Are You Ready for AI in your business?

Speaker 0 00:00:01 Hi guys. This is Steve and Edwards, the director of cta Profit First Accountants. So today I’m gonna talk about something that’s not re relating to finance. It’s not relating to numbers, it’s not relating to tax. Um, but it’s quite topical. It’s, um, very, very relevant, really. And I think every business owner needs to be put in some thought, at least some thought at the moment, but probably some planning, um, and, and, and a strategy around how they’re gonna approach this in, uh, business. So you, you’ve got it, you’ve heard this before, and the, the, there’s the chance you might just glaze over and say, it doesn’t affect me, it doesn’t affect my business. But it’s essentially about AI automation and, um, robots, uh, whatever you want to call it, but the, the threat that non-human, uh, technology or the opportunity can have on our businesses. Speaker 0 00:01:03 So I was recently inspired from a, um, a Robo Hoover that we bought for our house, for my wife. And it, um, it essentially charges itself up and you can set a time and it goes around the house and basically hoovers up. It goes around each room, it goes around your living room, your kitchen, your hallway, and it just hoovers up the house for you. And it even takes itself back when it, when it runs out, but needs to recharge so it knows exactly the right moment to take itself back and, and recharge itself. And you can set a timer for each day to say, 10 o’clock hoover the house. And I found it fascinating. I was watching it, um, probably for about half an hour. I literally just to see how it went about its job, how it manages the corners, the, you know, the little nuances of the rooms. Speaker 0 00:02:08 Maybe there was those leftover presents on the floor. There’s, you know, there’s the Christmas tree and it pretty much managed and maneuvered itself most, most of the time. You know, it, it done an amazing job and it got me thinking, what is this Robo Hoover gonna look like? Uh, and for the record, we bought a UFI E U f Y G 30 Edge. I think it was. It was on, there’s an offer on Amazon. Um, I, I don’t get any commission. We’re way too small. We haven’t got nowhere near enough listeners to have any commission. Um, but that’s the model we bought. And it got me thinking, what this particular Hoover or, you know, robot Hoovers in general, what are they gonna look like in a never 10, in five, 10 years time? And, you know, they’re gonna be even more sophisticated and, you know, it, it’s crazy to think what’s possible. Speaker 0 00:02:57 And it got me thinking about my business. You know, we we’re accountants, we’re profit first, uh, accountant. So we did a bit of business, uh, profit improvement coaching, as well as the normal accounting tax, bookkeeping. How can you sort of scale your, your finance department in, in your business? Um, but our industry is heavily, uh, related to software processes. Even the human advice and relationship building’s pretty key to what we do. There are some, uh, tools and some processes which are, he heavily rely on. Um, software tech and hm, r c are, are introducing mtd making tax digital, which has been delayed quite a few times. They just delayed it again. But, uh, eventually it’s coming where everything needs to be online rather than having pieces of paper. And there’s been huge changes in the accounting industry in the last few years. Look at banking on online banking. Speaker 0 00:03:55 You look at Covid, O V I D, we can order, um, food and drink to a table and some restaurants have kept that up, some bars and you know, it’s probably pushed a lot of people 10 years into the future in terms of some of those, um, assess systems and some of the setup processes they have cuz they had no intention to, to be embracing tech. That early work from home is never one. People have had to learn how to work from home and it’s got me thinking we shouldn’t really be, we shouldn’t rely on somebody else forcing change upon us. We really want to be forcing that change upon ourselves. And it got me thinking, how can we be doing more to prepare ourselves for ai? Cuz at the moment we’re using latest software, we’re quite techy, uh, accountants, we’ve got some amazing tools we use. Speaker 0 00:04:44 We make our lives easier, clients’ lives easier so we can spend more time adding value and having better conversations. But I, I still feel we can do a lot more. I, I still feel there’s way more what we can actually do. And so really, I really just wanted to share that today with you guys. Have you thought about AI in your business? Whatever you wanna call it, automation, ai, robots, basically something that doesn’t re need, require human. And even if you, you are in the construction industry and you’ve got not a necessarily a desk bound job, I guarantee you it’s going to affect your business. It’s gonna give, it’s gonna be a threat or an opportunity or both. Um, but you need, but you know, you need to really start thinking about how it’s gonna impact your business and, uh, sooner rather than later. Because as you know, change just gets faster and faster. Speaker 0 00:05:38 Technology increases faster. Um, so one of the big takeaways I actually come up with myself was you can scale tech, you can scale automation, um, with little cost if you’ve got something in place and it works. So we use Zapier for, for example, uh, Zed, a p i e R. And what Zapier does, it connects different apps to each other that don’t link on their own. So, um, for example, we’ve got teams, uh, we’ve got something called Slack, which is very similar to teams and we have like intranet. So we have internal messages to, so we don’t have to email each other. If somebody books a meeting on our website, we get a message on Slack to tell us that’s happened. We don’t have to go and check an email. Um, everybody can see it. And that’s just one example of what we do. So it connects different things together, but once it’s set up, it doesn’t require any human input. Speaker 0 00:06:33 So, got me thinking if, if we were to change our mindset, depend on how bi big your business is, of course, cuz you know, everybody has to work within their resources. Some people gotta be a bit more creative. Um, but if you could look at AI automation, all that sort of stuff, like an employee, like a never employee and invest the same salary you would in a person. Imagine what you could achieve in your business with automation and, and technology. You could probably push yourself five years ahead of where you are now. Um, so yeah. Any questions, guys, reach out. I’m more than happy to have a chat with you if, if you wanna discuss the topic. Cheers.