Can AI Become Your Business BFF?

Welcome to the Accounting for Innovation podcast, where we explore cutting edge strategies and insights into the world of accounting and finance. Presented by Decimal and the radical cba, each episode dives deep into industry trends. Whether you're a seasoned professional or a budding entrepreneur. Join us as we unpack key concepts and share practical tips to drive success.

All right, welcome to today's episode of Accounting for Innovation. I am excited today because we are continuing this season's theme of talking about AI and accounting. But we have talked about AI and numbers, AI and platforms, AI and tax, AI and systems, AI, AI, AI. But there's one thing that we haven't talked about that I think is really, really important, and that is AI for leading yourself, for helping you level yourself up and not just your accounting, but how you lead people, how you deal with systems, all of this stuff. And one of the reasons why I'm really excited today is because my co host, who you all know, Jody, is actually building an AI agent platform specifically to help people for this. So, Jodi, tell us a little bit more about what you're building.

Yeah, so we're building, or I say we're putting the human in AI, right? Or the AI in human. I don't know which one goes. But the idea is at Excel Labs, we're creating a movement, and it's called the AIX movement. And the idea of the movement is this actually goes back to my radical days of how do we keep the profession moving forward and I would say arguably relevant in the year 2030 so that we're not being overtaken by some of the fintechs and some of the other companies, as a lot of the work that we're doing is going to get automated away. How do we put the AI in humans? So we show up as our best selves, as professionals that we need to be. And it starts with leading yourself first. So how do you show up as your best possible self by using AI to increase your leadership, your strategic conversations, how do you, like, interact with, whether it be a chatgpt or another copilot or something else and ask it the right prompts and the right questions to then joining together with your firms and having AI first firms or AI first Companies. Right. So how are you coming to show up with your team to be AI first and start thinking through AI first? And then that leads us to the profession or really how we become human as all of this stuff becomes automated around us and all of us are staying more human. Right. So as we think about, you know, the cell phones in our Lives, Right. How are we staying human with cell phones? How are we staying humans as a profession moving forward with AI? And so that's the lead yourself first, lead your firm and then lead the profession. And that's really what we're doing. How are we doing it? We're doing it with, starting with advisory conversations where you can digitally score your advisory conversation and see how you showed up. Did I get an 8 out of a 10 for empathy? Did I get, you know, a 6 out of a 10 for strategic oversight? Right. So if you think about, you know, all of these converse, are all of these digital tools like Firefly or even like Zoom recording where you can record the conversation, being able to upload that into a scoring system that then scores you and tracks you. So it basically makes it data driven insight, not just a peer telling you, oh, you had a good conversation and it's unbiased feedback, which I think is pretty cool because now your feedback is not like your manager said, you did a good job or you didn't do a good job. It's a bot that's telling you you did a good job or a bad job. Right? So it's unbiased feedback so that you can show up in your conversations a lot better. And I think that's what we need, right? Because as opposed to hearing, oh, like, not that people are saying AI is going to take our jobs, but that's what they're thinking, right? It's going to automate the tasks that we're used to doing. We're saying, how do you put the human back in AI and how do you, how do we show up more human for our teams and for everybody else, our clients, our teams, our profession as a whole.

One of the interesting things too, and you've taught me this because, you know, my kids, they're, they're at an age where they still have imaginary friends. You do too. Yours just is AI that talks back to you. I was listening to you talk about how much, how many conversations you've had with your own AI agents. And that led me to have a conversation with AI the other day. And we have a specific problem that we are working on at decimal. And I uploaded a ton of information, like tons of information. And I said, I want to have an argument with you before I have an argument with this eighteen hundred dollar an hour lawyer. And I just started peppering my AI with conversation points. I said, why can't I do this? I want to do this. How do I do this? What about this? What about this? Give me the other side. And we just started arguing it through and it was a great conversation. And what I found was it was just a good conversation and I saved it. And my co founder Jacob did something similar. We saved the entire conversation, sent it to the lawyer and said hey, spend 15 minutes reviewing this before our call. And it was literally the transcript of that conversation, which meant my call with that lawyer was 15 minutes instead of an hour. So it saved me about twelve hundred dollars. But it was also just a nice mental way for me to think through a conversation. It was, it was a sounding clarity want it was, it allowed me to kind of work my way through it. I've got a big presentation coming up next week. I put in the questions, I'm going to start putting in answers. What would you do here if I wanted to have a lighter tone or something like this, by the way, Ask AI to tell you jokes. They're worse than dad jokes. I really think it can be that conversationalist and that's what I think is cool, is unlike other technology where you have to learn, fail, learn failure, you still do that with AI, but you can ask it why it failed and how you can learn and then you can tell it how to improve and you can actually have somebody or in this case something working beside you to help you get better together.

