Intuit Assist and Other AI Changes

Michelle and Dan discuss the history of Intuit with AI, the recent announcement of Intuit Assist, and what accounting professionals can do to adjust to this latest development in technology.

QB Power Hour is a free, biweekly webinar series for accountants, ProAdvisors, CPAs, bookkeepers and QuickBooks consultants presented by Michelle Long, CPA and Dan DeLong who are very passionate about the industry, QuickBooks and apps that integrate with QuickBooks.

Watch or listen to all of the QB Power Hours at https://www.qbpowerhour.com/blog

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Transcript

Michelle Long: 0:30

Welcome everybody to another QB Power Hour. We're very glad to have you joining us today. Today's topic is the new announcement from Intuit about Intuit Assist and other AI changes. So we got a lot of stuff to talk about with this new announcement that just came out this week. My name is Michelle Long. I am a CPA and the owner of Long for Success, speaker for Intuit for a long time. I was thinking about this, Dan. I first started speaking for Intuit, oh gosh, was it 2007, I think? It's been a long time. So I was trying to remember how far back I went.

Dan DeLong: 1:10

It's, if you can't remember, it's been a long time.

Michelle Long: 1:14

It has been back in the desktop days. That's for darn sure. So anyway, it has been a very, very long time. And I started teaching QuickBooks initially back in the late 1990s. So I do have a long relationship with Intuit, which is somewhat, some of what we're going to talk about today. And Dan, you have a long relationship with Intuit as well.

Dan DeLong: 1:34

Go ahead. Yeah. My name is Dan, the long owner of Danwith, I worked at Intuit nearly 18 years. It's funny, my work anniversary. Was September 11th, which, it was always a little clouded, but I did see a lot of Facebook memories of some of my work work work. Celebrations of that, which was a mixed emotions, but they may have involved me wearing a dress.

Michelle Long: 1:59

I did see that.

Dan DeLong: 2:04

Your

Michelle Long: 2:04

case in there address.

Dan DeLong: 2:06

Yes, yes. So we're co-hosting today as well as over@schoolofbookkeeping.com. We do a workshop Wednesday. I do a workshop Wednesday there. And yeah, so we definitely had a long relationship with Intuit as while on both sides of the badge, so to speak. And a little bit of details about the QB Power Hour webinars. They're every other Tuesday at 12 Eastern, not eligible for CPE credit, but you can always check the website for upcoming events. This month is actually going to be all about AI. We're going to be talking about the Intuit Assist announcement today, and then next time we'll be having Heather Satterly join us with with Michelle and myself, and we'll talk a little bit about how you can use some AI in your practice. So we did have an introductory Chat GPT we did a couple months ago. You can always go back to the website with qbpowerhour. com slash resources and see the watch replays check out the podcasts, download the handouts whatever you want to do there, get lots of resources there. It's a little bit about the housekeeping. If you have specific questions about what we're talking about today, please put those in the Q and a, you should see a little button down at the bottom of the console there for Q and a that will help us. Make sure that we capture your question if it does result in needing to follow up with that That makes it a lot easier for us to follow up with you directly if you have a general Comment of like go eagles then boo chiefs. Please put that In the chat, there as well. I see the chat scrolling by and then, of course, we have the availability for the webinar archive links and whatnot. And we'll post the link specific to today's webinar for handouts and replay as well in both places here for, so that you can have access to that. So, Michelle, our agenda today let's talk a little bit about that. You want to set the stage of what we'll be what we'll be talking about?

Michelle Long: 4:12

Absolutely, and I wanted to let people know that the handout will be uploaded a little bit later, and I apologize for that. I was fine tuning this handout literally until a couple of minutes ago, because I kept changing and adding to it and stuff. So first of all, what we're going to be talking about today is a little bit about the history of AI and Intuit and our relationship as accounting professionals with Intuit to help you lead into where we've been with Intuit and how this announcement affects us and our relationship with Intuit and stuff. So a little bit about that. So in this big announcement, Intuit assists. And what that could mean for us as accounting professionals in our practice in our future For our practice and us as accounting professionals and how do we stay ahead of this and of the AI curve? Intuit Assist was announced on September 6th This is a big announcement. How many of you all saw it, you might just put in there the chat window. If you didn't see it, I noticed they did it. Was it the tooth of the Wednesday? I think after a holiday weekend. So some of you might have missed this and they may have done that intentionally on innovation day to bury the news because this is. A huge announcement and it will impact us and I am always a well, you know, let's calm down. Let's wait and see, you know, is not falling exactly. I am never want to get all excited or, whatever. This one does ruffle my feathers and get me concerned, very much so. Some of you are just hearing this now and all this some of you saw the email but it sounds like a lot of you are new to this. We're going to talk a little bit about the history of AI and Intuit, because they've been working with this for quite a while. We'll talk about the impact on that, this on us as accounting professionals, because this one Is going to have a major impact on it. And I, you guys know me, I am not one who. Oh, my God, we're all going to lose our practice and it took awful and it took out to get us and I'm usually the one who's trying to calm everybody down and things like that. This time I am concerned. So let's get into it, Dan, but we also stay tuned at the end. We have very good practical steps and things that we can do to help mitigate the effect of all of this. And it is going to affect us all. Yeah,

Dan DeLong: 6:49

I don't know the announcement, even though the announcement was made last week. It is not changing the world today right like it is. And we'll talk a little bit about how this is like the writing was on the wall because you've got a picture of you and Brad Smith here. That, this really shouldn't be us. It certainly can be a surprise, but it really shouldn't have been a surprise because even our buddy Brad everyone's favorite Intuit CEO did talk about this. So let's talk a little bit about the history of of Intuit and AI.

