What's Next For Accounting? - Issue #102

Author

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

  • 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.

▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▯▯▯▯▯▯▯ 349/500 members