My Hot Tech This Month

ChatGPT

Like most of the tech & business world at large, I have been amazed and obsessed with the release of ChatGPT at the start of the year and have been experimenting with it a lot over the last two months.

I don’t plan to spend much time on this here as it’s hard to log on to Twitter without seeing a hundred “here is how to get the most out of ChatGPT” posts, but I am conscious of the echo chamber I operate within. So if you haven’t yet, check it out (it’s free, although I signed up for the paid sub at £20 pm) and see how it might assist you in certain tasks.

As most commentators point out, the key is to ask it the right questions. Feed the prompt with plenty of background information and ask very specific questions. I have been using it to help with our SEO, brainstorm titles for marketing content and help me outline the structure of larger content and presentations. (P.S. not in this newsletter. This is all me, as I am sure you can tell by the complete lack of respect for “proper” writing styles haha). These are just a small handful of my use cases.

Coda

I have been a massive fan of Coda for a few months. It falls into the no-code category of Tech, which appeals to me as a wannabee coder in another life.

Coda is a super powerful all-in-one doc. We have docs to store all of our processes and playbooks. These are super easy for the wider distributed team to interact with and keep up to date.

We now run all our projects through Coda, switching over from Asana.

We also use it as a central hub for reporting. It has a strong formula editor built in, which can take a bit of getting used to, but gives you complete flexibility over tables and dashboards.

Coda is at the heart of our business, but I wanted to talk about it now because of the Ai Alpha trial they are running. It looks genuinely mindblowing. It acts as a powerful assistant within our docs, hugely speeding up the creation of new tables, formulas and other pages. This is how Ai should be used!

Fireflies.ai

Following a friend’s recommendation, one of the newest pieces of Tech in my stack is fireflies.ai. This helps to automate my meeting notes. It records an audio (video on a higher paid plan) of my zoom meetings and creates a complete written transcription and a summary of the conversation. It also has cool extra features like analysing the text for suggested follow-up actions.

They have now added an Ai chatbot that you can use to help with follow-up actions, like drafting emails.

I have used this for a handful of meetings this month and found it does help. I also shared the link with the other attendees, and their feedback was very positive.

The accuracy is not quite there yet, so you need to review and tweak the summary, but still a helpful tool.

Accounting Tech Developments

Like the broader tech industry, the landscape for Tech within the accounting and finance space, particularly for smaller businesses, has been positioning itself for significant change.

There has been a massive amount of Private Equity money floating around in the U.K. sector, and combined with some of the Industry Stalwarts, like IRIS & Sage, who have been buying best-in-breed businesses to widen their ecosystem, we have seen a large number of Mergers & Acquisitions - something which will probably carry on through this year.

The accounting world has been relatively slow on the uptake of Ai, with most of the focus on its ability to help with admin, marketing, and perhaps coding, but it is still very early!

Only this month, we saw Fluidly, one of the earliest adopters of Ai based cashflow forecasting, close its doors.

My chat with Alex (Xero U.K. MD) showed that whilst they are intrigued and closely monitor developments, they didn’t yet have any huge rushed plans to embed Ai deeply. They have, of course, been using light touch Ai & machine learning in the product for a while, helping you to code bank transactions, for example. One of the potential directions he saw Ai helping the product was around customer support, more intelligent, more human chatbots, pre-empting what resources you might need access to before you know you need the help etc. Interesting little features but nothing mindblowing (yet).

At Vaulta, we have a clear plan where we think Ai can significantly add value. Vaulta provides key financial insights through beautiful dashboards to small businesses and the accountants who advise them. We will use Ai to analyse the business’s data and create talking points for the accountant to pick up on adding their expertise and then share those insights with small businesses. This will make the experience quicker for the accountant and extremely valuable for the small business.

Very few, if any, small businesses owners are about to trust an Ai bot to provide definitive accounting or business advice relevant to them (at least not yet), but where it can be powerful is in combination with a Human expert who can check the accuracy & relevancy and use the Human skills of communications around Emotional Intelligence, Contextual Understanding, Empathy, relationship building etc.

I will be fascinated to see what others in our space will do over the course of this year.

Some are scared by the pace of progression of Ai, and some couldn’t give a damn...

I am firmly in the camp of absolutely fascinated and consider myself very lucky to be experiencing a seismic shift in Tech and business and the wider world over the next two years. Strap yourself in!