Michelle Long: 7:26

Exactly. Yeah. So Brad Smith and he stepped down in 2018. I believe it was that Brad Smith left 2018. Well, Sasan took over 2019. So maybe Brad stepped down in 2019. But anyway, under Brad Smith and prior CEOs of Intuit. The ProAdvisor and the accountants community was a really strong relationship with Intuit. We were a huge part of Intuit's, pillar. We had the whole accountants channel. And there was a strong relationship and partnership there. They had the ProAdvisor program. They had the QBO accountants, there was training and certification, they had the roadshow. Back in the day, I started on the QBO roadshow in 2007, and so 2008, what's new for 2008? We used to go around, we were giving away QuickBooks desktop accountants to everybody who came to the training. We used to hand out those CD ROMs, everybody who came got QuickBooks desktop accountants. For free, they were giving it away. They were doing free training. It's who it was just really great to the accountant to community. We had that find a poor advisor referral website into it had for us. And Intuit promoted that referral website. They have links to the Find a ProAdvisor website in QuickBooks. When it said, do you need help? Find a ProAdvisor. They had, so they had it in QuickBooks desktop in the help area. They had it when you're getting started. It would say, click here for a local expert. They had it all over prominently when people would search. So they really promoted. Find a ProAdvisor website. That's how I got a lot of my clients because they encouraged us to do the advanced certification And then you would be listed at the top of that website So you could get more clients and one of the things that I always did I rode the coattails of Intuit to grow my practice because Intuit is a, multi billion dollar company, a billion dollar company. Spends millions and millions of dollars on advertising and promotion. Every time I would see these QuickBooks commercials and I would hear them, I didn't think Intuit's competing with me. I thought thank God they're advertising and marketing for me Every time I would hear QuickBooks commercials They're marketing for me because all these new small businesses that buy QuickBooks Intuit was also marketing Find a local ProAdvisor They were marketing for me and getting clients for me and driving new client referrals to me Through that Find a ProAdvisor website or just through word of mouth for QuickBooks users So it was a win win, as Intuit grew with more QuickBooks users, my practice grew with more QuickBooks users. It was a win win. Intuit grew, we grew, we were all one big happy tribe. And Brad Smith talked about that at QuickBooks Connect, how we were all a tribe. We were the same people. That's how when you go to these QuickBooks Connect conferences and stuff, it became a huge family. Because we were the same tribe, we were the same people, and they really cultivated that. And that's how it became such a tight knit community. And if you've ever been to any of these conferences or watched on social, You see everybody hugging each other, it is a very tight knit community and Brad Smith is a hugger and, how many CEOs hug, and I even remember it, anyway, I want to end all those stories. The other thing was the pro advisor preferred pricing, the lifetime of the subscription, we had that discount, and so we could give our client a 30 percent discount for the whole life of their subscription. And so we had it good. We were living the good life and everything was wonderful and hunky dory. And we just didn't realize how awesome everything was. And then at one of the QuickBooks Connect, they introduced the first QuickBooks chatbot. And if you guys, Dan's gonna play this for you. I want you to watch closely You're going to see Stacy Kildall. You guys remember Kildall in here. Stacy's in here. She has her cameo moment. She was on the big screen at QuickBooks Connect. So this was their first attempt back at the 2017 QuickBooks Connect, I think. Oh, 2016. This is the sizzle reel. This is what they dreamed for the first chatbot.

Dan DeLong: 12:09

Yeah, this was an ideal state, right? Obviously it didn't work that way at that moment, once they launched it. But this is what they were hoping that this could potentially be, right? So it just does. Play this video here.

Michelle Long: 12:29

Hey QB, at the lobster shack is a new customer. Congratulations, Naomi and done. Great. And can you invoice them 30, 000 every month starting today? Absolutely. What are you delivering? 500 loaves of sourdough every morning, right? Wow, that's your biggest deal ever. At that price, your profit will be 5%. On average, it's 17. Is this okay? It's the price I had to go with to get the deal. Go ahead and send it. Oh, and let Charlie know about the deliveries. Okay, I added their opening times to his calendar. Hey QB, let's look for some ways to increase the margin. Well, with your increased volume, you could buy flour in bulk directly from a miller. If you went with simple flour milling, you'd save about 10%. What's that tally? About 13, 000 a year. Or 3, 000 of those half capped, no whip mochaccinos you like so much. Right. And what's the downside? You'll have to pay up front, and that means you'll be short 4, 202 for payroll next week. Uh, are there any options to cover? Working on it. Yes, I found three. Borrow on a few invoices, open a new line of credit, or take an advance from your credit card. Hmm. Let's see what Stacy thinks. Playing a message from your accountant. Good job, Landon Lobster Shack. Since they're going to be a recurring and high volume client, I think if you switch suppliers and go with simple flour, you'll be fine after the first month. To make your payroll next week, the cleanest and cheapest option is going to be the loan against your receivables. Let me know if you have any other questions or if there's anything else I can help with. Hey QB, you got that? Working on it? Funds will be available by Wednesday. Plenty of time to make Friday's payroll. Thanks for the lift. You're welcome. Hey QB.

