session every month now called Leading Edge where I teach for 90 minutes. And I've been told in my January and February sessions the people have been there saying of all the things I teach, they just want more prompt engineering because we can do some extraordinary things if we learn how to craft prompts. So I love teaching prompt engineering because I'm doing it all the time. So you can learn from me if you join the Academy. But there are other people out there that teach it, just not specifically for accountants. What I do is I take all the learning from out there and then figure out what are the best prompts for an accounting firm. Hayley says we have one minute left and this might be the last question, but I can see Lisa's got one, so let me see if I can do two more if possible. Hayley says, Is ChatGPT learning from an open source or secure data feed? So it learns, firstly it was trained on all the information in the Internet, on the Internet up to a certain point in time. That cutoff was 2022, I think. But they recently, a few months back, for ChatGPT4, they updated it. ChatGPT4 is now trained up until April 2023. What that means is it's got all the information up to April 2023 that's on the Internet pretty much. But you can't use it like Google. You can't say, what's the weather today? It doesn't know today, where's the Internet? We can go to the Internet and find out. But what you can do with ChatGPT4 is you can specifically ask it to use its browsing functionality and then it'll go and do the search for you. So where's the question? I've lost it. So partly it was trained based on being fed information, but it's also learning from us using it as people use it. It's learns all the time. So it's learning just from the interactions with it. The way I don't want to get technical now, but the way that it was created and all these large language models, they're not like old fashioned software. Software used to be. If this happens, do this. If this happens, do this. And you have to then.

Give it all the information and have complex statements for us to figure things out. What ChatGPT was done is they figured out how the human brain work in terms of the synapses, and they figured out the human brain and figured out, well, how can we replace the way the human brain learns.

With technology? And this is one of the interesting things, Hayley, but also one of the scary things is that we have found over the last year that there's been reports from Sam Altman and others in OpenAI where sometimes it does things that they had no idea they didn't know it could do that. And it's developed things that extraordinarily well from learning. It's learned, for example, to speak in other languages. So it's great. For example, if you. For me, for example, speaking Portuguese, I use ChatGPT for my Portuguese learning. It's awesome. It's very good at translating to different languages that might be useful to you. If you're for example, an accountant in California, perhaps from a Spanish background, then you've got.

Clients who are Spanish speaking and English speaking. Then ChatGPT is really good for doing that. We are out of time. I normally stop exactly on 60 Minutes. Let's just see what Lisa says because she's a regular. How does AI ChatGPT help with compliance work? You say it's going to take over from bookkeepers.

Yes, AI will take over. It won't necessarily be ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a large language model. It's a very specific tool. But what we will find is that the best tools for doing things in the accounting industry will be tools created by the tech companies. So like Intuit will do a lot of stuff that's specific to accountants. Bookkeeping initially that might help us and support us. Eventually it's going to replace us. But there are still lots of things that we can use ChatGPT for. So let me give you one final use case that I didn't mention is ChatGPT is pretty good for things like financial analysis, particularly if you've got the paid for account and have access to code interpreter now called Advanced Data Analysis. One of the things that's really powerful is you can feed it, upload an Excel spreadsheet, ask questions about it. And so that's powerful. For example, financial analysis, business advisory work. It's helpful if you want to be summarizing financial data in a different way. Then we can do all that in ChatGPT. And if you want a video to check that out, I have a video that I did teaching you how to use that inside with a GPT.

If you go to my YouTube channel, it's called Powerful Data Analysis. With ChatGPT, I teach you how you can use it to do data analysis and build into a GPT and I even give you a link to the GPT so you can then do the things that you can see on the screen. Right now it's free. It was my Christmas gift. So you'll find if you go to that video, watch that Lisa, it'll give you some ideas for data analysis. And then you can click on the link underneath, grab the GPT, you will need a plus account and then that'll give you a good example of the sort of the power of what you can do with ChatGPT for data analysis. Okay, we are four minutes over. We normally finish on time. I always play out with some music, gives me chance to read the rest of the comments. Let me know in the comments what was the most valuable thing. If you've enjoyed it, click the thumbs up and I will see you on the next live stream. Actually, no, I won't because Emily's doing the next one in I think two weeks. I'm not sure when. We'll let you know. Watch this space. We'll tell you about when the next live stream is. I've got one planned for next month and if there's anything particularly you'd like me to teach you in the world of ChatGPT in a live stream, let me know in our Facebook group, ChatGPT and AI for Accountants and bookkeepers. Go to the Facebook group, do a post, say mark, I'd love you to cover this topic in a live stream. I'll happily do that off planet for this year. Happy to. You tell me what you want to learn. I'll do that. Okay. Hope you've enjoyed it. Thumbs up, give me some comments and I'll see you soon. Bye for now.

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You have been here since day one. See my ups and downs.

Never left my side once.

I knew it was you you have been here all along you have always been the one you who knew it was you. You have always been the one that you.

I never saw the signs it didn't treat me right but I just couldn't let him go you waited patiently you waited for me you show me what it was too long.

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Never left my sister.