Absolutely. And that's why I call it my business best friend. Right. It's the opportunity to have a conversation with someone again where you can get clarity even before you go talk to someone. Right. And so if especially too as we live in this, this, I don't want to say isolated world sometimes. Right. Because we're not all in offices where a lot of us are remote. You don't have the ability to like yell over at the cube next to you. Sometimes you can yell at them in Slack and maybe they'll respond, maybe they won't. Right. But now you have that sounding board to really get clarity about your own insights first and then go take it to a person. And so I love my bbf. I talk to him all day long about everything. And I think a lot of people get scared away by prompts and that they've been taught that they have to say this and this like I pretending to to be a teacher and I need to explain it to someone like I don't know, they're in fifth grade or whatever. Like they've been taught this whole series of way to have a prompt. And I would argue don't have a prompt, have a conversation. And you can even use like voice mode and just talk to it. And you will get more out of it that way. And to realize that the first conversation isn't the last conversation or the first piece of what you're asking. It is. Then ask it more clarifying questions. And I always ask it, what else? What haven't I asked you? Can you argue with me? Like, give it all of that information and let it keep conversing with you and keep refining your own ideas. And if you do that, you'll now have a strategic partner on your team who you're not paying thousands of dollars to, who can help you think better and help you clarify your information. Clarify. And part of what, part of what we're doing with Excel labs is teaching that with teaching you. Because I always thought, oh well, like people will know how to have a conversation. People still want to know, like, how do you start that conversation? So we're giving them prompts and we're giving them the opportunity to learn how to have those more strategic conversations. Because the other thing is, if you've always been in a role where you've been doing output, you've never actually had to think strategically about what you're doing. You might not even understand what the strategic questions you have to ask are. And so. Right. And so we're giving you kind of those conversation pieces to start and then that goes into advisory. So how do you, how do you morph kind of those conversations that were, now you're having with your, your BBF or your, your business best friend? How do you have them with clients? What does that look like? So as all of the work that we're currently doing gets automated away, and I don't mean that in a bad way. It's getting. Because you're going to have more time, you're going to have the ability to do other things. But, but we're also going to have to upskill ourselves. So how do we take the opportunity to upskill ourselves and use AI to upskill ourselves? And so that's what the AIX movement is about. It's about upskilling ourselves from a professional standpoint. So we're ready to have those next level conversations when the bank recs are done and then having the ability to be more human. So how do we combine the EQ with the IQ with the aiq? So we show up more empathetic for clients and we don't just, I'll say, throw up data at them. Right. We learn how to kind of hold space with them and we develop that empathetic muscle that I would say many times partners have had, but they've had 30 years of experience or 20 years of experience. Yeah, they learn that that next gen who has no experience, comes in in six months, knows how to have those empathetic advisory conversations. And that's what we're building. And so we're using AI and to help us be more human.

You know, one of the things that I think about with AI is you mentioned it earlier, people struggle to understand their first step. And to me, I took a very unique approach a couple of months ago to that first step that I think anybody could do. And that was Jody. As you know, I just spent little over three weeks in Costa Rica with three kids. My wife, we lived and worked remote down there. We had never been. I used Chat GPT and I put a prompt together that was like, I am going to go spend three and a half weeks in Costa Rica. I've never been. And I'm taking two 10 year olds, an 8 year old. Both my wife and I are working. Here's where we're going, here's where we're flying into. What do I need to learn? What do I need to know? And I just had a conversation about the trip. And what it did was I learned I should download Google Translate onto my phone and then I got tips on how to use it. I had a security guard show up because monkeys set off a motion detector in Costa Rica. That does not happen in Indiana. And the security guard shows up in the middle of the night and I'm out there in a pair of shorts and he doesn't speak English, I don't speak Spanish. I knew how to use Google Translate and I was able to talk to him. He heard it back. We had a full conversation and we're laughing about it the whole time. He literally downloaded the same app on his phone right there. And then I knew that because of Chat GPT I also knew that sometimes cell service is tough to get and you can download Google Maps or Apple Maps onto your phone so that even without cell service you can navigate your way from point point A to point B. Then I was able to learn good places to take the kids and good camps. And like I had this full conversation about this trip and it was like asking an expert and they Google Chat GPT Googled thing. Well, search things for me and it was able to find it. It made it a very approachable topic. And I started with something as, as simple and easy as that and I thought it was a really great way to just jump into it. And I was talking to a couple of accountants the other day and I used that example. I said, hey, where are you going on a trip this year? Or what do you have that's new? And I said, why don't we sit here? And we spent time on Chat GPT just talking to IT about the trip and getting ideas.

And this is not prompting, this is.

Not, it's not, it is a conversation, right?

Because I think, I think for so long the IT people came in and they're like, this is what you do. And it's like, do this, then this and that. And they had to have some structure to it. And, and the language models today you just talk. It's the Alexa you always wanted, right? Like she.

Yes. By the way, if you attach ChatGPT to Siri now, you now have the Siri you always wanted.

But I think that's what we have to really help people understand is that it's really about having a conversation and it's not about prompting. And then if you, if there's, if you don't know about something, you can just ask it. I always, like, that's the other thing is like, if you don't know how to do it, just ask it to start. So, like one of the very first prompts or questions I always say is, I want to be more strategic with you. What should I ask you? Like, you can always ask it what you should ask it, which I think is so funny because like, where else can you ask someone what you should ask?