Dan DeLong: 14:51

You sure are popular.

Michelle Long: 14:53

I serve over 10 million businesses around the world and speak 37 languages. But I'm never too busy for you, John. Alright, so I just picked up another 15 bucks. How much have I made driving versus designing this month? With driving, at 22 an hour, You've made almost 1, 100 with designing at 50 an hour. You've made 700 and

Dan DeLong: 15:22

I'm going to

Michelle Long: 15:22

finish up the toy store job tomorrow. Could you let them know their new logo will be ready in the afternoon? I marked your calendar and notified them. Sounds good. Drive safe, John.

Dan DeLong: 15:39

Before we were using monday. com, our team was drowning. Yes.

Michelle Long: 15:49

So you want to go ahead and give us an update on where we're at now with all that.

Dan DeLong: 15:55

Yeah the QuickBooks Assistant, which is what they've ultimately rolled out into, is really only still available in the self employed labor of QuickBooks Online. If you do have access to a client or QuickBooks self employed currently today you will find that image of what they were going to going to do is not what it is today, right? At best, it is a it is a guided help, in product help to give you resources to help with those types of things. So it's certainly not the reality of of what it turned out to be based off of the Vision of what they were hoping it to be certainly not what happened now, and Alicia has actually said in the chat, this is so not realistic, even now, right? But the vision versus what versus the reality is definitely, what we're here to try to isolate talk about and unpack through through today.

Michelle Long: 16:59

So what I think is interesting about what Brad said and so if you want to go to the next slide, Brad even said way back then, he told us that we as accountants must embrace AI or we're going to fall behind. He said, that anyone who wants to stay in the business of sending your shoe box and I'm going to charge you by the hour. Those are the ones that have to be struggling in five years. Instead, he says that the accountants have to step away from keying in the data, let the machine do that, and get into the advisory role. And he said, basically, that you have to get away from that. That if you do, then you're going to be in a category that's reimagined yourself and has not been displayed. He was right. Look at it now. If you're still trying to do manual data entry and charging by the hour, you're struggling because our industry has changed. So Brad was right. We can now look back five, six years ago. Brad was right in 2017. He was correct on what's going to happen. And that's one of the things that I respect Intuit. They're a billion dollar company. I have a hundred shares from many, many years ago. I've made a buku bucks off of them because that stock price has done very well. They spend a lot of money. On researching and investing what the future is going to hold. I was doing Firm of the Future and teaching people about freedom in the cloud way before COVID hit. So when it hit, we were ready because a lot of us accounting professionals already knew how to remotely log in to everybody and we were already working in the cloud when all these other people were scrambling. Intuit is ahead of the game because they are one of the top technology companies in the country. So they know what's happening. They know what's company. Brad Smith told us what was coming. So if you were paying attention and you were listening and preparing like a lot of us were, we did reinvent ourselves and we started implementing these tools. We started setting up the bank rules and utilizing these third party apps and we did this. So do you want to go ahead and launch that first poll? Dan? Yes.

Dan DeLong: 19:22

Alright, so our first poll is see is this the, let the machines question.

Michelle Long: 19:28

Yes. Let them, yeah. Do you let the machines do the, there we go. The basic bookkeeping. Yeah. And the thing of it is that we have to realize is accounting professionals, Intuit isn't the only one doing all this. We have so many competitors out there now. With pilot and bench and QuickBooks Live, our accounting industry is not the way that it used to be with mom and pop bookkeeping firms out there doing bookkeeping anymore. We have big players with big money into our industry that has automated everything. And what QB live now is as low as 200 a month, and bench and pilots all of these VC money has come in and two, 300, 400. And not only are they doing bookkeeping, but I think it was pilot. They're doing bookkeeping, tax and advisory services for these clients and these small businesses. It's commoditized. Basic bookkeeping and it's already here and it has been here for a number of years now So it has changed our practice and brad smith told us that was going to happen Back in 2017. And so we knew this, right? And so we've had to change, and the vast majority of us have done that. Those of you that are listening to this have probably already done that yourself. And we're seeing that here except, there's still a few of you, though, that are still doing data entry manually. And that scares me that that number is that high. 27 percent are still doing that. Dan, what do you think about that number?

Dan DeLong: 21:07

I think it always kind of came down to, and we would we would question these sort of things, like, when I did work at Intuit, right, like, all these things that were done for you where it, or where there was some kind of automation included, like, what does this mean? Like, does that mean, and we would ask the same questions as support, people like, are we going to be out of a job because this is going to be so easy to use? Well, the thing is, you cannot count out adopters of the program having some confusion around how to use it, right? I mean, that's always going to be a case. There's always going to be new people using it and having some confusion. And so, we never, we never saw a a degradation of of the workforce. Now you see all these new news things. And we'll even talk about, the Intuit assist announcement of the firing of 715 people into it. I always thought that they were a very green company because they recycle those employees. Even though people got let go I was impacted twice. But if you chose to you could you could come back, right? It didn't necessarily mean that you were fired or laid off. It just means that role that you were currently in was no longer going to be available in the way that it was, right? Because this is so this was the way that that Intuit embraced change is by reorganizing re recalibrating job functions to the, to that calibration, and then hiring the people that that that felt that they could do that role in that job, right? It was a little, little weird weirder, from the outside perspective where somebody would be like that's an odd culture, right? because you kind, every. Fourth quarter, it was like, okay is it the, is it me this time? Right, right.

