The Future of Accounting with ChatGPT: The opportunity for forward-thinking accounting professionals

Let's get started. We have a lot to cover today in the 60 minutes. We have so very, very quickly, a few introductions before a few things before we kick off and start. And in about five, six minutes I'll be bringing on Emily, we'll be running the session together all about ChatGPT, AI, the future of the accounting profession. And we also are here to answer your question. So first thing is if you have a question for us, then because we encourage you to put stuff in the comments box, if you have a question, please put two capital Q's in front of it. That way it jumps out and we get to see it. We won't miss it. Sometimes if you don't put a question, if you don't put the two capital Q's and a question mark at the end, sometimes we miss it amongst all of the comments. So if you have a question about AI, about ChatGPT, then put it in the comments box and we will try to answer as many as possible. The sooner you ask your question the better because we usually go through them in order. When we get to the Q and A section, we have lots of people still joining from South Africa, which is great. Kabani, is that right? We have Farah is here from Joburg and then from over in Murfreesburg is. It's not James Brown, it's David. Hi there, great to see you. Second announcement is one of the things that we do is to help make the world a better place. We are supporters of B1G1 and one of the things we do is we make a contribution to a project somewhere around the world on behalf of every person who comes along live to one of our sessions. So all you need to do is this, grab your smartphone right now, hold it up to that QR code and when you click on the link it will take you to an image that looks like the one on the right. Sarah's going to put the link also in the chat box if you prefer that. And basically you can get to choose which of those projects best resonates with you. And what happens is when you choose the project, all that happens is what we make a contribution on your behalf. So would you like us to help give, for example, life saving clean water to families?

If that's the thing that you like, then click that button and we will make a donation on your behalf to provide 40 days of life saving clean water. Sarah's put the link into the chat box if you prefer to use that rather than your QR code. So please support help make the world a better place by choosing which of those charities you can you best resonates doesn't cost you a penny. It's us. We make the contribution on your behalf. Next quick thing and again a QR code coming up. Next quick thing is if you haven't yet got our ebook chatgpt for accountants and bookkeepers. Then again you can use your QR code, your phone with a camera or I know Sarah's going to put the link into the comments across each of the platforms. So it may take a few minutes because you've got to do this on YouTube, LinkedIn and several places on Facebook. So I can see that's going into the chat now. So grab the ebook if you haven't got it already. Tell us where to make the contribution to B1G1 and then the last announcement is One of the things we want to let you know is many of you know that we run the Value Pricing Academy and at the moment it's closed. We opened up again in May. At the moment the Value Pricing Academy is just $445 per month. We have many VPA members here. However we have had a number of people said over the years we would love to be able to join the Value Pricing Academy but we can't afford that right now. So what we've done is we've just changed the way that we run the Value Pricing Academy with three different levels to make it much easier for people to get started if you want learn more about how to build an extraordinary accounting firm. So we now have rebranded and we now have three levels of the Value Pricing Academy. Level 3 mastery is what was the Value Pricing Academy. It's now Value Pricing Academy Level three. You can't join that right now. It's closed. We are open enrollments next year. We also had what was called the Bookkeepers Pricing Academy. We are adding brand new content next year and that's called level two growth. It's all about how to grow your firm profitably and that's just $195 per month. But we now have an entry level to make it easy for people to get started. It's called level one Foundations where we teach you the foundations of value pricing. The core foundations of building extraordinary accounting firm. This used to be called the profitable growth Academy. It's now the Value Pricing Academy. This there is new stuff coming next year we will be introducing pricing software. Our starter plan of the effective pricing software will be bundled in. There'll be three lots of monthly live training and loads more stuff more than I can tell you right now, but what we're doing is we are closing the year with a very special offer where the price at the moment is just $95 per month, that is going up next year quite considerably. But as is all of the.

Investment in our Value Pricing Academy, we are putting the price up next year. But one of the things people love about the Value Pricing Academy is they always tell us they love the fact that when you join, your price is locked in, it never changes and we just keep adding more content each year. So the very best time to join is now. It's $95 a month. When we put the price up in the new year, it won't change for you, it'll stick at that. But there is new content coming in January. You'll get all the new content for that old price of $95 per month. So if you want to give Value Price Academy a try, and we have a guarantee, it's all on the website, you can go and check it out yourself. I think it's. I have it here. Sarah's going to put the link into the chat box, I think. So you'll find the link coming very, very soon. It'll take you to a page that looks like this where you can find out everything about the Value Pricing Academy. But there is more stuff coming. Not everything is listed here yet. We're introducing new stuff in 2024. And if you want to know the exact price in your currency, if you're not in, then when you click on Sign Me up, it'll take you to a page that shows you what the current introductory price is. It's going up next year, as you will see. And you can pay in your. In your currency, your preferred currency. So I can see Sarah's put that into the comments. So go and click on that. Check it out after the live stream. If you want to start to explore the Value Pricing Academy, then level one is the place to start. And then once you're in, you can upgrade whenever you want. Once you decide you want more content, you can just reach out to us and we'll help you upgrade. Right. That's all the announcements. Awesome. Great. That's exactly where I wanted to be because we want to dive into the content now. So today is all about ChatGPT and AI. And because this is the last session of the year, what we're going to do is break it down really into four parts. So I'm going to bring Emily on in a second. What we're going to do is we're going to very quickly have a look at what's happened in 2023 because it has been an extraordinary year. And when we look at the full year, you'll realize how much has changed because.

Which is extreme. It is extraordinary. We're going to talk about what are our favorite things that we use ChatGPT for. What both Emily and I will look at our use cases and then what we'll do is we'll spend a bit of time focusing on some of the very latest stuff that's come out very, very recently and why that's so powerful. And then we're going to wrap up with what are our predictions for 2024 and how is it going to impact on you? Where do we think it's going to impact you in the accounting profession? So, and then we'll answer questions as well. So remember, if you've got questions, put them in the comments box. Put those two capital Q's in front. Usually Sarah does one of those. So I can just show you what 2Qs are, but never mind. I can see. Wesley's here. Hi, Wesley from North Carolina. And Beth's here as well, but I can't see the two Q's. Okay. So I'm going to bring in Emily at this point. Emily, how are you doing? Hello.