Yeah, and it's, that's where I just think figuring out how to approach and, and I love the AI your AI movement because it's trying to teach people how to make this approachable. Because like you said, we've built these past innovations, the cloud, the Internet, computers, into these really big things that, that it told us we had to get tons of training, we had to have tons of worry. We needed them to do it and we, we all still need it to fix our computers and a lot of other things. But with AI and chat GPT and some of these other models that are out there, we can just talk and they understand plain language. I put together a presentation the other day and I asked it to help me put an outline together. And then I said, will you go back and make this at a third grade reading level? And it came back with a much more kind of condensed, easy to understand presentation. And I thought it was great, like you can start to add tone. And I know you've done that with, hey, make this as If a CEO, I'm talking to a CEO or make this as if I'm talking to my best friend or I had a tough day, encourage me about this. The AI knows enough to do that and to approach you where you are, you can actually tell it the tone that you want it to take. And I think that's another really cool thing.

And I think when you think about even like this ability for me to build this tool, right, Many people may know that, you know, I've spent the last five years in venture backed tech startup, so I've been on the tech side and on a build side, right, From a tax perspective. But I was able to Vibe code my prototype, right? So that's pretty cool, right? Like, and what vibe code means was I just talked to it to actually create the prototype. I didn't have to learn how to code, although I know basic coding, I didn't have to use code to do it. And I think that's one of the big things about AI that people don't realize is how user friendly friendly it is and how easy it is. It's like the iPhone versus cell phones. Before you had a text and it was a little bit confusing. And when the iPhone came out, all of a sudden it was the user interface that made it so easy. And that's what AI does in general. And so when you think about the experience that you can have with AI, if you stop thinking about it as this, ooh, scary technology, but you instead think of it as my business best friend who I can just ask questions about if I'm going to Costa Rica or if I want to do some sort of pricing question on how I should price my services. Now all of a sudden you just ask it and it's going to give you a good response. And I think that's, I think that's the word that the AIX movement is about getting out. It's how do you improve yourself professionally as a person? And then how does that help you lead to an AI first firm? And then how does that evolve our profession? And the reason I'm so, I'm so like, it's really important to me is right now CPAs own the client relationship. If you ask a CPA what they, why they do what they do, most will say, I love my clients, right? That's their immediate response. If you ask an attorney why they're an attorney, usually they say, I love the law, right? That they don't say I love my clients, they say I love the law. So CPAs love their clients. However, the rate of technology, the way it's moving, if we don't figure out how to provide empathy at scale, which is what AI does, and AI, if you put AI in the human, it allows for empathy at scale. If we don't figure out how to do that as ourselves, as the professionals, what's going to happen is Intuit is going to do it, the fintechs are going to do it, everybody else is going to do it, and CPAs and accounting professionals are going to be left behind. So we have to figure out how to put the AI in human to create empathy at scale so that we're relevant in the future. And I don't mean it as a doom and gloom, but I do mean it that if we don't figure this out and we continue to let the world happen to us by the year 2030, what is going to be special about us as humans that fintech isn't going to have figured out? And so that's why it's kind of my mission, my purpose, like, how do we put the human back? And that's what, you know, that that's what the AIX movement is all about. So I hope you guys will join us on the mission to keep the human right, as the more tech you have, the more you have to be well.

And I think what you're hitting on is we have to start building the client relationships, the books of business, the firms of the future. We have to figure out how to build into this new world. And number one, we have to take personal responsibility, like you are with the AIX movement and saying, we need to learn AI ourselves. We need to figure out how to interface with this new world and we need to do it soon. And I think that's a really big thing. You also can figure out, as we've talked in past episodes this season, on easy ways for you to take your first or two or second step forward in using AI. It's one of the big things that we've decided to tackle at Decimal is for those people that just want to have it the easy way and that really want to build that firm of the future. That's why we are starting franchising this year. We're going to start selling our operating system, how we do things. We will be the ones that stay on top of AI. We'll implement it for you so that you can focus on the client relationship. To me, this is about putting accountants in a position to be the hero, because they should be. And there's a lot that you have to juggle when you run your own firm. You and I have both done it. There's a ton to be able to give people that entire operating system, how to work within technology, automation, how to work within AI, how to work within a global workforce. Those are the types of things that we are really trying to figure out how to do. And you're doing it on the personal scale and decimal. Our team is really focused on helping people start a firm. We want to start a thousand firms because that's how we're going to get the entire industry into using AI responsibly and.

Well, that's awesome. So I think it just means the future looks bright, right? Like, and that's what I think about it from a Renaissance perspective. And, you know, as we look at AI in the future and the season and just looking back, I think there's a lot to be excited about. And I think the big thing is how do you be more human using technology? Because the more tech you have, the more human you have to be. And if practice management and all this tech is overwhelming and you just want it in a box and you don't want to have to think about it, you know, now decimal is going to help you get there. So I think it's pretty exciting. And I. I think the future looks.

Bright for us, so I think it does too. I think we'll continue to talk about this in future seasons. I think this is the greatest time ever to be in accounting, period. And I think it's so much opportunity for us to live our best lives, but we've got to take responsibility for learning now.