AI Is Coming For You!

Artificial Intelligence is the new buzzword in business. Today there is a story in every newsfeed about the power this new technology has to reshape our world.

Many are concerned that AI will lead to massive job losses and ultimately hurt our economy. So is AI the next new thing, a tech bubble, or a job killer?

Today's show will share our insights and where AI may help, or hurt, your business. Stay tuned!

Be sure to like, share, and subscribe.

[00:00:00.00] - Alice

Hello. Welcome to Books in the Biz, a podcast that looks at both the financial and operational sides of success. Please welcome our hosts, Dan Paulson and Richard Veltre. Dan is the CEO of Envision Development International, and he works with leaders to increase sales and profits through great cultures with solid operations. Rich is CEO of the Veltre Group and a financial strategist working with companies to manage their money more effectively. Now on to the podcast.

[00:00:44.20] - Dan Paulson

Hello, and welcome to Book's in the Biz. We are back for another exciting episode, Or Are We? Rich, is that really you?

[00:00:52.07] - Rich Veltre

It's me. It's me.

[00:00:53.17] - Dan Paulson

It's really you? I guess it's really me, too. Because now we got to start asking that question. I don't know if you've I've seen some of the AI videos out there, but it's getting pretty hard to tell what's real and what's not, isn't it?

[00:01:08.22] - Rich Veltre

It's very hard to tell. And some of it, I think, is just playful. People out there trying to figure out how much they can do without people figuring it out. But I've seen all the videos. It is a little scary how good they are.

[00:01:27.13] - Dan Paulson

I mean, it used to be somebody would I have six fingers and three eyes, so stuff popped out. But they've really gotten to where things blend well, and it's getting tougher to tell. I actually had a... And this is one of those funny, entertaining things. I had a client that's an orthodontist, and he had sent out a video on Facebook that he had done through AI. So he had found this app or this program, and I was impressed. I mean, you could tell Because AI still isn't real good at facial texture sometimes, or hair or whatever. So there's still a few things that if you look at, if the hair is too perfect and the skin tone is just too right, you know that Probably not really that individual. But that leads into our conversation today, because you and I have been talking about AI. We've had a couple other discussions. I think we've even had some guests on who probably are a little bit more AI expert than we are. But the thing that I think we're both hearing is that it's the end of the world, and nobody's going to have a job in the next 10 years.

[00:02:38.06] - Dan Paulson

And I think we're just here to talk about, is that really going to be the case or not? And I'm not going to lead much into it other than, how is AI affecting the world of finance or of accounting? We've touched a little bit on, but maybe you can go into some more depth of what's going on there.

[00:03:06.01] - Rich Veltre

Okay, so it's a little bit of a balloon, but I would tell you that I look at things in three sections. I look at it in the bookkeeping type section, and I look at it in the CFO type section, and then there's both accounting and financial planning analysis underneath that. And the place that's talking the most about AI is in the bookkeeping side. But I'm looking at it and going, but they're not actually doing anything. And the reason I say that is at my own risk, I'm going to throw out there the fact that, Quickbooks has sent all kinds of notices to everybody because there's a lot of people in the US who use Quickbooks for their accounting and their bookkeeping. They've sent out all these messages that we're now AI enhanced. What does that mean? Because when I look at it, I got a nice new user interface, but it's the same QuickBooks. The system still goes back to how have you been actually tracking your expenses. If you're paying Johnny's automotive, it goes to auto expense automatically because that's how you've always done it. So the computer is just basically saying, well, that's what they've always done.

[00:04:26.15] - Rich Veltre

So we're going to do the same thing. And everybody says, oh, look, AI. It's great. They've had it for 20 years. So it's not AI. Stop telling everybody you're losing your jobs because we're now doing it. You're doing the same thing you did for the last 20 years. And there's my first challenge for that area. Because if bookkeeping was going away, and everybody was going to lose their jobs, why are all these people overseas coming to me saying, We'll do your bookkeeping for you. Are you really telling me that you're trying Once you get into an industry that you're telling me is going away because the computers are taking over, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Then you get to the CFO job, and you're sitting there saying, well, that means that every company has one CFO, and other than normal attrition, you shouldn't try to get that job because eventually it's going to get taken over by a computer. I don't think so because the CFO has to train the computer to do its job, and it's going to train the job as it is Now, it's not necessarily going to train how it's going or where they plan for it to go.