I'm good. How are you?

Yeah, I'm really good. And I don't know about you, but I'm really ready to get started with this because there is so much we can talk about. But very quickly before I do, that's what two capital Q's look like. So thank you, Sarah. If you have a question for Emily and I put it in that format and then we will see that. We'll deal with your questions towards the end.

End.

Right. So let's talk about. I do have a.

I do have. Where did I put it?

I did have a. I had a scene, didn't I, Emily? You saw me even create it and I have no idea where I put it.

I will find it in a second. Is it that one there? It's there. Found it. Okay, great. So, yeah, we created this timeline and we'll just take. We'll just give you a quick run through of what's happened in 2023. So ChatGPT, if I just go back a bit further, the first time anybody really heard of it probably was in November of last year because November 2022 was when OpenAI released it to the public. They released ChatGPT3 and everything went crazy in January of this year. You may remember I said that Microsoft was so excited by it. They invested $10 billion in ChatGPT. They are a major shareholder. And then in February, OpenAI announced that they were going to open up ChatGPT plus, which was, up until then it was just a free version, but they created the plus account where people get more content. And also Microsoft were really getting excited by the whole thing. And they released the AI powered Bing Chat. Everyone thought Bing was a dinosaur. Before 2023, it was all about Google. But Microsoft really started to change things when they built AI into Bing. So, Emily, what happened in March, that was the big news.

So, yeah, so in March, they then released the later version of the GPT model. So GPT version 4, which is just a bit more advanced. It gives you slightly better answers. They released that to the plus account users. So that's for people who are paying for membership. And then at the same time, Google also launched their kind of rival piece of AI technology called Bard. And they were kind of pushed into it a little bit because we think, you know, OpenAI had the earlier technology and they released all of their stuff, which kind of forced the hand of a lot of the other companies. So when that came out, Bard was still a little bit behind. It has continuously improved, but that's when they released it. There was also in Italy, they banned ChatGPT because of, @ the time, there was a lot of controversy about security and the privacy. There was no laws or regulations or anything put in place about AI. So there was a big sort of panic about how that could be used. So they completely banned chatgpt in Italy so that you couldn't even use it.

And it has since been added back in, but I think that will come up on the timeline. And then Midjourney was also released, which is a picture generation piece of software which we have talked about a lot on this channel as well. So that was also released in.

March? Yeah, version 5 was released midjourney itself was actually released, if I remember right, it was in 2022, early 2022. But version five came out in March and version five was a huge increase on version the versions before that. So if anybody likes the idea of image creation, midjourney is extraordinary. So April, what happened in April? ChatGPT reacted to what Italy had done, and at the same time, because of Italy, the EU were looking into security issues and then the US were. So ChatGPT reacted very fast. They did a number of things like introduce data controls into your settings. And then as a result of that, Italy were happy. So they resumed access to GPT ChatGPT in Italy. And then we also found as well that this was all starting to build a great big race amongst all the major companies. So obviously Microsoft jumped on board and saw the potential and jumped on board with OpenAI and ChatGPT. Google launched Bard a little bit too early. It wasn't quite ready. Amazon are really in this space. And in April, Amazon, through aws, they announced Bedrock. Bedrock was a platform where they were going to pull together.

A number of different AI, large language models like Anthropics, Claude, and a number of.

Image tools like Stable Diffusion and a few others. So that was April, then in May.

Emily. So in May, they released the app for the iPhone. They didn't do the Android till a few months later, which annoyed me because I'm an Android user. But they released the app, so that's really, really handy if you're out and about and you want to use it. They also released the Plugin store, so we do think that that's kind of on the way out now. But at the time, this was a big kind of change in the software. So you could, in the same way that you would use your phone and then you'd go onto the App Store to download games or different apps, different social media, maybe things. It was the same with ChatGPT, so it opened up a world of possibility of all the different things you could do with connecting it to different pieces of software or getting it to do things that it wouldn't have originally been able to do, things like your shopping list and travel information and all of these sorts of great things. So it introduced all of those.

And there was 200 initially. There's now somewhere like over 3,000 or something like that. So it's grown since then a lot. What they did then as well is they released Browse with Bing, so they already had the AI powered Bing chat with it. If you went to Bing to do your research, then you could do it there. But what they've done is they put Browse features into ChatGPT so that when you're having your conversations with ChatGPT, you can access the Internet. And that solved a lot of the limitations of ChatGPT, in that it was only trained up until a certain period of time. So anything modern data, you know, what the. What the football scores were last night, what the weather's going to be tomorrow, those sorts of things you couldn't access. But they added Browse with Bing, so they did later take it away, but they added that in May. And then Claude which was anthropic's version of ChatGPT, you know, their own large language model. They announced a 100,000 token context window, which just means that you can input a much larger prompt. I'm not sure what the word count is on that, but it was something. It was a huge, huge word count, much larger than ChatGPTs was at the time. And it also meant that the output that you got out would also be a really large amount of text as well. So it just enabled you to ask much bigger questions, do big summarizations of text and things like that as.