Michelle Long: 23:01

And that's the way it was in public accounting. Yeah, you know every so often. Yes Okay, so let's move on now because we still got a lot to cover. So now Sassong Goudarzi, I hope I said that right Sassong Goudarzi comes in as CEO in 2019 And he had his background in running TurboTax and the QuickBooks businesses, which are product based consumer focused Businesses and he says he realized that no matter how much they worked on letting people DIY, do it themselves, no matter how much they worked on helping people calculate their own taxes and keep their own books, he realized that people didn't want to do it themselves. He realized that building out a platform for our customers to do the work was not actually the future. The future was it's done for you. So he says that he quite, he really bet the farm. Basically he bet the entire company on the idea that people are going to trust an AI service to recommend specific personalized business decisions. And he decided to bet the company on their data and AI. He literally bet the farm 20 billion, the whole Intuit company. AI and not everybody was on board with this. Not all of them were on board. So he's gonna bet$20 billion on the fact that what enables this company to do, this is their data that's gonna bet the farm, that they're gonna do the work for you. They were always do it yourself before, we're gonna give you QuickBooks and let you do it yourself. With your accounting professional, we're going to give you TurboTax and let you do it yourself with your, accounting professional, or we're going to give you a certain Pro Series and let you, the accounting professional, do it. Now, Intuit says, we're going to invest in all of this data, and this is where AI is all about the data. We have heard this for years. It's about big data. So Intuit needs big data and Intuit needs clean data, right? So Intuit, first of all, already had 57 million customers and some data, right? So they already had the QuickBooks and the TurboTax data stuff, right? Well then they bought Credit Karma for$8 billion, and that got them 120 million or 110 million. Customers in their financial data. Then they bought MailChimp and that was 12 billion and another 10 million more customers and their data. They also started QuickBooks Live because now they have all those customers and they're cleaning up that data. They're getting that data cleaned up and formatted. So now they have good data from bookkeeping clients as well. They can use all of this data for training AI. Okay, they can feed that data into AI and help the AI learn, these are the expenses, these are the, they can use the data to train AI on how, to recognize patterns and predict things and all that. They use that data. For AI to train it, to learn, to predict patterns and to recognize things. They use the data for cleaning things. So the whole QB live thing. Yeah, they were losing money for a long time, but they're investing in a lost leader. So yes, they can be cleaning up that data and getting all those clients and stuff to get the data. To train their AI to be doing this stuff and learning and making all these recommendations and everything. And so some analysts who's in the stock and how these stock analysts and stuff recommend and comment on these public companies and everything, he said that everybody wants to talk about how great their data is. But Intuit's data set on the consumer side of the small business side is second to none. They have huge. Amounts of data with a hundred million customers or more than that. Now that is just amazing data. And good Darcy says that this AI is as transformative as electricity and the internet. And listen to this last one year, we're at the beginning of the journey with AI in the next five to 10 years. It's going to create new economies and destroy some economies. Create new experiences, fuel new company growth, and make certain companies go out of business. Okay, and I want us to listen carefully to a lot of their messaging. Make certain companies go out of business. That is okay, some companies are going to go outta business and we're gonna do this poll in a little bit. They make it clear

Dan DeLong: 28:03

through. Yeah. But one of the one one, and one of the things about that is that, from, from my perspective and our relationship working with and for for Intuit is they, and you mentioned this, they have a data problem, right? They have so much data that, they. They're never going to be wondering, what people are saying, because they have all these data inputs not just the data, the services that people are using, but, collecting feedback and people will call in and talking to somebody or the you mentioned the QB live, right? The problem is they have dirty data, right? Where somebody will just put in feedback. This is broken. I was like, what is this? And how is it broken? And so they need to get it from something that is usable or something that is cause into something that is usable. There was a guy who used to work at to it. He's and God, we trust and all others bring actionable data. Right. Because you can't do anything with inactionable data, like it's broken. You need to actually turn that into a situation that, that's duplicatable and then replicatable. And then we can do something do something about it, whether it's fix a glitch or fix a problem. I actually was almost let go fire we're not. Properly documenting my cases, because there was a certain format, right? I wanted to just take care of people and that busy work to me was was just that. It was, what I felt it was busy work, but it was me being able to take what people are saying and turn it into something that is, that, that was actionable.

Michelle Long: 29:51

Andy, you want to go ahead and let me give this a try real quick. Okay.

Dan DeLong: 29:59

Yeah. I don't hear any noise. So if there is if there is any sound, it's not coming through. Do you want me to share?

Michelle Long: 30:07

Yeah. Can you go ahead and play this video?

Dan DeLong: 30:10

Yep. Let me stop your sharing. And there we go. There we go. All

Michelle Long: 30:25

right. All right. Do

Dan DeLong: 33:05

you want me to stop sharing? Can you pick back up? Oh, you're muted.

Michelle Long: 33:14

Yes. Thank you. Sorry, my husband would love to meet me more often. Okay, can you see my screen again.

Dan DeLong: 33:24

Yeah, yeah, I think the big thing that I saw in that video as opposed to the initial one is that, we can pretty much say, one of the things that was missing was the whole ecosystem. And that's what I think. Into it has made those changes in the last five years is they've created and acquired the data that centers around the entire financial ecosystem of a person a business or what have you right? So the turbo tax credit karma for personal types of things and then the quickbooks mail chimp That gives a more holistic view of you know of services not just necessarily the One service that one person might be using.