[00:05:35.26] - Rich Veltre

So there's a piece missing there. Now, I see some of the analysis part as being a challenge because I think AI probably could do a lot in this area, but not the way that they're advertising. I think in the middle where the people are doing the analysis, I think they can speed that up, which means if you've got a company that's of a larger size and you have 10 analysts, and now the computer helped you that you only need five, then yes, there's an efficiency factor that could take five people out of that big job. So there's a challenge I see in the middle of people putting their heads against this and saying, well, if I can get the computer to do it for five bucks, and it's going to cost me $10,000 a month for somebody that's going to be able to do it as a human, maybe I want to investigate the five. Because we got a world full of bean cowders out here that are saying, hey, we can save you a dollar, and hey, I'll save you the dollar and split it with me. Let me keep my 50 cents, and you guys save 50 cents.

[00:06:38.27] - Rich Veltre

And there are still people who do that deal. I'm not sure how I feel about it. I think I love the efficiency factor. But if that promotes the fact that the economy grows, then there's more companies. There's more places for those people to go. And instead, you have people limiting the fact that what we have now is all we have. We're not going to grow anymore. And therefore, the same people are now competing for jobs that are taken away by AI. Well, hopefully, you're going to tell me that AI is going to grow the economy, get us more companies, and now these people have a place to go. Otherwise, what you're telling me is everybody who took accounting over the last 25 years is doomed. I can't imagine that's the plan here.

[00:07:24.22] - Dan Paulson

Well, and I guess there's people I think are too much much on the AI bus. It seems like it's the new bubble now. It's the next big thing, like the dot-com boom in the 2000s was everyone was going to have a website. And truthfully, now everyone does have a website, but that doesn't mean to Traditional commerce has gone away. And in fact, web traffic or web sales have probably enhanced a lot of bricks and mortar businesses that we're able to figure out how to make them work together. And that's where I see marriage here, because I've heard the same thing about coaching and consulting. That's all going to go away because be able to just talk to an AI bot, and the AI bot is going to be able to analyze your needs based off the questions you ask it. And we've seen those situations where, or at least I've heard on the news, where you get your AI girlfriend, and you got somebody who can talk to you and ask you questions. But I've never experienced that. Fortunately, I am I'm happily married to a real female, so I had to deal with any of that.

[00:08:35.25] - Dan Paulson

But I just see the question or the way AI responds to certain things as being very robotic, not warm and feeling I mean, it can catch some nuance in there. You can somehow teach it to be a little bit more humanlike, but you still miss the human experience. And AI drives itself off of data. So yes, the more data you pump in, the better it can do things. And that's where I see AI coming along to enhance all our jobs, and not necessarily take them away, but probably change how we're doing things. I mean, I look at what I've been working on in the last year. Take this podcast, for example, our intro and exits, those aren't real people, which I'm sure our audience has clearly figured out. But at the same point, it gives it a different flair. I can also We'll very quickly transcribe this entire podcast without doing anything. In the past, you'd have to have somebody sit there and type that out. Well, now I have an AI program. I could just pipe the sucker through. And it says 80 % of the time. I'm finding about 99. 9 % of the time it gets everything right, and I just have to skim through it.

[00:09:54.13] - Dan Paulson

I change a couple of words that I know are misspelled, and now we have a full transcript of our podcast without me spending a ton of time on it. That's where I'm seeing the advantages here. I was talking with someone earlier today who they're using AI to basically scrub their incoming sales calls and help categorize them for what those sales calls are for. And to me, that's a valuable use of the tool, because that's really where I see AI shine, is it can take a gross amount of data that would take several people, hundreds of people in some cases to pars through, and really figure out what that data, how to make that data valuable. Ai can do that with a few simple questions. And even if you ask the wrong questions, you can fine tune it, because that's what I'll use chat or any of those for when designing training programs. It doesn't create my training program entirely. What it does is I can say, here's what I want to do, and here's how I want to do it. Give me an outline. And then from there, Where, for example, if it's in person, I can only come up with so many activities.