Well. Yeah, that was always a limitation of. There still is a little bit of a limitation. There's only so much data it can read. Just as a very rough rule of thumb, a token is a word essentially. So if you want to, let's say you want to feed a large language model with a PDF of a book, then ChatGPT would struggle with that because it's too long. But if you want to summarize a book that you've got on PDF, you could feed it to Claude and that could cope with it. So then we get into June and June. The big thing that happened, the really exciting thing that I was really excited by was at the back end of June they launched Code Interpreter, which for accountants is a really big thing. The only frustration was that in June they only released it initially in the us so I had to start digging out my old VPN so I could start playing with it in June. But fortunately that was fairly short lived. They rolled out to the EU because I'm in Portugal and the UK not too many weeks later. So Code Interpreter is actually now been renamed. It's a strange name that Code Interpreter. It's a bit misleading. Although interestingly they still use Code Interpreter inside GPTs. We'll talk about that later. They did eventually, a few months later, change it to Advanced Data Analysis, which is a much better way of thinking about Code Interpreter. The thing that makes Code Interpreter or Advanced Data Analysis so exciting for us in the accounting profession is that we can upload files like Excel spreadsheets and CSV files and it can do quite complex math to do various bits of analysis. And I'm going to show you a tool later on that I've created. If you've not got it yet, you can grab a tool that you can experiment and see exactly how it does that. Okay, let's move on to July.

Then. So, Emily, So in July they temporarily disabled the browse feature because they were finding that it was able to get around paywalls for things. So if you wanted to buy somebody's book, for example, it was getting around the paywall and accessing people's content. So they had to remove.

It.

So. And for several other reasons as well. But that was the main reason, so that they could fix that to bring it back in. And then Custom Instructions was also launched, first of all in the us, which was a big, big, big feature, a really, really big change. And Custom Instructions allows you to add specific information that ChatGPT will then remember about you throughout all of your conversations. So you were finding that in each new conversation, you had to reinstate who you were, what your business is, regular information about yourself. I'm based in the uk, I want you to format answers in this style. You had to re put that information in. But Customer Instructions allows you to have preset information that it always remembers throughout all of your conversations. So that was released in the us and then Meta, which is Mark Zuckerberg, it's Facebook, they released their own large language model as well, called llama 2. And that entered the game as.

Well. Yeah, And Meta, they've done some really big announcements later. They are really going big in the AI space. So we focus on ChatGPT mainly because we still think it's the best tool for accountants in the large language model space. But if we start looking at other things like image software and video and so on, there are other tools that are just extraordinary. And in Meta, I think their recent announcements, what they're doing, doing a lot of focus around is things like audio translation. So there's some. If you're trying to learn a foreign language, Meta have got some really cool stuff coming out right now. So in August they also then thankfully released Custom Instructions to the EU and the uk. Many of you will know that until November that was my favorite feature because custom Instructions, essentially, in essence, it allows you to personalize ChatGPT to you. So that was a big development. And they also, as well as making available in the EU and the uk, made Custom Instructions available on the free plan. So very often when they bring out the new tools, you have to be A plus user, but then eventually they do filter down. And that was one that did filter down to free users fairly quickly. And the other thing they did was with the advanced data analysis, or as it was back then, code interpreter, there was a limitation that you could only upload one file, one Excel spreadsheet, for example. And then in August they updated that so you could upload. I think it's 10 files, which really opened up the possibilities of what you could do with analyzing data. So let's move on to September.

Emily. So, yeah, so in September they brought browsing back, they fixed the issue and they brought that back and released it as.

Out of beta mode, I think at that point. So you could use that again, which was great. They also added a new voice capability to ChatGPT. So we still don't have.

We still have that now. And what that allows you to do is using your app on your phone, you can talk your prompts out and it will also.

Voice them back to you as well. So that's great for. It's very similar to, I guess if you're using Alexa or Siri or any of those, you can just, you can physically talk your prompts out. And that's really, really helpful. Great for things like language translations and things like that. You can just use it as the in between sort of thing. And then Amazon also plan to invest 4 billion in anthropic. So you've got Microsoft kind of backing OpenAI and ChatGPT and now Amazon are backing Anthropic and Google are also rolling out all of their extensions, lots of extensions that we've talked about in the past that really work nicely with ChatGPT and help you to improve the experience as well. So lots of extra things coming out as.

Well. Yeah. And the other thing that Google did back in September is they integrated their Google Bard into many of the Google tools like Google Sheets. So for people who just love Google, you might find that Google Bard is your preferred. If you like Microsoft, then Microsoft are building ChatGPT into everything. So you choose your preference. And Google, they've recently just launched Gemini. They had a big release just a couple of weeks ago and the only problem with their release is it was turned out that a lot of things they said their claims were a little bit overstated. So Google I think is, you can't, they're not, you can't dismiss Google, but they are very clearly still playing catch up, as I think most people are playing catch up at the moment with OpenAI. So October saw that. One of the things that was fascinating in October with ChatGPT was they then rolled out Dall E3 inside ChatGPT. And what I mean by that is Dall E3 was their image creation tool. There are a number of AI image creation tools and Dall E3 has been around for a while. Also Dall E has. It was a little bit poor when we tested it out back in April but when they brought out three, it got much better. And for some things, it's very good at. But the great thing is you don't have to pay for it separately because it's inside ChatGPT4 if you have a plus account. Whereas if you want to use Midjourney, for example, you have to subscribe to that. Or if you want to use some of the other. The other tools. I personally still think Midjourney is a much better tool if you want to create photorealistic images. But the nice thing about Dall E3, it's getting better, but it's the convenience. And so one of the things that if you're in our Facebook group, you'll often find that when I post things in the Facebook group, there's an image there as well. And it's really quick and easy.

You can put your text into. You can put your text, your article, your blog post or whatever into ChatGPT, or you may even use it to create it. And then you can just say, create me an image that reflects this content and it creates an image. And sometimes it's really, really good. I think actually one thing we did miss out in October, Timeline, but you're going to come to it later, is all tools like ChatGPT Vision. But let me leave it at that, because, Emily, I know you're going to talk about all the big things that came out at the end of October. So that brings us into. Actually, no, it was early November, wasn't it? Sorry, I think those.

End of October, early November, a lot of stuff seemed to happen very.

Quickly. I think it was sort of end of October, November. But yeah, essentially what all tools is is that everything that we got access to so far was in separate kind of areas. So you weren't able to browse something on the Internet and then use a plugin and then create an image. You couldn't do that all in one place. But what they did is they took all of those things out of base mode because they were still in testing at that point. And they've put them all into the same place so that if you're using the paid version, you can now access the Browse feature code interpreter, what's now called Advanced Data Analysis.

