What's Next For Accounting? - Issue #108
Jason Staats
November 09, 2023
💡OpenAI Announces Custom GPTs!
In a big week of AI announcements, OpenAI rolled out custom GPTs that can be developed by anyone, even normies like us.
Here's how they work, and potential use-cases for accountants:
As you're creating a new GPT a bot guides you through the intended use case, asking questions like:
What would you like to make?
What topics should the bot emphasize?
What topics should it avoid?
It'll help you create a name for it, it'll generate an image for it, even create suggested questions the user sees when it loads up the bot.
Enable or disable features like web browsing, image generation & code interpreter in the bot. But most importantly, you can embed knowledge into it. Upload files and it'll use that knowledge when interacting with users.
To be clear, this is something normies can do, no dev skills required. But... devs can take it even further. Check out this wild example from Zapier, asking ChatGPT "What's on my schedule for today?" and it responds with a list of meetings.
Later she simply says "let Sam know I gtg" and it works out it should DM Sam in Slack. This is achieved via "custom actions", which looks to be a beefed up version of function calling.
A few ideas for how you could use this:
A GPT for a piece of legislation
A GPT for a body of BOI context + your personal commentary on the state of things
A GPT that contains all the blog posts you've ever written
A GPT with the transcripts from your podcasts or videos
It's a step toward making GPT more personal to you, and connecting it with the other apps you use.
OpenAI announced a pile of other stuff this week as well, we ran through it on yesterday’s daily podcast.
💎This Week's Sponsor
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📅 This Week
I’m at the National Tax Conference in DC Monday and QB Connect on Tues & Wed, don’t be a stranger if you’re there!
The first custom GPT I made was a legacy accountant and it is so accurate it’s shocking
Black Ore raises $60M to launch “Tax Autopilot, offering autonomous tax-prep for CPAs and Accounting Firms”
Using the new GPT-4 vision model, here’s an AI agent that can see your entire desktop, navigating around and completing tasks for you. It’s an exciting concept we’ve been talking about since the launch of GPT-4 in March, and this week developers got access to the vision model via the API. Expect to see a lot of agents like this start kicking off
Patrick Dichter shared the retention metrics of his last 3 accounting firm acquisitions, ranging from 105% to 79% - I had a great chat with Patrick recently on my podcast about his path from non-accountant to firm-buyer
I went on The Modern Accountant Pod discussing my journey from accountant to creator
Elon Musk’s AI company launched their first model Grok, with an interesting approach to branching conversations and vulgarity
😍From The Community
My private peer networking community Realize for firm leaders, now capped at 500 members.
11/17 🏫 Hall Pass - Live Coaching with Brandon Hall
11/21 💘 Setting Client Expectations & Boundaries with Kellie Parks
11/27 🕸️ Into The Chadiverse with Chad Davis
11/29 💻 Demo Day - FinOptimal (Accruer) with Jason Staats
12/01 📃 Mastermind Group Signups Open
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