[00:11:05.15] - Dan Paulson

So here's an activity I want to do. What would you recommend or what would you come up with? And usually it spits out some ideas. Some of them are crap, and you just throw those away because that's the sign you need to fine tune the message. But you can get some new techniques for doing stuff or for facilitating just by utilizing AI as a tool. Because my other alternative is I've got about a dozen books in the background that I have all sorts of ice breakers and activities to do. But then I've got to sort through all those books and figure out what I want to do. And I can give parameters within the AI, say, well, I don't want any extra materials. I don't want role playing. I don't want this. I don't want that. I want some of this over here, or I want to use this type of example, and it will come up with a better solution for me. So in that way, that's where seeing AI going, where it's going to be an enhancement for a job that would normally be very tedious or time consuming and make it much simpler for us to do thus saving time.

[00:12:11.29] - Rich Veltre

I think I totally agree with everything you said. And then I also think that the piece that's missing that I don't think that they can replicate is the intuition, the judgment. Those things cannot be added. So that's why I don't see it in finance being at the top job. I don't see that being able to be there. I see efficiency only. Maybe I'm just limited because I don't know enough about it. But what I did see was I do a lot of work in mergers and acquisitions where people are looking at, hey, let me buy that other company, enhance my company with an acquired existing company. And when they do that, they build a model. And the model could take months to do. Because you're digging and you're digging, and you're digging and you're going through things, and then you have to ask questions. And I was able to take a simple financial statement for four years for 2020 to 2024, and I gave it to a tool that I was helping someone actually build. And when I did that, I told it, here's a financial statement for this company. I want you to analyze it for me.

[00:13:25.05] - Rich Veltre

I want you to tell me about its liquidity. I want you to tell me its trends. I want you to tell me anything else that you see, whether you would recommend that we look at this or where you would see the pitfalls. And I use a little bit more language because that's the other thing I find out. If you don't ask the question right, you don't get the- It gives you exactly what you tell it to.

[00:13:48.02] - Dan Paulson

That's the best way to put it. It gives you exactly what you... You have to give it more specifics. Otherwise, you are very limited on the result you get.

[00:13:56.10] - Rich Veltre

So I did it a few times, and I kept looking at it, and I kept looking at the results. I actually was impressed. I'm not going to tell you I wasn't impressed. I will tell you that I saw where it ran into some issues, but I was impressed because it came back and it gave me a couple of things that I didn't ask for, which was interesting that it was able to do that. Now, I don't know if somebody programmed that or if this thing actually learned that, but it gave me back things like liquidity, like working capital. And I hadn't asked for that. I just asked for an overall analysis of the company and what it saw. It saw declining revenues. It told me it had declining revenues. It told me that based on the declining revenues, it was going to potentially get to the point where it was going to struggle to pay for its debt because the debt was a little bit higher. And because revenues were coming down, working capital was coming down, net income was coming down. Based on that, debt service was going to be a difficult issue. I didn't ask for that.

[00:14:56.14] - Rich Veltre

So I was impressed that it came back to me and said, take a look at this. And I went and I looked at the numbers, and I'm like, I saw where it came from. Made sense. I felt like I was talking to another staff. So it made that degree of sense of, hey, if you're going to make the jump into this, this could be good. And I told the people that I was working with, I'm like, if you're telling me that I can just take a company's financial statements and put them in here, and I'm going to get a relatively similar analysis between Company A, Company B, Company C, then somebody who's doing acquisitions can make a legitimate decision on which one is the better prospect. And then they could take that intuition and judgment and say, I really like that one because I like the industry, or I see where I could take it over here. Ai is not going to know that. It's not going to know why I would throw an additional piece on there. I can teach it, and I could say, Here's why I'm going that way, and maybe it'll come out with the same recommendation on another company that's similar.

[00:16:05.18] - Rich Veltre

But as of right now, it's only going to do that first part.