Michelle Long: 34:07

Yeah. So one of the things, and I'm running out of time here, I can go long. I don't know if you can, Dan. Can you go over a little? Yep.

Dan DeLong: 34:15

Yeah, I can go over a

Michelle Long: 34:16

little. Yeah. So those of you that can stay long, we can talk about questions and stuff over, but I do want to get through the bulk of the content in the hour that we have allotted. Those of you... That we'll have to drop off at the top of the hour or the end of the hour or whatever. I have links in here for you to go back and watch. They have a separate video for each one of the four. There's a separate video on TurboTax, credit Karma, QuickBooks, and MailChimp. There is the overall launch video that Dan showed you. The blog post has information. There's a separate blog post for each one separately and stuff. So I have links in here so that you can go through and take a look at these. Whoops. Sorry, I went down too much. One of the things, though, when we're talking about QuickBooks, the Intuit Assist for QuickBooks, it talks about automating tasks and workflows, but it doesn't really get into much detail where it talks about actually doing any work or anything. Mostly what I saw with what you saw where it shows you report and answers questions like show me how much I spent on this or what were my sales or whatever it does say that it could send some invoices eventually. You'll have the ability to send invoices look at some insights on profitability or your top selling products or whatever Those are reports. That's no big deal So most of what I saw when it comes to QuickBooks really wasn't a big deal Some of the things though that are alarming to us and I saw this Frequently under the QuickBooks and the tax side You eventually, you'll be able to seamlessly connect with a human expert. Everywhere you see where it says you're going to be able to talk to a human expert, that's their QB live team and their TurboTax live team. It's not us. It's not the find a pro advisor website anymore. It's not the accounting community. And when you watch their launch ads or their launch videos and that you'll see Sally the cpa or steve the cpa or whoever you can bet your bottom dollar It is from their qb live team or their turbo tax team And my son andrew was a cpa and he worked for the qb you guys like to talk about how awful their qb live team was or their turbo tax team or whatever? They do get CPAs that work for them. My son wanted the freedom and the flexibility or whatever. They, yes, they may mess things up and do an awful job for you to clean up after them, but they do get good quality people that work for them for whatever reason as well. So they're not all horrible. They do get some good quality people. They get people who are retiring, but still want to work. So they do get retired CPAs or EAs or whoever that want to go work for them. So anyway, here's the video for the QuickBooks one, and here's the blog post there. Here's questions I have about Intuit Assist for QuickBooks. They make no mention about setup or conversion. They only mention that they, that the people can import something from their website. That doesn't tell me much. What are you going to import the products from the website or the customers or what? That makes no sense at all. What if I'm using a third party app? It doesn't say anything about that. Does it talk about bank fees, rules, or other ways to get data into QBO? Does it mention third party apps? What about payroll? What about QBO users? Are my employees going to be able to use Intuit Assist and say, hey, show me the P& L for last month? Show me Dan's paycheck. How much did he make? What are the user permissions going to be like? What are they going to be able to see? Again, when they connect with that expert help, it's clearly going to be like, What's going to happen to the FinderProAdvisor website? There goes all of our leads and referrals that we used to get. Is that still going to exist at all? I get the impression clearly from all of the communication, and I spent hours reading through everything that's and from the sun and all of the messaging, it's clear we're going to be one of the ones whose business no longer exists. We're going to be one who suffers and doesn't survive. And I clearly get the feeling, and this is just, it's been leading up to this. Our discounts went away. Those of us who have been a ProAdvisor for 25 years, Jane. For our 20th anniversary and a gift basket. Anyway, we can feel the relationship between Intuit and the ProAdvisor community has been changing over the past several years. This is not new. This is like if you weren't clear on what's been happening over the past few years, our ProAdvisor discount changed. It used to be 30 percent for the lifetime of the. Subscription has now changed where it's only 2012. For the year, even for the solution providers that those discounts and referrals and everything has changed the relationship has changed. It's not the way it used to be. This is clear. It's like, if you weren't sure, drive the stake in the heart. Almost. This is just very clear to me. Maybe I'm misreading it, but, maybe you guys can tell me differently. Okay. Anyway, what about training for accounting pros in the future? Is that going to continue? What about our PETA clients? You guys are putting this in the chat. I've not been able to keep up with it. We have pain in the ass clients And I know quickbooks live has that too when they won't return your calls They won't give you the information you need we have pain in the ass pain in the rear clients What about them? They're not going to fit in this neat little box for QB live or for pilot or bench or whatever. What happens to the PETA clients? They're not going to work for AI or QB live either. What happens to the PETA clients? They're still out there and they still need someone to help them. Okay, so they're going to fall through the cracks. Somebody still has to deal with them. I don't know about you though. I don't want the PETA client. If you're going to deal with the PETA clients, you better be charging them, three time multiples for dealing with them. In the Intuit Assist with TurboTax, they now, I don't know if you missed this because you were so busy doing your taxes. There are three options with TurboTax. Full service. They will do business tax returns now. Last year they had a discount. They'll do your business tax return for 800 instead of 1, 500 or whatever. But they will do business tax returns now. So there's full service assisted and do it yourself at any process If you're doing the do it yourself, you can say hey, I need to help they're going to go to the TurboTax live people Okay, it's not going to you but with the TurboTax do it yourself option or the assisted any of these it is so easy to just drag and drop here's my w2 Here's my 1099. Here's my whatever and it just drag and drop it in there Why would I want to go fill out the organizer? You send me or go to your portal and drag and drop it all over there when I could just do it over here And then when I hit done, it's completed my action and if I need help, I just click here and I get help anyway So why am I going to go to you? Tax professional instead of just doing it over here with TurboTax, this is where I see the biggest threat because not only do I have to drag and drop and upload my W 2 and 1099, they can just get it all automatically downloaded and basically have my tax return already prepared for me. Because everything's all electronic now anyway, so tax preparation, I think, may be the first biggest risk under that. So that one could be really, a risk. Mail shift and credit card risk, those are awesome. The MailChimp, you saw that? That can help us a lot! Being able to do an email campaign, and do the copywriting to draft your email campaign, to be able to oh, change this so it's more friendly. Now you can do that with Intuit Assist and QuickBooks as well. Make this email to my client about their overdue invoice more friendly so I can soften the tone. That is going to be in QuickBooks or an Intuit Assist with QuickBooks. So you can do that in there. That's going to be cool. But with the MailChimp thing, you saw how it could... Put the potted plants, put the plants in the background of the email. If you got a picture of your chair, you can say, oh, put this in a living room setting so you don't even have to take the picture. That is where the text to image AI can generate and Dan ask, what is generative ai? When it can create new content, it can create a new picture. By you telling it, take this chair, put it in the living room now instead of with blank wall behind it, generative AI, it creates new content based on what you tell it. MailChimp is awesome. However, they're going to have to have an email list. But the MailChimp is going to be awesome. So that is going to be great for these small businesses and for us as well they may need our help with that to help them with a marketing campaign Using MailChimp. Credit Karma was awesome, too when I was looking into that. How do I know which? Which of these five credit cards with their reward programs I should get based on my personal spending? Maybe I don't travel a lot anymore. Credit Karma can look at your personal spending habits once you hook up your credit cards to it. Analyze them and say, Oh, Michelle, based on this, the sapphire blue credit card is the best one for you based on your personal spending habits. So it's really cool. Not only that, I can say, Oh, you spent too much. You should do this. You should do that credit. Karma is got some pretty cool things in it for people, not only people that are financially distressed and need help to meet their monthly expenses each month, but also, other situations. So that was cool as well. Here's, what's really cool. Like Dan said, with this whole ecosystem now, somebody who's been using MailChimp. Intuit can cross promote them to get them to use TurboTax or QuickBooks. People that are using QuickBooks, they can cross sell and hey, why don't you start using MailChimp for your marketing and promotions, to do an email campaign. So from a stockholder perspective, this looks very promising for cross promotion and cross sale and to help get that stock price up in the long run. So that all looks very good on that aspect of things, but I think the biggest threat initially is on the tax prep side. Because people initially when GPT 4 came out, CHAT GPT 4 came out, they were like, Oh my God, CHAT GPT can do a tax return. Well, CHAT GPT can read the tax code, but it couldn't apply it to your tax situation. But Intuit has the data. So Intuit can make, or Intuit assists. On the tax side, can make personal tax recommendations because it can read your data, so it's got your data, and now it's got the financial LLM large language model that it has trained, so it takes the open source chat GPT, puts it in its Gen O S financial language model. I don't want to get too techy. Intuit now can take the AI smarts combined with the data to give you a personal recommendation that says, Dan, this is what you should do to maximize your tax stuff. And not only that, if you did this, you could save that. Intuit can take over the tax stuff. And make the tax planning things too, not only to do the tax prep to do tax planning and tax advisory. So I think if I were if I had a tax practice That's initially where I would be really scared and really worried. It's from the tax side of things But again, what about the pita clients? What if they don't get you their stuff? To do the tax returns

