What's Next For Accounting? - Issue #102
Jason Staats
September 29, 2023
Programming note: The cutoff to sign up for my accountant community Realize and join a mastermind this quarter is tomorrow. Lots of cool stuff in there, Brandon Hall, Kellie Parks, Geraldine Carter, Chad Davis and myself are all running live sessions in the next month. We’re doing user meetups for Canopy, TaxDome & Keeper. You get no-cost access to coaches, a no-code developer, an RPA developer, a developer developer. It’s a progressive group of firm-runners and also how I make money.
Windows Copilot is Live 🎉
An AI assistant built directly into windows:
It began rolling out Tuesday in a Windows update and is the first step toward some really exciting automation unlocks for accountants. Here’s what it does so far:
You hit Windows key + C to summon it, or just leave it open on the right
It does everything Bing chat does (GPT-4ish + browsing)
Local system settings (turn dark mode on)
“Reorganize my windows” will put everything into a nice grid
Summarize some text that’s on-screen
Explain some text that’s on-screen
Rewrite some text that’s on-screen
Security note: It’s unclear whether Windows Copilot will use Microsoft’s secure chat service, “Bing Chat Enterprise” (BCE). BCE is the service MS says you can chuck sensitive data into, doesn’t train the model etc, and today virtually everyone on a MS biz plan (even if not enterprise) should have access to it. You’ll know you’re using it when there’s a green “Secured” label at the top of your chat experience. Be mindful of this when asking Windows Copilot to perform tasks related to sensitive info on-screen.
This lays the groundwork for some extremely exciting future developments, including plugins to pull in data from your favorite apps, and AI agent functionality to click & type on your screen 🤯
It’s something we’ve been talking about for a while now on the daily podcast, and this week we explored whether this changes what we need now from our accounting ecosystem partners.
💎This Week's Sponsor
Have a product or job opening to advertise? Reply to this email for more info.
📅 This Week
I layed out what the accounting AI landscape is going to look like over the next 24 months
Hector Garcia & Ron Baker share their take on AI’s impact on accounting
A wild week of AI announcements follows 👇
In the same Windows update we also got:
An improved snipping tool that will redact sensitive info 🏆🏆
A new & improved version of Outlook
The biggest upgrade to Paint in decades
We’ll dive deeper on this soon, but massive announcement Microsoft 365 Copilot will go live 11/01, on the heels of Google shipping this functionality last week.
OpenAI announced GPT-4V, the long-awaiting image process capabilities of GPT-4 and early impressions are wild. Access is rolling out over the next couple weeks and we’ll do a deep dive once I get my hands on it
They also rolled out voice support on desktop, iOS and Android apps
And re-launched a better version of their browsing model, to bridge the gap between the September 2021 training cutoff and today
Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic, the folks behind Claude, as all the big bois have now hitched their wagon to a big AI player
😍From The Community
My private peer networking community Realize for firm leaders, now capped at 500 members.
09/29 🏫 Hall Pass - Live Coaching with Brandon Hall
10/09 💻 Demo Day - Anchor with Jason Staats
10/10 🌴 Take A Step Back with Geraldine Carter
10/13 💻 Demo Day - Settle with Jason Staats
10/17 💘 Swiping Right - Creating a Sweetheart Client Profile with Kellie Parks
10/23 🕸️ Into The Chadiverse with Chad Davis
▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▯▯▯▯▯▯▯ 349/500 members