AI Year in Review

Trent McLaren: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the first official session of the day for the AI in Practice Summit. My name is Trent. You're going to see my face and wonderfully new, freshly cut mustache a lot over the next two days. And I am excited to officially welcome you and kick all things off. You are in for a jam-packed couple of days where we are going to break down AI in practice for the accounting industry. This first session is an absolute banger, and I can't wait for you to meet Chad.

Trent McLaren: The main event: we're kicking off with our official keynote. We have the man, the myth, the legend that is Chad Davis. Chad, how are you? So good to have you here.

Chad Davis: Thanks for telling me I'm the first person up. I just found out, what, like a week ago? So thank you for this.

Trent McLaren: We always want the best first.

Chad Davis: Whoever's available, everybody else, one of the other slots. No, this is really nice. Thank you.

Trent McLaren: Everybody wanted to sleep in.

Chad Davis: That's right. We have so much to get through and I'm looking at the clock saying, okay, we have 39 minutes left. This session could have gone so many different ways. We could have just picked the top 10 or 15 things that were really interesting as a firm and ran with it, and it would have been fine. However, over the course of the year, I've been kind of keeping track, for my own sanity, and for a little monthly write-up around what's happened that's affected me as a CPA firm owner in Canada, and that ended up being close to 3,000 updates in the accounting space. So today, we are going through 220, as fast as humanly possible, inside of 38 minutes. And if you do the math, that is roughly 11 seconds a slide. So Trent, you're probably going to get a lot of complaints.

Chad Davis: And I apologise ahead of time for that, because this is not a traditional keynote. It's not meant to, you know, inspire. It's more of a reminder of where we were in January to where we are now, and everything in between, because I think so many people feel like they're left behind, and there's a barrage of everyone who's pro this new technology, and there's very, very far on the other side, anti-AI, and at the end of the day, it's the reality. We live with this. There is going to be so much change in the way we work that it's okay to be wherever you are in this development lifecycle. It doesn't matter if you're a super smarty-pants person, or if you're literally just coming up from tax season right now and you're like, oh, what's new?

Chad Davis: It's totally fine, because I think what you're going to find out is the difference between January and now is 10 months. Sometimes you give a new hire 10 months to get used to your firm. There's a lot that happened, there's a lot of fun stuff, and at the end of the day, that's what it's about. It's about just being aware that something exists, so you can go on your own time, talk to your friends about it, do some research, see if it fits for you, and that's all that's really required. So in terms of an update, I guess we can get into it.

Trent McLaren: We can get into it. Yeah.

Chad Davis: Let's do this.

Trent McLaren: Gonna let you rock and roll this thing. Yeah, let's go.

Chad Davis: Okay. Is it cool if I get pinned, like this? And for context, yeah, I'm Canadian. I lived in an RV for eight years, travelling the US and Canada. If we haven't met before, that's probably the most interesting thing about me, but I also went through a major firm transformation. We grew up to about 120 people, and now we're at a very stable and calm 60 people, and that's been happening over the last three to four years. And now, on the side, I just get to talk to a bunch of friends online about AI and tech and how it's affecting our firms. And like a lot of people here, I've been building some stuff, been encouraging the purchasing of stuff, and everything in between. So, let's get into it.

Chad Davis: Oh, a little bit of housekeeping, too. I'm not going to be able to go through a lot of these things in detail, but if you have experience with one of these things and it's really affected you, and you have some extra tips, throw them in the chat, because that is super helpful to people. There are incredibly smart people here that have way more experience than me, most likely, and you can absolutely help somebody that's maybe a little bit behind you if you can put a little bit of commentary around something that shows up. So if you're ready with this, let's do it.

