2022 was a busy year for me. I traveled a lot. I worked a lot, and I fell behind A LOT. I constantly felt like I would never catch up. Well, I vowed not to have this same overwhelming feeling going into the new year. 2023 is the year of playing offense and delivering better customer service to my customers because I know they have not gotten the best version of me and my team over the past year.
Knowing that this is a priority but I’m still left with the same amount of time I had last year I had to take a moment to lean into new technology to help automate a bit more or just save me those precious minutes that we all know can add up on those repetitive and mundane tasks. So I’m turning to ChatGPT.
This AI generator is all the rage. Its presence has EXPLODED across the internet over the past month and half, so I wanted to test it to see how it could help me deliver my promises better this year.
I started testing this software out to see how it would be beneficial to help me reclaim my time. And the main thing it’s going to help me do is write content faster.
Writing content is a task that has to be done. From the monthly blog posts (that I never seem to squeeze in), to client emails and updates, I just never seem to have enough time in my day to write consistently.
I asked ChatGPT to help me write a few emails I can use as templates and personalize for my customers. This prompt has already allowed me to schedule my tax season email reminders through my email marketing system this season:
In a little over a minute, I had 3 emails I could tweak and schedule to send before tax season even starts. Watch how fast this thing generates copy:
After the excitement of seeing how my very first prompt worked, I asked it to write a 1,000-word blog post based on a question I received from a potential client this year:
Within 2 minutes, I have a working blog post. Now all I need to do is edit and personalize this post to ensure that it sounds more like me. A blog post of this word count generally takes me an hour to write and around 30 minutes to edit. I just regained about 60 minutes back in my day that I can use for more meaningful work, like meeting with my clients.
I’m just scratching the surface with this AI software. I’ve seen other colleagues like Alicyn McLeod of Atlanta Tax use ChatGPT to write a comfort letter.
Or Jason Staats of Realize using it to transform ugly CSV data into a workable format.
The possibilities are endless. And as more and more companies began to set up native integrations with ChatGPT I can only imagine what a native integration within QuickBooks would look like. I’m just imagining how we can streamline and automate our advisory conversations with clients if we connect this platform to QuickBooks. I’m dreaming that the software could have it alert you instantaneously if your client pays a new vendor for an expense coded to a service line item and ask you to request a W-9, or to quickly identify if there are statistically inconsistent transactions occurring in the bank account in order to stave off theft and embezzlement. What would you dream up if this integration was live today?
As exciting as this technology is, I have to give a disclaimer. This is a public platform! Don’t forget about security when using this technology – especially when dealing with confidential and secure client data. Also, this technology isn’t perfect yet. It’s still learning and developing. So please don’t ask it to do something and expect near perfect results.
It even warns you of this when you sign up.
So what else am I going to use it for? Well, I promised to record more videos and as you may have guessed, ChatGPT has helped me find topics, has written outlines and scripts and has even injected some style into the scripting.
I’m also going to use it to help me learn Google Sheets. I typically use Excel but as I get more and more data auto-generating into Sheets, I need to learn how to write formulas quickly and again save myself some time.
I do love this time of year because I get so excited about the future and the possibilities of emerging technology, and this AI generator is really exciting to me. I can’t wait to see how it gets more integrated in our lives over the next 12 months. Even the art I used for this post was generated by AI. How impressive is that?
I know that the industry has been screaming that the bots are coming for our jobs for years, but they haven’t arrived yet. And when they get here, I’m really looking to leverage them so I can spend more time on the work I enjoy and that uses my brain to its fullest capacity.
The idea should be that machine learning will enhance our accounting capabilities. And this should excite our industry, not make it fearful of the tech. The goal should be to help us be less busy and more productive. I don’t know about you, but I would love to take an extra week of vacation instead of an extra few days during the tax season. And I’m hoping that AI is going to help me do so in the not-so-distant future.
This post is part of a paid partnership with Intuit.
