Your Accounting Firm is NOT behind on AI

I was listening to Jason on Accounting firms youtube podcase found here. He was interviewing Chad Davis who owns a 60-person firm which manages AI adoption through fiscally responsible, tiered access and a gradual approach: There was three key points he referenced:

1. Low Tech Spend: The firm maintains an "insanely low" tech spend, ranging between 1.8% and 3% of revenue, which is significantly below the typical industry average of 4% to 5%. Davis notes they are "very fiscally responsible".

2. Tiered Tool Access: Access to premium Large Language Models (LLMs) is controlled and selective. While the entire firm uses Gemini (as they are a Google firm), only about 10 people (out of 60) have the more advanced ChatGPT Teams plan, typically those at the management level handling sensitive projects.

3. Non-Mandatory Adoption: The firm focuses on letting the team "move up together" and does not force AI usage, prioritizing the employees' meaningful life outside of work. They recognize that the general uptake on daily AI use is still "pretty average" among staff who are not power users

What this tells you is that your firm IS NOT behind. The noise from most YouTubers is that if you are not doing it you are behind, you will go out of business. Most claiming how big their community is and trying to sell you something.

Chad brings AI is the real deal. He is not selling you something - he is providing a blueprint and his business is the example. Two points:

1. AI adoption need to be implemented smartly. Listen to the interview if you have time but it was affirming to hear a real story of how AI is being implemented.

2. Not every use case is an AI use case. Many times it is about automation. There is a difference.

Tech Stack

Firm-Wide AI Base: The entire 60-person firm uses Gemini.

• Premium AI: They provide the advanced ChatGPT Teams plan to only about 10 people at the management level. Chad, as a power user, personally pays for premium access to Claude and OpenAI.

• Automation Infrastructure: The firm runs over 400 automations using external tools like Zapier and Make.

• Custom Proposal System: Their proposal process leverages Google Sheets (containing 250 data points and indexed fields) and Google App Script to create proposal documents in Google Docs.

• Proposal Delivery: They use Anchor because it offers an API for creating and sending proposals