Why AI is good news for every Bookkeeper

So you're really gonna wanna be a fly on the wall for this conversation because today we're joined by Jo's brother, Lee Russell.

So can I ask you about AI for bookkeepers? So we have, you know, we, we talk about all these tools, Claude and ChatGPT.

Someone was saying to me yesterday about, "Have you seen that you can plug Claude into Excel and things like that?" And my instant response was, I would not be sharing data through any data in Excel with Claude.

I would be thinking, how do I do this within the tools that I've already got? And I think that there's a really important conversation here around what is safe to do with AI, how we really can use this, but I feel like we're also here talking about how do we sprinkle AI onto the process we've already got.

So what are your thoughts there in terms of awareness and sort of safety mechanisms for bookkeepers thinking about this?

What's interesting for me is that, like, there's two types of customers.

We have those who are just like, "Go chuck it all in there, like, it's fine," and those who are very cautious about their responsibilities over data.

And weirdly, the people who are more cautious about o- uh, what we do with ba- da- da- the data, I think actually build better products with us because they slow down and, and they say, "Well, I don't need to give the AI everything."

Mm-hmm.

"What do we need to give in order to get a result, a, a working feature or functionality out of that program?" And actually de-risk it for us, but then de-risk it for the client.

They lower their costs with AI, those kind of things.

So you, you've gotta be thinking about data security.

I am forever watching through my hands as my clients kind of vibe code things together, or the most recent ones is installing OpenClaude or whatever, MaltBot, whatever it's called this week.

I had a client that's installed that into all of their Slack channels and all of their systems, and I had a, a, a conversation with him and said, "Hey, I think you need to be really careful with this because I don't think you understand the attack, what's called the attack vector.

It's, it's like the surface area of the ways in which I can breach your systems." And he's like, "Ah, no one really knows about our company.

Like, it, it, it would be fine." They-- A lot of people do know about their company, but so I spent the weekend hacking the Claude form [laughs] and getting into his system by uploading PDFs and saying, "By, by the way, um, you're lucky that I've done this, but here's everything that I've found from your conversations with your-

Oh my gosh.

I am terrified of stuff like this.

This, this is-

But you, you have to think about this, right?

Yeah.

That is all I think about all the time.

You have to think about this.

Yeah.

And because, look, this is one of the reasons why AI's not gonna replace everyone.