Dan DeLong: 46:36

I actually uh did I actually did use the full service turbo tax, a couple years ago and From my perspective and my, my personal living situation where, I'm living in an RV and who knows where I'm going to be. It was actually really, really helpful. But I actually got dropped a couple times because I didn't. Respond quick enough. And it was very transactional, meaning that, I provided them the information that they put it in my return and they prepared it, right? If you want fast food tax returns, that was it. And it was really good and delicious. Like most fast food, but it didn't it didn't give me as far as like planning and having a conversation about what should be my strategy next year that, that didn't happen and that was with a person, right? So I don't know how how this will ultimately lead. Flesh out with AI being part of that and people being part of that as well in the full service side of things, which, extrapolates itself to everything that, that the Intuit Assist can and is promising to do, right? There, there's always going to be a human element. It's just what human, right? And, uh, and that, that will be the, that will be the 64, 000 question. As this kind of evolved.

Michelle Long: 48:02

Yeah. Okay. I got to real quickly give you some suggestions and then I wanted to show you something also, but okay, how do we stay ahead of this and fight back against some of this. We've been saying this for the past 6 years since Brad said this, we've got to focus on advisory. The good news is we can still take advantage of the training and opportunities that Intuit is giving us for free while we still have them. I don't know how long they're going to be there. There is a virtual conference, October 10th and 11th. Accelerate growth with the midsize clients or whichever clients. Advisory services. This is great. There and there's a session i've got a session out there on pricing strategies put some third party apps converting to qbo and qbo advanced Sign up for this even if you can't attend it, you can watch the recording later. It is two days free cte the whole bit also As a pro advisor, there's 20 some hours of free advisory training out here. This is really great self paced training, you guys. This is some really good stuff out there. Jeannie Whitehouse has recorded some of this and other people as well. I don't know why they didn't let me do some of it. I would have loved to, but I don't think I've got any of these self paced trainings out there. But really good stuff out here. And here's how you can access that.