Chat GPT, the Dall E3 Image Creator, and also something called Vision, which I don't think we've actually put Vision on there. But Vision is now a feature where you can upload an image and it can recognize what's in the image and give you some feedback on whatever is in that Image as well. So it gave you access to all of the tools all together, all at once, which is a really great help. And that kind of reset the drawing board of what you can do with ChatGPT because now you can access everything all together and use them all in combination. Then that's a great thing to do. And I'm going to go into, I'm going to show you a bit of an example later as well. But then they also release GPTs, which Mark is going to show you a little bit later as well, which allows you to similar to custom instructions, how you can personalize it. You can create lots of different sets of those personalizations to get it to do a particular task or remember a particular Persona that you want it to enact out. And then also there was a big saga with Sam Altman that we won't go into massive detail about, but it was a big kind of soap opera drama where they staged a bit of a coup and they booted him out. They sacked him from the board. Microsoft then said, well, we'll hire him. And then OpenAI seems to panic a bit. All of their staff said, well, if you're firing Sam Altman, we're all leaving and going to Microsoft as well. And then he's eventually ended up back at OpenAI. They've taken him back. So it was a big, a big drama. But it's all seemed to have resolved itself. He's back in OpenAI and they're carrying on. But that was very interesting for a few days, if you wanted to have a look at that. But yeah, that brings us up to.

Today. Yeah, that was a very, very quick summary of the year. I mean, extraordinary when you look back, all the things that have happened and the speed that which is AI developing unconsciously, we're going to have to speak faster because we've got so much still to cover. So we're going to. Let's talk very quickly about a couple of our respective favorite uses of AI. What I just want to do very quickly is as well, just because we can answer questions, there's a couple of quick things Mark said for accountants. Is the free version of ChatGPT adequate or is the plus paid version much better? Version 3.5 is adequate. That's the right word you've used, Mark. The free version is adequate. The paid version is a million times better. And some of the things you can do now with it is extraordinary. And it may be those of you I know there's many Academy members who are in, in watching this. If you're using GPT4. I think Randall, you're excited because you've got it now then what would be your advice to other people? Is it worth upgrading? I think it's a no brainer. I can see Randall's also said Randall has Please help Mark out and hit the subscribe sorry, the like button if you like it. So thank you for that David. David AKA James Brown. I will answer that later. And Katie says, will this be available online to rewatch Joined late. Yes, Katie, you'll be able to catch up with this okay, so let me start off by giving you a couple of very, very quickly in about two minutes.

Some of my favorite use cases for a couple of minutes. Then Emily will show you a couple of things. So one of the things I use it for, I love ChatGPT. I do use it every single day. And that's not an exaggeration, that's every single day because it saves hours and hours of time. So one of the things that I have to do regularly is being a speaker is then provide an overview or a synopsis and a title of the session. Every live stream I have to go to synopsis when I do a webinar for somebody. When I teach things in the Value Pricing academy, I have to write a synopsis, an overview of what I'm going to teach. And one of the things that it's extraordinary for is writing synopses. So I have all sorts of standard prompts I use. In fact, I have a GPT for that. More on that later. And it just saves me so much, much time. In fact, more than that going beyond that, I recently did an AI course for somebody who has a platform in the US and it had to comply with the NASBA rules for cpe, which means you have to have a whole load of assessment questions and learning objectives. And I just crafted a prompt, I fed it the NASBA requirements, I fed it the transcription of my my set, my training course and it created the whole lot in a matter of just two or three minutes. Something which would have taken me between half a day and a day to do in the past. It was just extraordinary. So that's one of the ways I use it. The second way I use it, which is I think the most powerful use case and one that you should be using, is many people know I talk about we need to be as a profession starting to create more value for our clients. And perhaps we'll talk about that more later, Emily, when we look at the future of the profession and 2024 in a little while. But we need to add more value, we need to adapt, we need to change. And business advisory is more important than ever before. And one of the things that it's extraordinary for is chatgpt is great for helping us out with business advisory. Now I'm not in practice anymore. I used to be many years ago, but in Portugal, there are a few people, some friends here running businesses that have asked me for help. And so I've used ChatGPT to help them create complete business plans, complete strategy documents. I've helped them to rewrite their marketing material. And it's just I've been able to create amazing content for other businesses, businesses that I don't know much about. But ChatGPT helped me, armed with the right prompts, it saved me hours and hours of time coming up with complete strategies for their business. And it's just absolutely amazing. So I would strongly recommend that if you want to help businesses, your clients become more successful, then ChatGPT is extraordinary for that. Emily in three or four minutes, perhaps even less than that, two or three minutes. If you want to talk about a couple of things, I think you might have a couple things to show as.

