But that is just another place where a sol- smaller firm can, can benefit.

Yeah, 100%.

Uh, I'm gonna go back to your question of how do we do it right and how do we do it wrong.

There are so many videos out there of people on YouTube and influencers and people going, "I just did this, and look." What we didn't see is how much time did it take him to get there.

And secondly, they know where to plug the pieces.

So, like, why do I pay a plumber 200 bucks an hour to come in and, you know, do what he does? 'Cause I don't know where everything needs to go.

So you pay for that expertise.

[laughs]

So where do you typically start? If you have a room filled with people of different functions, different niche specialties, where do you begin to kind of get them all seeing the potential or, like you said, the use case that starts to unlock some enthusiasm for AI? Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, essentially, you talk about where your data is located.

And in any firm at any given point in time, I don't care what department you're in, you're going to have a spider web full of information and it's not consolidated.

In order to take advantage of AI, you have to talk about consolidating, cleaning your data, keeping a better system in place in order for you to kind of move that data into the AI system.

It's garbage in, garbage out.

If it's over here and over here and over here, how are you going to get the AI to read these different places? The first thing you always start with is, okay, where's your data? Start with security and then let's start to consolidate.

Is that a literal call with an AI on the other end, or what are they actually doing?

You know, a lot of people wanna know where the profession stands because they want to know where they stand in relationship to the profession, right? Are they behind? Are they ahead? Or are they grossly behind? Um, have they been negligent to the topic at all? Um, so what, what are you seeing? Where, where does the profession actually stand as we record this in July 2026? And for those that are not where they need to be to that benchmark, what's holding them back?

Yeah, great question.

You know, I, I always tell people when I start my boot camp, "You are exactly right where you need to be today," right? Don't measure yourself against another firm or where the industry is.

And I know that's hard, and that's not exactly what we're trying to figure out here.

But the thing is, is accountants just came out of their April 15th shells, right? The entire industry.

And they opened up and they said, "Wow, there's this thing called AI." But it had been going on two to three years before that.

The marketing and the sales and the, you know, a- all of these other industries have really adopted a lot faster than accountants.

All right? How is AI creating that capacity? How are, more importantly, accountants responding when they get that capacity? Are you seeing them use it to elevate?