Dan DeLong: 49:21

And this is, we've been talking about, Intuit is doing this to, to you or to us as accounting professionals, they offer this free, right? Like, this is, this is something in the ProAdvisor portal that when you log into your QBOA, you can access this too, right? So this is not we don't want to necessarily be like wagging the finger at Intuit. All the time because, they do may, they told us five years ago or six years ago. Hey, this is coming. And now they're telling us today. Hey, hey, this is coming. And they've also given some, some tools to be able to allow you to do that. So this advisory, I think this was like two or three years ago that it was launched in there. Right.

Michelle Long: 50:05

So take advantage of it. Yes, it is very great training set. Also, we need to continue focusing on advisory. Check this out, please. Digits. Go to Digits. Just Google it. Go. Train for your first five clients. For accounting firms, Bidgets takes AI and gives it to you for your accounting clients. Okay, your first five clients are free. What it does is it takes, and I was going to demo this and I'll show you in just a minute. You can use this to help you to do advisory services and give your clients recommendations on how they can improve their financial performance. Okay, this can help you significantly. And it's in a nice secure platform with their app. Okay digits If you've got to jump out of the top of the hour just write down digits go sign up for it The first five clients are free In November, we have Cashflow Mike is going to come on and he's got great content for you on advising your clients about cashflow, which is always a problem, especially now to make sure that you pay attention. We don't have the exact date yet, but he's coming on in November. And then also there's a lot of different third party apps out there that offer some training and certification for you to help you. With their apps and things like that. So all is not lost. We just have to make sure that we keep continuing education, that we keep training and learning new things and stuff like that so that we aren't obsolete. When these clients start going to Intuit. Instead of the find a pro advisor website to find help. Okay, so we don't want to all of a sudden say, you know What's happening to all my new clients? Where did

Dan DeLong: 51:55

somebody get somebody? And while you're looking for whatever it is that you're trying to share, somebody did mention in the chat, there are some limitations with the QuickBooks Live as it is, as it fits today. They only take cash basis versus accrual and those types of things. There is a feeling for what will be able to be done, directly within the within the product itself. I know the chatter on on some of the social media outlets is that they use QuickBooks Live as a great referral source because they end up talking to the people after they reach that threshold of what they can do. Right. And I often talk to people like I take off, I come in where Intuit leads off, right? If you're not getting what you need directly out of Intuit, that's where you, that's where you, that's where you come talk to me. Right. So those types of things are still going to be in existence. But, and I think what I think the cautionary tale that we're trying to talk about today is that it's only going to get better. The systems that are in place are only going to get better because a machine is a machine technology is a technology, it's going to have its glitches, but it's going to, it's going to get better. And things have gotten a lot better from, five, six years ago, because now there are things in place. So that things can get better

Michelle Long: 53:19

and just real quickly. Let me show you this and we'll talk more about chat GBT and some of these things with Heather next time, but you can use plugins such as Wolfram for math calculations and stuff. You can give chat GBT a PNL don't ever copy the company name or anything like that. Notice. I just have the the date. And the account names. Make sure there's no identifying information out there. No company identifying information out there. Only numbers. Okay, but then you can ask it. I asked to calculate the profitability margins and give me recommendations for improving their margins. Look at the type of things that this can do. So when you're talking about AI giving recommendations for improvement and. Things like this. It can already be doing advisory type of recommendation. So here's where we also could use. AI to help us with our advisory services. That's where Digits can help us as well. So we can supplement our AI knowledge our advisory knowledge with AI tools as well. All right, to make our job easier, faster, and more efficient. But you have to have that knowledge base because AI can hallucinate and give you bogus information. Digits is a great tool to help supplement and do it faster and more efficiently for you. So, I encourage you to check out Digits. Again, it's free for the first five clients. You've got to have that knowledge base though. So go do some of that training from Intuit. Sign up for that virtual conference and somebody said the dates were October 11th and 12th Instead of the 10th and 11th. So I apologize if I got the dates wrong. I was doing this late last night Sign up for the training even if you can't attend it live. You can watch the recordings later And also due to self paced training because that self paced training has a lot of things that are not available in the virtual conference, okay? And I don't want to be totally down on Intuit. Intuit is still a fabulous company. Intuit still supports us amazingly. They give us QBOA, they give us amazing tools like books review, the reclassified transactions. I mean, they still do amazing things for us. It's still an amazing company, but there are some things that are changing and some of those reviews, those referrals from the Find a Pro Advisor website may not be coming anymore. So we just need to be aware of that. And they are competing with us just like bench and pilot and things like that. Some of that stuff is changing. So we have to be changing as well. That's the nature of our industry. Our industry is always changing it. AI is changing it just like the dang PC changed it however many years ago. And everybody freaked out. Oh, my God, we're losing all of our clients because everybody's getting a computer and they can do it on their own. You know, things change. Our industry is changing just like it did then. This is a huge change, though. And it is changing. It's going to continue changing. We just have to keep changing right along with it. Yeah,

Dan DeLong: 56:35

if you've got a surfboard and you see the wave coming you can have an awesome ride. Into the shore here. So that, that's the thing is just making sure that, you've got the skills, you've got your wetsuit on, you've got your board is waxed. And you're ready to get ready to ride that wave into the shore. That's my analogy.