[00:16:10.13] - Dan Paulson

Yeah, I think it's going to get better. Again, Look at the advancement. As you said, AI has been around for quite a while in some way, shape, or form. But you look at even just going back two or three years. So let's not even go pre-COVID, let's go post-COVID. And you look at the changes that have happened just in a couple of years. And it's amazing how much better it's got. So I'm going to assume that it's going to continue improving, and the lines between what a human comes up with in an individual comes up with is going to blur to some degree. I still don't see where machine learning is going to surpass life experience on some things. And to me, that's always going to require some level of human intervention, because, again, the machine is going to look at the data, and it's going to look at things in that data that a human is probably going to glance past and not pay attention to. You brought up What you were working with on the M&A side of things, I look at the medical profession, where they've taken data of symptoms of patients or tests of patients, and they put that in, and it's gone through and it's found early markers for cancer, for example.

[00:17:33.17] - Dan Paulson

That would have been missed by a human looking at that. So that's again, where there's this infinite amount of data that you can pump into the system. And because it's so powerful, It can look at that and find things that are so minute that the average human would just blow it off or look past it. That, to me, is where it's going to be powerful. But again, you're still going to need the doctor. You're still going to need the nurse. You're still going to need the specialist or whatever it might be, because ultimately, again, somebody has to step in and look at that data like you did and say, okay, is this right? Is this accurate? What's it looking at? Do I agree with the findings? And if I don't, What do I need to change in the question asked or how we go about searching for that? So that's where I see things for the next 10, 20 years. And to be honest, if in that period of time, it does fulfill limiting some jobs or removing some jobs, I don't think that's necessarily a problem, because if we look at future generations, they're getting smaller anyway.

[00:18:41.12] - Dan Paulson

Gen Alpha, which is the current one that's in school right now, that generation is the smallest yet at like 49 million. So there's going to be fewer and fewer employees out there. You're going to have to take it up some way, shape, or form. Now, the part that concerns me is Again, you still have that human need, the human, I guess, thought process in there. And also the stuff that you learn over time. You've done your career for what? 30, 40 years, about the same with me. You learn a lot over that time. You build a lot of learned experience. And where AI is going to come in, is going to take away those more rudimentary tasks, where you really cut your teeth and figure out how the machine works, whatever you're doing. For you, it was accounting. For me, it was leadership and HR and that stuff. If you take that away and have a machine do it, how does the individual learn? So that's really where my questions or concerns come in, because if we still need the people and we still need that individual human knowledge, that experience that they build, and that now is reduced because you're going to type something into a machine, and it's going to I bid out an answer for you, that person never learns why the machine made that decision.

[00:20:05.13] - Dan Paulson

So they don't gain anything from that. That would be my biggest fear of all this.

[00:20:10.24] - Rich Veltre

But I think, though, one of the things I saw a stat recently, and I'm trying to keep this in my head because it goes to what you just said about the medical field. And I just heard that the medical field is adopting AI four times faster than anybody else. Right. Now, I don't know if that's 100 % true or not, but that's what I heard as far as the last stat. But when you think about it, they're talking about the fact that the medical profession is running at a doctor's. They're running at a nurse's. The numbers of those people are going down. And yet we're all getting older, which means we'll need medical more. So the fact that this is the perfect analysis of why AI makes sense in the medical field, because if an AI is going to allow those people to be more efficient, and that allows them to handle more patients, then you've cured the problem of the aging America with the decreasing number of doctors, at least to me. I think that's a very good push for it. And there are a lot of doctors who are actually doing, I'll call them side hustles right now, which is while they're running a practice, there's a side hustle that's actually building an AI use for their practice or related to their practice, which means it's expanding their knowledge base.

[00:21:25.26] - Rich Veltre

And I would expect then that the next piece is the medical schools are going to be teaching with the AI as the advantage so that the new doctors are now still able to be innovative, but using AI as their support.

