What's Next For Accounting? - Issue #85
Jason Staats
June 01, 2023
💡Chatting With Big PDFs
Talk in the US lately has been centered on the Fiscal Responsibility Act. Everyone has opinions about it, but few have read it. AI to the rescue!
There are a couple PDF plugins for ChatGPT right now - I’m having good luck with “AskYourPDF”. If you’re a ChatGPT Plus user ($20/mo), all you need to do is add the plugin to a conversation, no signup required.
I point it to the URL of a PDF of the bill, and ask it to outline anything that may be relevant to my tax clients:
#4 mentioned IRS funding so I got angry and asked for more information:
In testing, the responses have been very accurate. GPT-4 does a much better job of sticking to a specific context & not hallucinating.
These apps today will work best with narrative text. Assume it will generally be blind to tables & worksheets, and its why it works well on narrative text, but less so on something visual. For example a tax return, semantically, makes no sense. But a transcript, or anything that’s just text is suited for this.
Long-term, enriched context will make this more powerful. For example, an IRS publication that’s augmented with a semantic explanation of a worksheet. Or a service that takes a tax return PDF, and layers in semantic explanations of the amounts in each field.
💎This Week's Sponsor
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📅 This Week
I’m at AICPA Engage next week! I have two talks on Monday, and the AI keynote at the end of the day Tuesday. If you’re there, please come heckle with inside jokes to make other attendees uncomfortable
The story of leaving my firm, and how to do hard things
Building on last week’s nerdery, chain-of-thought prompting, OpenAI shared how they’re now training this into the model to encourage responses to do chain-of-thought by default, and it’s yielding big math improvements
An attorney got in trouble for using ChatGPT - get ready to hear this cautionary tale 100 times
A new-age web-based PDF markup app - actually looks pretty cool
Lorilyn Wilson re-launched her content for accounting firms service
Another AI legal service - I’m seeing much more AI innovation around legal than what we do 🤔
From OpenAI, the most informed folks re: what’s to come: “Given the picture as we see it now, it’s conceivable that within the next ten years, AI systems will exceed expert skill level in most domains”
From the daily pod this week: PTO policies, are some people unfit to run accounting firms, “loyalty”, building a firm optimized for a sale, and video deliveries
😍From The Community
My private peer networking community Realize for firm leaders, now capped at 500 members.
Upcoming Events:
06/01 🐠 EOS-Ish - Scorecards with Rachel Fisch
06/06 💘 Swiping Right - Tech & Client Education with Kellie Parks
06/07 🥳 AICPA Engage - Realize Cabana Party with Jason Staats
06/20 💻 Demo Day - Copilot with Jason Staats
06/20 🐠 EOS-Ish - Where To Go From Here with Rachel Fisch
06/21 🏫 Hall Pass - Sales System with Brandon Hall
06/21 🎤 Who Runs The World - “Feelin’ good as hell” with Twyla Verhelst
06/26 🕸️ Into The Chadiverse with Chad Davis
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