Well. Yeah, sure. So my favorite ways of using ChatGPT, first of all, is idea generation. So just using it to brainstorm, get some ideas, and I then use my own knowledge to take what it's given me and expand on it myself. Or maybe that kickstarts my way of thinking and I just take bits of what it's done and put it into my own words. And it's kind of that starting springboard thing that I use it for. So I also use it for things like idea generation, for things like coming up with blog posts, ideas, headlines, titles, synopsises, things like that, and coming up with lots of ideas for those. But then I take that and I use my own, my own input to expand on that. And then I can also kind of go the other way with it and I'll put in an idea of something that I want to do and then ask it to expand on that idea and give me more ideas for that thing. So if I just quickly jump over to my chatgpt, I can show you what I'm talking about. So in this particular example, I'm using the free version and I just asked it to create me 52 blog titles for an accounting business that specializes in helping the restaurant industry. And it's done that. It's created me 52 blog titles. We've shown you this in previous live streams, how it can do this sort of thing. You know, I've then asked it to expand on that by giving me a bullet point of the five points I could cover in each blog. And so it's just done that for the first blog and it's expanded on that for me. I can then take that information and add to it myself with my own ideas or, you know, use that as a, as a basis and then help it get it to help me write a blog. You know, different titles I can come up with. I can ask questions like suggest how I can then repurpose this blog throughout my marketing. And it just come up with social media posts, video content, email marketing. I can then take these ideas and say, oh, social media posts, that's a good idea. We have quite a big strategy on Facebook. Maybe I can start posting things into the Facebook group. So I can take that idea and roll with it based on what I know about our business and how we run things. So it's giving you quite generic information unless you give it a more nuanced prompt. But the prompts I'm asking are very basic here and I'm then using my own knowledge to implement that in a way. So another example is we, we want to be able to, to use GPT more throughout our business. So I've asked it, if we did train it, if we were to train it up a GPT with information about our business and the content in our training, what ways can we then use that within our business? So I'm using this to help come up with new ideas of how we can grow our business and expand and create more content for our members and those sorts of things. I then see this and I think, oh, we can make a customer support chatbot. And I then think in my head, okay, I've got two or three ideas of how we can incorporate that into the business. So I use it more of a springboard for ideas to then add my own ideas to the end of that as well. And then the other way that I use it, which I don't need to give you an example of, is just summarizing like chunks of text. So I can take either a file and upload it. Now, if you're on the paid version or possibly even on the free version, I'm not sure, Mark, maybe confirm that for me. But you can upload files or you can just copy and paste the text and paste that in and ask it to do a summary. If it's off a webpage, you can get the link to the webpage and put that in and get it to do a summary for you. And you can also simplify that at the same time and say explain it to me like I'm a 10 year old and get it to summarize whatever it is that you're trying to learn or consume in a short amount of time. So yeah, those are my favorite ways of using.

ChatGPT. Thanks, Emily. Okay, so let me, let's talk about now. I think we've got some time left. Let's talk about.

The latest stuff that's come out that we're both using. So I'll perhaps go first because I want to talk about the thing I'm most excited about and I know you've got something that's really exciting as well. So very quickly if I just go across to just to me for a second. So back in November, up until November, my favorite feature was custom instructions because it enables you to customize ChatGPT to you. The only challenge I had, and many other people said the same things, is what if I want multiple different custom instructions for different types of writing styles and so on. Well, you can couldn't do that without continually cutting and pasting new custom instructions in. And then they listened to my request and what they brought out in November is quite simply extraordinary. Now this is one of the reasons why you need to be on the plus account. They launched GPTs. They launched GPTs. In fact, they were so, so powerful and so.

Sought after that they had to stop people from upgrading to the paid account because OpenAI was just overwhelmed. It was all slowing down for a few days. So for a while you could not upgrade. You had to go on a waiting list. But I found out from people like Randall said just a few days ago, they've opened it back up again. You can now upgrade to ChatGPT Plus. And my advice would be you must do that because GPTs are extraordinary. So a GPT essentially is you can build mini little chatbots yourself inside chat GPT to do specific tasks that, that will save you huge amounts of time. If I go across to ChatGPT to show you and if I pull up the right hand menu, what came out in early November was you always had your chat history here, but they brought out, you can see at the top now we have various icons. I can expand these. Now there was an Explore button. All these icons are all separate GPTs that I have built. You can build them yourself. Other people are building them. They will be launching a GPT store at some point. It was going to be in November, but They decided to hold it back until next year. Although there are already several thousand publicly available GPTs. Just the store's not public yet and because they're so easy to create, they're so Easy to create GPTs, you can also use others. I'm going to share one with you in this session. So just in a few minutes I'm going to give you a GPT as my Christmas gift to you, so you can play with it and you'll get a better feel for the sorts of possibilities. This opens up so many possibilities. So let me just first of all show you. To create one, you click on the Explore button, you have to have the plus account and what you will see here is at the bottom is a list of a few of the ones that OpenAI have created as a starter. None of those really excited me too much. But you can create your own and you just hit the plus button at the top and you create a GPT. And when you do that, what you find on the left hand side is you can create a GPT using natural language. You can just have a conversation with, with ChatGPT and said I want you to build me a chatbot that helps me translate Spanish into, into Chinese, Mandarin or something if you were into doing translating stuff and then you could start to feed it more information. I wanted to specifically do this and I wanted to do this so you can have a conversation and behind the scenes it builds the specific custom instructions and then on the right hand side you can play with it in preview mode to see if it works how you want it to work. If it doesn't, go back and continue the conversation on the left and say actually I want you to do xyz and then when you're ready you hit the Save button and then you can save it just for your use. Which is great. But I think where it gets really powerful is you can share it with other people by sharing a link or you'll be able to share it on the public store in due course. I like the middle option with the link because I can share it with my team. We share GPTs internally and you can share it with your clients. Now the only thing is that although they've made it extremely simple to create a GPT, what I have found is that what it will create is something that's okay, that's adequate, but where you get, when you can, when you. If you want to create amazing GPTs, what you want to do is go into the Configure tab and now you can create your specific Custom instructions. You have to understand a bit about prompt engineering, but you should do anyway because that's one of the most important skills we now need in this AI world. We can create the instructions. So think of these as custom instructions, but each one's different. And then what we can do is we can also upload files. In other words, we can create a GPT and we can provide it with knowledge. So, for example, I have a business owner, a friend of mine here. So think about this. If you're doing advisory work with some of your clients, I have a friend here running a business, she wanted help with her strategy. So what I did is I created a GPT and I fed some information about her business, her website and so on, and now she can use it. If I was the accountant, I would use it. I wouldn't let her have it, but I gave it to her. And she can then use it for copywriting, for building strategy and so on. Because I programmed the GPT in just a few hours and it's trained in her business, she can use it to help her with her business. And then there's other amazing things that you can do, but that's the process of creating a GPT. It's really, really simple. So what might you want to build? If you're building GPTs, what might you want to use it for? So, just a few use cases. For example, Gabby, my daughter, she built one called Effective Pricing. So if you use our effective pricing software and you have questions, you can grab the GPT, we'll give you the link and you can ask it questions like how do I set my prices? How do I create my packages? And GAB is fed it with all of our user guides for our pricing software so you can ask it questions and have a conversation about effective pricing. I've written one for members of the Value Pricing Academy. I'll be launching next year on Proposal Builder, which will help you to create amazing proposals either for yourself or if you want to do advisory work with your clients and help with proposals. Another one that I've built, I will be releasing this to a Value Pricing Academy members, is how to build packages. I talk a lot about in the Value Pricing Academy, giving people a choice. Think of it as the Bronze, Silver, Gold, but often people say, okay, but what should I put in my packages? So I've fed it all of my training and instructions and it will work with you to build your packages for any service. I have one called Write Like Mark, because one of the things I've done is I've trained it to write in my writing style. So if I want to write a blog post, a Facebook post, and I want to be my writing style, I will just go to that particular GPT, click on it. And now I can have a conversation like a normal ChatGPT conversation, but within this specific GPT, you might want to use it for other things, like, let me think, you could use it for generating headlines, for marketing, copywriting. There are so many uses. I have one called Lusso Learner. I'm in Portugal and I want to learn Portuguese. So this one will always.

