What's Next For Accounting? - Issue #95
Jason Staats
August 10, 2023
💡 An AI Agent In Your Browser
Agents are the most exciting short-term application of AI. Bigger than ChatGPT, more important than writing emails like a pirate, agents actually do the work.
And this tool is the best general-use agent we’ve seen yet:
Previously we’ve discussed Pixie’s agent that fetches things for you from Xero, and why agents are likely the solution to the awful state of US tax software.
But in my opinion the best general use agent today is Hyperwrite’s Personal Assistant.
Click the Chrome extension to pull up a chat dialog on the right
Ask it to do something on the current page of your browser
It opens a background Chrome tab and does its best to complete the task as requested, clicking around & typing as necessary
The more specific instructions you give it the better, but it’s impressively good at reading between the lines as well.
Like ChatGPT this is a general tool - most exciting will be domain-specific applications of this tech. An agent optimized for QBO, for Xero, etc.
Tasks I’ve used it for in the past few weeks:
Completing a standard, repeatable set of tasks in QBO
Looping through all my QBO company files to check something, for example to check for broken bank feeds
On a department of revenue site, looping through all the accounts I have access to & exporting payment information
Clicking the OK button a kajillion times on the Xero reconciliation page
It isn’t pure magic. It breaks, it’s kinda slow, and high-volume tasks get expensive since it’s using GPT-4 to instruct it. But it’s absolutely been worthwhile for me in a number of situations, and gets me EXTREMELY excited for domain-specific agents I can assign recurring work to.
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📅 This Week
The biggest tech issue I see with most small (<100 EE) firms is they don’t have the right core system in place - I developed a list of where to start with your small firm tech stack
Next Tuesday Blake Olives & I will talk AI
I explored how to put ego to work in firm-running
A couple weeks back we talked about ChatGPT’s new Custom Instructions - these are now available for all ChatGPT users, not just GPT Plus
Hector Garcia’s RightTool app now uses GPT to figure out what a transaction is
A bunch of ideas for how to get people to promote your firm
Digits’ QBO chat assistant now supports follow-up questions, rather than just a single Q&A
You can now modify your website’s robot.txt file to prevent OpenAI from scraping it to train GPT-4 and GPT-5, but tbd whether that’s a good idea as LLMs have taken a bite out of SEO
The controversy surrounding Zoom’s AI privacy policy is a spooky reminder of how valuable your conversations are, yet most of us still don’t capture them 🫠 I shared why I think we should be using AI meeting assistants
Botkeeper announced an upcoming tech-only AI bookkeeping assistant
😍From The Community
My private peer networking community Realize for firm leaders, now capped at 500 members. We’ll be permanently raising the price for new members in a couple weeks.
08/10 💻 Demo Day - Firm360 with Jason Staats
08/11 💻 Demo Day - Client Hub with Jason Staats
08/14 💻 Demo Day - Dryrun with Jason Staats
08/15 💘 Swiping Right - Disengagement Part 1 with Kellie Parks
08/16 💻 Demo Day - Karbon with Jake Kessenich
08/23 🌴 Take A Step Back with Geraldine Carter
08/24 🥸 Role Play - Match Made in Heaven with Nayo Carter-Gray
▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯ 335/500 members