[00:21:43.07] - Dan Paulson

Yeah. I think when it comes to testing, especially, testing a specialized testing, I think that's where it's going to be a tremendous benefit, because as you point out, there's fewer people going into those medical professions, plus the level of data That you can get from a simple blood test anymore, or any other test related to maybe Alzheimer's, cancer, any one of those things, where you can run it through an AI data set and actually have it spit out something and say, well, based on this information, here's your probability of getting Alzheimer's, for example, or breast cancer, or some other form of disease, or you already have the disease, but it's not showing up in test, but here's the markers that show that you're in the very early stages of it. Well, now you can basically cure it at such an early point that you might prevent yourself from having to go through heavy chemo or anything like that. That's where I see things going, because now you need one person to read that AI result and then do their back check of it, versus maybe having a whole army of people that are manually setting up the blood test and running through everything and reviewing the data.

[00:23:01.17] - Dan Paulson

Yeah, that's going to be a big issue. And the other side of this, which I think is more relevant to our audience, small to medium-sized companies gives you access to The ability to do certain things that maybe a company of under 50 or 100 million would really have a difficult time doing, either A, finding the person that's capable of it, or B, just the cost involved with having that person do it. So So you look at how we use AI in a relatively small company, and you take that to a company of 5, 10, 15 million, you can get a lot better information. You can streamline things where you maybe don't have to hire that extra person to do that job. Now you can have one person do a job, as you point out, instead of 10, maybe you need five. That's going to be where I see the huge advantage in companies that are already struggling to find those people anyway.

[00:24:00.13] - Rich Veltre

That's a perfect example. I think you already have problems. Nobody's looking at the existing problems or looking at the change and the challenge of putting this new path in place. But we've done it before. We've put new processes, new computers. It wasn't called- That's going to take away everyone's job. Twenty five years ago, we're all going to die because the computers are going to take over, or there was a glitch in the programming, the Y2K whole thing back then. Have we survived? Yes. I don't like the word retrained because I just think that's silly, but to a certain extent, we all got to keep learning. And everybody's always told us that, keep learning. Well, AI comes in, keep learning with the new tools. It's really no different from... You can pick any industry, and there's probably a tool in there that came about at some point and made everybody's life better. So I'm hoping that AI is doing the same thing, but I think we have the power to control that, at least to a certain extent. How are we going to use this new tool? How are we going to use these new things to help us out?

[00:25:15.25] - Rich Veltre

That's what I think.

[00:25:17.20] - Dan Paulson

Yeah. And that's going to be the key, I think, for the generations that are coming up. You're right. It's not retraining, but the jobs that... At one point, wagon wheels and blacksmithing was a huge need. At some point, that went away. And then even as that moved into the automotive industry, because, again, I'm the car guy, you had people that were stamping and hammering out pieces and parts more or less manually, and then that was replaced by machines and so on and so forth. But there's still people building cars. It might be fewer people, or it might be people doing different things. Now they're running the robots, or they're running the presses, or they're managing the welders, or whatever it might be. So the work changed, but the work is still there. And I think that's what we've got to talk about here is, okay, if AI is now going to take over this part of what the labor force was doing, what other areas does it now open up for an individual to come in and actually use this tool and then enhance their job or enhance the new jobs that it It creates.

[00:26:30.27] - Dan Paulson

Because to me, that's what it's going to do. When one job is taken away, it seems like other ones are created, and you got to look at it that way.

[00:26:38.06] - Rich Veltre

I agree.

[00:26:39.07] - Dan Paulson

Yeah. Well, we're at about 25, 26 minutes. I think this is a good place to wrap up. Rich, as always, it is fun and interesting to talk to you, especially since we are non-AI people. If you are very much into AI and you want to educate us further, I think we're okay with that. Maybe you're going to tell us we're completely wrong in what we said. Please like, share, and subscribe, and make comments down below. Rich, if a non-AI entity, a live human being, actually wants to get a hold of us, how do they do that?

[00:27:13.17] - Rich Veltre

Just give me an email at rich@xcxo.net.

[00:27:17.13] - Dan Paulson

And you can do the same for me at dan@xcxo.net. And now we're going to let AI Bob take it away. Go ahead, Bob.

[00:27:24.27] - Rich Veltre

Go, Bob.

[00:27:25.17] - Bob

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