Do stuff, help me learn Portuguese. It will do translations. I can just cut and paste some text in. It'll translate it for me. Really, really powerful. I said to you earlier, I do synopses a lot. I now have one called Synopsis Writer, which writes me the synopsis for a live training session in the format that I want. So I have one for you as a free gift, which I'm going to get Sarah to put into the chat box. I created one called Data Summarizer, and this one demonstrates the power of both GPTs and advanced data analysis. And what you do with Data Summarizer is you upload an Excel spreadsheet of, let's say, expenses. Perhaps you've downloaded all the expenses for the year for a particular category of expenses, and perhaps you want to summarize it between the different suppliers. Well, all you would do is you would drag in the Excel file and it will guide you through the process. It'll ask if you want to clean up the data. And at the end of the process it will produce for you.

It will produce for you a table with a summary. It can produce for you some graphs and some charts. So if you want to play with data, it's my free gift for you. What I will do is, or what Sarah will do is put two links for you because I do recommend the other day I did a video to explain how to use it and also how you might want to think about how you can adapt it to create something for your accounting firm for analyzing data. So we're going to put in the chat box, in the comments box, both a link to the YouTube video called Powerful Data Analysis with ChatGPT and and the link to the GPT. So watch the video first. I recommend watch the video because you'll learn a lot of stuff about GPTs and data analysis. And then if you like it, just click on the link to the GPT and as long as you've got a plus account, you'll Be able to play with it. Start playing with it as I show you in the video. Right. Okay, Emily, let's go back to you because you've got some exciting stuff you want to talk about that you're using right now. And then we'll go to question. Oh, no, then going to. We're talk about the future of the profession as well next.

Year.

Yeah, so I wanted to talk. I'll just give you a little bit of a demonstration of the all tools that I mentioned earlier. So that's kind of one of the later updates that have happened. And what this allows you to do is to use all of the different things that we've kind of over the year got access to have now all been put into one place. So we can make. We can access them through any chat that we do now. This is on the paid version. Let me switch over to here and I'll show you. So this is on the paid version only. But what you'll see now is when you start a new chat with ChatGPT and you click up here, you can see it says ChatGPT4. That's what I've got automatically selected. And it says that this conversation will use Dall E3 browsing and analysis, and it will also actually use Vision as well.

You are limited to 40 messages in every three hours. So if you're just doing really quick, simple tasks and you're using the paid version and you don't want to waste that limit of messages, then I would just say, and it does say here, use 3.5 for your everyday tasks. So if you're just coming up with a couple of different headline options for a video that you're doing or something like that, the 3.5 version will do an absolutely perfect job at. Then make sure you use that one. And then if you want to use all of these advanced features, then you want to be using the GPT4 model. So what it will do is it will combine all of those features into there and you just need to tell it what you want to do. But a lot of the time it's going to automatically understand what you want to do anyway. So in this conversation I've just done here as an example, I'm using the little upload feature here in the bottom. So you can just click this button and you can upload either a file or, or an image. And this is what's using the Vision feature and it recognizes what is happening in this image. So this is a screenshot of one of our landing pages. It's for our ChatGPT ebook which is available to you if you want to grab that. But the.

The landing page I've put in here is a screenshot and then I've just asked it to critique my landing page and it's gone through. It can see what is on the image and it has given me feedback and it said your, your headings are very clear. Call to act, your call to action is great. However, you might want to consider testing different colors the design and layout. It doesn't like the, the image that I've used in the background which is the image of a robot. It says maybe you might use a calculator or some something instead. But it can, it can view that image and tell me what, what is happening in that image and and how to improve and it recognizes that it's a landing page and then recognizes the context of that image and can give me advice and critique and give me information off the back of that so I can then also use in conjunction with the image upload. I've then asked it to use the Internet to find me the best practices for designing a landing page. And now you can't see it now. And I always pre prepare my conversations because sometimes there's a bit of a lag when you do this live. But what this does is what it did is it went and it researched this information off of the Internet. So you'll see a little icon that says browsing with Bing and it will then come back with the information that it has found from the Internet for you. So this is what it's found. It's looked at two different places to look at the design and the copy. And next to each kind of element it's put a little quotation mark here and that is the web page that it has got its information from. So if you want to check your sources, check that everything is correct and makes sense, you can see where it's done its research from. And then down here it's looked at copy on a different page as well. And it does that in a few seconds, sometimes maybe a minute if it's taking a while to look at a couple different pages. So it's used the Internet in here. I've then also all in the same conversation. Now previously you would have to start a new conversation to do all these different things. I've uploaded a Word document, a PDF even that explains how we teach the perfect landing page in our academy. And I've said based on this, is there anything that I need to change in my image above to make sure that we are practicing what we preach. And then it's gone through that document, it's found what we are teaching and then it said we can now review based on these things what is in that image. So I did need to upload the image again. So it's reviewing based on what we teach, how we need to change it. And it's then given me a lot of information about how to do that. So you can see how it's combining all of these elements. I then asked it to create an image for me using Dall E3, which is in there, which I can use to promote that ebook as well. So you can add all of these elements in together and they'll do everything all in one place, which is incredibly useful. And that's one of the greatest features, the latest features as well. So I'll pass back over to Mark.

