Beyond the Prompt: Ellen Choi on Firm-Wide AI Enablement

Amazing.

Thank you.

And, and, Do you find that when you approach these firms, what's the percentage of them actually excited and wanting to embrace AI? Because sometimes when you think of accounting firms, you think of the stereotypical kind of stuffy, not wanting to change.

But I think that's changing.

Yeah.

So I would say that we've been all on this – I divide the AI times into pre-chat GPT and post-chat GPT, right? I mean, we've been talking about AI, you know, for a long time, but really like post-chat GPT and open AI, that's when things really took off in terms of the progression of the interest and adoption and, you know, how AI is actually integrated into our work.

So, you know, we've seen kind of the step every single year in terms of more accountants Understanding this is a way of the future.

They experiment on it in their personal lives and they understand the impact and the potential on the work front.

So a lot of experimentation.

And it's very uneven in the sense that you have people that are very curious and innovative all the way down to entrepreneurs.

you know, people that you have to kick out that are kicking and screaming.

And, you know, you have to kind of drag along in terms of going into the new age, like firms have people of all spectrum.

So, you know, we see this all the time.

Right.

But what I will say is, you know, last year there was a lot of firms at least pockets of people in experimentation mode, much more, hey, let's just get some co-pilot license and just kind of see how this works.

Let's actually try this other vendor.

Let's actually test some pilots.

What I'm seeing this year is a conversation shifting yet again to really firms understanding that AI, it's no longer optional.

Like, you know, if you want to thrive and succeed and survive into the future, adopting AI, you know, that's imperative.

And the conversation is actually even shifting from are you using AI to how are you using AI, right? Because, you know, people are understanding.

I mean, there's a massive difference between using AI I'm co-pilot for summarizing documents and, you know, using co-pilot to do some valuation analysis that used to take two days and you collapse it into two hours, right? Like people are trying to understand there's actually much more depth of how you use AI.

So like where I'm starting to see the field kind of separate again, you know, from that perspective and the firms that really get it, like they're the ones that are making the systematic progress and they, they are excited.

Of course, There's a lot of security, data, compliance concerns that are always happening, and there should be.

These are, you know, really big problems, but they're all solvable problems.

So, you know, even the accountants who are forging ahead and who are not necessarily the most... know forward in terms of you know because of all these issues they understand that there are solutions out there and the best way to just kind of get going is to figure out the guard rails and understand what can be done within those parameters so yeah it's actually really exciting