Michelle Long: 56:57

Yeah, this is one though, where it is really going to impact us. I think not today, not tomorrow, not even next year, but three to five years from now. If you just don't do anything and keep operating like you're operating. And you're planning to retire in three to five years. That's probably okay. But if you are like my son and you're like, I'm not going to say all of these, but because then that makes me old. But anyway, you probably, you have to change. You just have to, in my opinion. So I hope I light a fire under your behind and it gets you, realizing you've got to change, you have got to, if you've been dragging your feet on this stuff, you have to learn about AI and these tools start with digits. I I started hearing your eyes. It's an amazing tool. I wish I would've had time to demo it. Join Heather and I, and we're going to talk a little more about using ChatGBT and how you can use it for communications, for social media. I'll show you more how you can do that with the financials and stuff like that. So Heather and I are going to do that in two weeks.

Dan DeLong: 58:08

All right. Well, I thank you. Is there anything else that you wanted to to talk about? I did launch the poll while you were while we were talking there about where people sit. Today with regards to is the sky falling or are they well equipped? And I do see, a significant amount of folks that. That do say, feel like they are well equipped to embrace the change, which is pretty awesome. They see that this will affect their business, but they're not quite there yet. So time will tell. Right. And then this will not necessarily, the sky has not fallen yet but we foresee or, Michelle and I we foresee that this will definitely have an impact on the accounting profession and it will. It will need to be embraced or not necessarily embraced, but at least dealt with. So that you're able to, ride that wave or, take your surfboard and go somewhere else.

Michelle Long: 59:03

And that, yeah, and that's right. If some people may decide. Maybe it is time for a change and stuff. Anyway, yeah, so hopefully, if, hopefully this was informative to you and all that. And hopefully, it opens your eyes and stuff. And we do just have to wait and see, what's going to happen and where this is going. And. Stuff like that. Somebody asked if Intuit is going to charge more for this. At this time, it looks like they're just baking it into all of their products. Intuit is just for QuickBooks, for TurboTax, for MailChimp, and for Credit Karma. It doesn't look like they plan to charge more for it. But as you know, they increase the prices every single year. So I would anticipate that it just is an additional cost every year. As opposed to an add on, what do you think, dad?

Dan DeLong: 59:49

Well, I think once it gets to the point of I needed, I need to talk to an expert, right? And that's going to be where the, they're going to have that conversation with the QB live. Or into a full service live for TurboTax or what have you, anytime you have a human person, then there's going to be a cost involved because there's going to be a fee for that, right? So I think that's where they're hoping that things will go and maybe they're not driving it, but the more that they can automate, right? Just like anything else in your practice, the more that you can automate. The more scalable that, that will be become all across the board, right? They're going to have a win there for more subscriptions because, that they'll be able to their capacity to do that will be available. And then, when it comes to, okay, well, I need more help. Then that's where there will be a An increased fee I think

Michelle Long: 1:00:47

yes. Yeah So and somebody says awesome and scary at the same time It is because we just don't know what's going to happen in the future. It is awesome I mean some of these things like mail chimp that can really help these small businesses and that's what I said like about the third party apps and everything That helps the small businesses compete with the larger companies like they never could before. MailChimp is going to help some of these small businesses to have access and do things that they couldn't afford before. So that's awesome. And I think that's really great. And I love Intuit for bringing those things to these small businesses and even all this other stuff, being able to help these small businesses like they couldn't before. I love that Intuit is bringing this to these small businesses. I just hate that we're getting cut out in the process, that it hurts. So anyway, anything else, Dan? No,

Dan DeLong: 1:01:42

I think I think that about covered it today, So appreciate you, Michelle for sharing your perspective. As always. It's your history of helping the accounting industry and navigating some of these changes as they may seem scary is is fantastic. And I think that's a lot of people look to you for guidance. On, on how do I navigate this? This change as well. And this is a great session. I think it will have some it remains to be seen how this will, will affect. I saw somebody in the chat. There is a QB connected. They're going to be a riot. I don't know. Right. I would not advocate for that. But we're it's You know, like we saw last year when we were at QB Connect, some of these things that were announced were met with thundering silence because there was a little bit of a guarded guarded aspect to the way things were coming towards or being delegated I don't know, that's not the word I'm looking for, but directed towards towards the accounting profession, those that are in the accounting profession it'll be an interesting QB Connect for

Michelle Long: 1:02:45

sure. Thank you. Well, for the first time ever, I probably won't be there. Is it any wonder? Yeah.

Dan DeLong: 1:02:56

Anyway. We'll still hold out hope that you'll make it.

Michelle Long: 1:03:01

Yeah. It's still an exciting time to be an accounting professional. With all of these tools and all of these opportunities, it's still a great time to be an accounting professional and to be able to help these small businesses. So, I think it's great.

Dan DeLong: 1:03:15

All right. So next time, we're going to have Heather Satterly on to talk about how we can use some of these AI tools to your benefit as a, as an accounting professional. So look forward to having the three of us talk about that next time. And as always, we appreciate you joining us on the QB power and we'll see you next time.