Now. Wow, thank you. Okay, we are fast running out of time and I want to talk about the future of the profession and next year, but somebody said I don't know your name because you're on Facebook. How do I get started? I'm overwhelmed. Yesterday there's so much stuff happening in the world right now. And we were. This is kind of an end of year summary of what's happening in the world of AI. There is so much that's happening. So where to get started? If you are new to ChatGPT, then go and check out the videos on our YouTube channel. In fact, I might have some links for you later. I might have some links. I do have some links. If you've got a. If you've got your smartphone. No, I haven't. But go to our website right now to our YouTube channel and you'll find a bunch of different videos we've done. If you haven't got an account yet, a great one to watch is easy Step by step guide to setting up ChatGPT where Emily walks you through exactly what to do to set up your account. And then there's a whole bunch of videos on, for example, use cases for accountants. So go and check those out. They're all on our YouTube channel. Somebody else says please do an accounting sample to increase productivity. Well, what I talked about that GPT for data analysis, that's an accounting example. Just go and watch the YouTube video that I mentioned earlier and then play with the GPT and see how you can increase productivity from analyzing financial data and that will hopefully give you an idea. So Emily, we need to talk about. Let me bring you back. Sorry, we need to talk about the future of the profession. And perhaps if I could go. We'll have to go very quick, I think because of the time. Let me go with my first prediction, and I know somebody mentioned it earlier is we've talked about the fact that all the major companies are investing huge amounts in this Microsoft, Google, Facebook or Meta Amazon. But one has been very quiet and that's Apple. But my prediction is do not write Apple off. They're going to launch something big next year. The working title is Apple GPT. They are working on it. They have said they're going to be investing billions every single year. And it wouldn't surprise me if 12 months from now when we're doing these live streams, we're talking as much about Apple as OpenAI ChatGPT. I think they will enter the race with a big bang. So that's my first prediction. Keep an eye on Apple. Do not dismiss them in this space. Emily, what's your next.

Prediction?

A lot of my predictions were kind of more about the, the world of the employee, I guess so because productivity is going to be boosted significantly. Anybody who's using ChatGPT or AI in this way, productivity is going to be massively, massively boosted. If you're already using it, you'll know exactly how much it is helping and that's going to have a big impact, we think, on the working week and the structure of that. So I've seen different schools of thoughts. Some people are saying there'll be huge job loss because one person can now do the work of two people, so we might as well sack that first person. So there's that kind of side of it. There might be a lot of job loss, but the other side is that it could just alter the working week. If one person, rather than saying, well, you can now do the work of two people and dumping all of that on two people and over stressing them, it might give you more of a work life balance where we say, well, let's drop you down to four, four days a week or three days a week because you can do the same amount of work in that amount of time. So we might be seeing. And also with all of the stuff that happened with COVID and people working remotely, they think there probably will be a big change in the way people work and whether that leads to a huge job loss. There'll also be a lot of opportunity at the same time for new jobs in the AI industry for things like prompt engineering is going to be a huge, huge, coveted skill. You know, if, if you see that on Somebody's cv, that's going to be a huge, a huge thing that works in your favor. If somebody's great with AI and has knowledge about these technologies, then that's going to be a big thing to improve your, your still as a worker as well. I think so. Lots of changes within the workplace, I think, yeah.

Absolutely. Emily's right there. When they predicted 300 million jobs are going to disappear. And we can see that. I mean, there are so many highly skilled things that you don't need anymore. Copywriting is a great example. Copywriters are paid huge amounts of money for writing copy. But you don't need a copywriter now because if you know the right prompt, you can create amazing copy. Inside ChatGPT, we did a session in the Value Pricing Academy recently on that. The key thing is to learn prompt engineering. That is the number one skill. My big prediction is, and I know some people hate it when I say this.

But we are seeing, because we are researching this every single day and using this, the speed of what's happened and it's accelerating all the time, it's extraordinary. I think that within the next few years now I'm thinking two to three years time, we will see that a lot of our work we do that, the data entry, bookkeeping particularly, that's going to disappear. Bookkeeping, the days of bookkeeping are going to be gone fairly soon because the speed at which it's learning is just extraordinary. And I know that sounds scary, but I also, I think this is a great time to be alive because it's opening up so many opportunities. We've said for years in the profession that we should be creating more value for our clients to not just adding up numbers for clients, but actually helping to understand them and grow their business. And as I said earlier, ChatGPT is amazing at helping with business advisory. So I think that in the profession, what we should be doing over the next year or two is making sure that we are upskilling and making sure we understand prompt engineering so that we can use these tools to not just create better productivity internally, but, but to do extraordinary things for our clients. Anything? We've got five minutes. There are a couple of questions, but Emily, have you got another.

One?

Yeah, I mean the other things that we're definitely going to see more of is just more incorporation of AI into various different other pieces of technology. So if you haven't already noticed within your tech stack that you're using within your business, you will probably start to see AI becoming more and more prevalent, used in you know, even places like qbo, Dex, all these different software that you might be using, AI will become much more prevalent in those pieces of software. You also see it in other pieces. If you're using Microsoft, they have something called Copilot now. So that essentially anywhere you are on your computer, if you've got a Word document, open, a PowerPoint, an Excel spreadsheet, you will be able to access AI and ChatGPT directly from where you're working and it will be all over your computer. And Google have very, very similar with across their suite of your Gmail, your calendar, your Google sheets and everything that Google has all together, you'll be able to use AI seamlessly throughout all of this technology. And in other places like Zapier, that connects all of these together, you'll find that that's getting more and more seamless and that jobs and tasks that you do will just be able to be a click of a button, a separate essentially. So it's going to become a lot more prevalent throughout lots of different pieces of.

