I spent a few days last week at the Digital Accountancy Show. Loads of fun, you might think – well, it was for me!
5,000 accountants in attendance. Eight stages, all packed full of talks and over 100 exhibitors to let me know all the new techie stuff in the accountancy world. And lots of the best techie stuff in the accountancy world is also the best techie stuff across all businesses.
And, much as at the last two events, one of the main topics was AI, and how we use that to make us more efficient and to help our clients better.
We’re huge fans of AI at JDA, and I thought it might be helpful to let you know about my current three favourite AI tools. So, what are they?
Firstly – Fireflies.ai.
What do I use it for? It sits in on all of my online meetings – Zoom, Teams or Google Meets – to record and transcribe the meeting. It then summarises the meeting, with action points. And there’s an app you can use to record face-to-face meetings.
Why is it so good? It saves me having to take notes! I can pay full attention without frantically scribbling away and trying to keep up. And I have the full video and transcript if needed. There are plenty of alternative apps – Fathom, Otter, and Zoom/Teams have their own – but I’ve found Fireflies the best…so far.
Next – Epiphany.
What do I use it for? Have you ever been out and about and had a brilliant idea? Or remembered something you need to do? Epiphany is an app that sits on my phone and Apple Watch and, whenever I have one of my many genius ideas, I just tap the app, speak into it, and it drops me an email with the full text and a summary. Or it can send to one of my team if I’m delegating (again). If you use Slack or Notion or similar tools, it can create a task in there.
Why is it so good? It’s really, really simple to use. And I also now use it as my main dictation tool for blogs, etc – you can dictate for up to 20 minutes at a time and I’m finding it more accurate than the other dictation tools I’ve used. When I dropped myself a little message to remind me to update my fantasy league team a couple of weeks ago, it managed to spell Mo Salah, Luis Diaz, and Trent Alexander-Arnold all 100% correctly!
And the third one, of course, is the daddy of them all – ChatGPT
What do I use it for? It’s quicker to tell you what I don’t use ChatGPT for. I use it for practically everything. Within the business, we use it for drafting blogs and social media posts – either from scratch or rewriting the blogs our tax guys write into our tone of voice. We have recurring tasks – it sends us the top accounts/tax stories every week. We use it to find potential prospects we want to approach. When we arrange a meeting with a prospect, we use ChatGPT to research them. We use it to create images and infographics. We use it to help with Excel – formulas, macros or formatting. And, of course, it’s great for some of those tricky tax questions! As with everything, it needs checking – it’s not perfect, but it is brilliant and quick to get your first draft.
Why’s it so good? I do think it’s really upped its game recently with the addition of Deep Research – the quality and depth of thought given to answers is superb. And that can include putting in a lot of your own docs/info and using it to analyse/find answers, or put together a system for delivery of a service. A great start is simply asking how it can help you make your business more efficient and deliver a better product/service – it will ask you some questions and then come up with really detailed ways it can help. (And it’s well worth paying for the Team plan to get its best models and also full data protection.)
So – those are my favourite three at the moment. And I’ve avoided using any ChatGPT-created images of me as footballer/jedi knight/superhero. (But, of course I’ve created them!)
What AI tools are you using?
See you next week
Jon