Technology.

Awesome. Okay.

I think there's a Neil's put an interesting comment. I just want to deal with that in a second.

Mark says. But first Mark, what AI program works best for tax research? And I don't know if Emily, you got a thought or not, but I think you need to test the different ones out. But one of the things that I, one of the things I love about ChatGPT is the ability not just to browse with Bing but also to feed it PDFs documents. So I'm from the UK, so if I go to HMRC, which is the UK tax, if you go to their HMRC very often, a lot of their tax stuff you can access as a downloadable PDF. So you can take if you want to understand the tax rules for, I don't know, expats, for example, people looking for not become non resident. You can download a PDF document, it's a huge great big document. You can feed it into ChatGPT and you can start to ask questions. So whether that's better than Bard or others, you would just need to test them all out. But certainly ChatGPT, particularly version four, is very, very good for that sort of stuff. I don't know if you want to add anything to that.

Emily.

Yeah, I've just probably on that point that I said you'll find that AI gets integrated into your own tools that you're using anyway. So you know your own software that you're using for your accounting stuff, they'll bring in their own AI things to do those tasks in a more specific way as.

Well. Yeah. And Neil, I know Neil slightly disagrees with me about bookkeeping, that it won't disappear completely. I think that. Well, I think it will. But let me give you an analogy. So when I was in practice many, many years ago, I started in 1988 in my accounting firm. In an accounting firm. And one of the things that in the UK that we can do is when we do a corporate set of accounts, financial statements. You can also do abbreviated financial statements for smaller companies, which means that you can put less information like not disclose your profit and loss account on public record. So obviously a very valuable thing. Back in 1988, the large eight partner firm I worked for, they didn't have computers, they had a word processing department. And when we did financial statements, we had to. The juniors would pair up and do calling over, if you're as old as me, you'll know exactly what I mean by that. We would basically make sure that the typists had typed the right numbers into the accounts and all that time went on the timesheets. And the firm I worked for back then, there would be time on the timesheet for creating the abbreviated financial statements. And that firm would typically charge about 300 pounds for doing the abbreviated. And then a few years later, technology came along where when you do a set of financial statements, there's a button that says produce the abbreviated and in one click and in seconds it produces abbreviated financial statements. And I've done many benchmarking studies in the past profession over the last 20 years, and what I found is that it's almost never that accounting firms charge a separate price for that.

It's just a free extra thing. In other words, technology took that job away pretty much because you can now press a button for abbreviated financial statements. It took that away. And so we don't charge for it. But if you were to ask the question, how's the value to the customer changed? The value still there. The customer doesn't have to disclose their profit and loss account on in the uk, its company's house. It's not on public record. For a small company, the value is just the same. But because technology means that it's a press of a button, we're not charging for that. And that's what's going to happen with bookkeeping. It's going to be so automated that if you're charging based on the hour, which many in the profession are doing, you're going to effectively be doing it for free. And that's crazy. So how are we going to make our money? We've got to do other things. We've got to add value in other ways. I hear someone says, I remember those days of calling over. Yes, the first year being on a training contract in the UK was very, very exciting. Doing the calling over. Right, Emily? I think we pretty much run out of time. But what I did want to just wrap up with I think was just a very, very quick reminder for people that if you want ebook then Sarah did put the link into the chat and we will put it in the description as well. And I also mentioned earlier I said a little bit about the Value Pricing Academy and that we've now restructured. There are now three levels and level one you can now join for just $95 a month. And the one thing I want to add to that is that we have created a complete training course on ChatGPT. Hours and hours of training on how to use ChatGPT. You can buy it for $495 but we give it away for free as a bonus in the Value Pricing Academy. So if you want to learn more about ChatGPT and how to use it with use cases, there are hours and hours of videos that you'll get when you join Level one foundations. And if you want to become a master at things like Prompt Engineering, I do advanced stuff in level three mastery. So people like Neil, who's been with me for years, I know he's very excited that I'll be teaching, for example, early next year, Advanced Prompt Engineering. I'll be talking about some advanced stuff with building GPTs and many more exciting sessions next year if you're in level three, but level one, you get all of our basic hours of training on ChatGPT. Okay, Emily, that's been awesome. Thank you. Anything you want to.

Add? That's it from.

Me. Okay. I think I will add and just say Happy Christmas, Merry Christmas to everybody. This is our last live session but we will be back early next year. I think Emily will be doing these probably every couple of weeks still. We might change the format. Emily, we were talking about. We might do some where it's just you because I know you've got loads of things you want to show and share. We run out of time so it may be sometimes you'll see just Emily delivering these, sometimes me, sometimes it'll be a double act.

Randall says. Are you finding you sometimes have to generate twice on a chat? Yes. So at the moment one of the things you'll find is so Many people are using ChatGPT.

It's sometimes going a bit slow and you'll get a little button saying regenerate. You hit regenerate, it'll then come up with the answer. It's just because there are millions of people using it and they're having to deal with the demand. But it does get there. Sometimes it's a bit frustrating and some of these new features are in beta. Rhino says which level am I? I don't know. Rhino. If you're in the Value Pricing academy right now, you're in level three, you're in the top level. If you're in the Bookkeeper's Pricing Academy, that's now going to be level two Rhino. But if you're not sure, reach out to Sarah or just post it in the VPA Facebook group. I'll answer that question for you. Right. Have an amazing Christmas, have an amazing new year and I will see you very soon. As usual, I'll play out with some music. Let me know what was the best thing you learned. I will share some comments on the screen and hit that thumbs up button if you enjoyed it. Okay, bye for.

Now.

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