Chad Davis: Okay. So we're going to go from January to November, and I'm not going to go through a lot of the small, tiny little apps that have come up. And when I say small, tiny little apps, you know, they're pretty big. Some of them raised like $100 million, but there's just so many AI wrappers and new tech. It's so hard to know which one's gonna be around for a while, so here's a couple of them, right? You've got Numeric, and Stax, and Maxima. And I should probably preface that this is a bit of a North American update as well. I'm Canadian, I kind of keep track of the Canada and the US side. So, sincerest apologies for not having the most Australian or New Zealand or UK updates, but that's the frame for this a little bit.

Chad Davis: So again, bookkeeping, there's been little small ones like Finland's Wesley entries, Truewind. We've got Reconcile IQ, Clerked. That's another big one that's trying to take on MakersHub. There's a lot of stuff that I don't want to cover, because there's so much that's happened in other areas. So let's go through.

Chad Davis: Claude Cowork back in January. Can you believe that? It's been 10 months since Cowork was introduced, and we could finally talk to an AI agent, or an AI environment, with our computer. And this was released originally on a Mac, around January 12th. But it's kind of changed the way that a lot of accountants interact with spreadsheets, their own local files, and connecting into things. So it's a nice reminder that it's only 10 months old. So now you kind of take it full circle, and Cowork is being combined in with a chat experience now, and they don't want it to be so by itself, because they're trying now, obviously, to push Claude Code, and then the chat experience, which includes Cowork, to be along the same lines as OpenAI with their work and chat.

Chad Davis: Agent mode. So this was with Microsoft, and in January, they released one of their first agents that worked inside of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Now, this was super nerdy if you could get access to this, but it was our first idea of saying, hey, we can finally use AI inside of a spreadsheet.

Chad Davis: Karbon released their big State of AI report back in January. Lots of press around this one, but the biggest stat was that essentially everybody's using it, and everybody's... not afraid, but they're very concerned about security. And that's what I really like about this AI in Practice Summit, is that there's a lot of sessions that have to do with security and the proper treatment of connectors and teams. So go check those out if you can. Very, very good.

Chad Davis: In terms of OpenAI, they had a bunch of updates. Do you remember GPT-4o and 4.1? Well, they finally got rid of those. They launched some stuff in, let's see here, the ChatGPT voice, improved their search. Remember when it was really cool to just talk to it and ask it about restaurants and things like that? That was a big improvement in January. They updated a bunch of small things, but nothing overly crazy in January.

Chad Davis: In Microsoft's land, they had a whole bunch of Copilot updates. Now, Microsoft gets a lot of slack because it's not the most incredible AI out there, but because it does integrate with Claude and GPT... in January, they went to 5.2 and into some Claude areas in the US. It made it kind of usable. So in January, we're just trying to figure out, okay, maybe we can use Claude, or sorry, maybe we can use the Copilot inside of Microsoft, you know, using these other models to be actually a little bit helpful.

Chad Davis: Intuit released their first tax store, so physical tax stores, to kind of push that narrative around the ability to do more AI work. Honestly, I think when people go into these stores and they see it, they're not making money off the tax returns. It's about something bigger. It's about the brand, it's about making sure that people are aware that there's these other services. Expensive? Can we be a little honest, it just feels like a lot for a little, but I mean, they have billions of dollars, so why not?

Chad Davis: Xero did their big analytics launch, and that launch was on the heels of the Syft Analytics purchase for $70 million, so good on them. That started a bunch of people using that as part of alternatives to the tools that we've been using for a decade plus. Digits. So, Digits is an AI-native ledger, mostly based in the US, and they were one of the first ones where you could drop your bank statement in and have it extract all the lines and just start the process of doing the bookkeeping. Yes, it existed in other tools too, but for the AI-native ledger stuff, this was pretty early.

Chad Davis: There are some predictions from my buddy Jason. The one that I wanted to call out was this one down here, right? Practice management systems that absorb workflow get rewarded. And I couldn't agree with that more, because as we see now with a lot of the practice management systems, the ones that are getting into talking to the ledgers are the ones that are getting a lot of the love. So in the US and Canada, that's like Canopy and Double, and Karbon's trying that a little bit with Aider. So I think we're going to see a little bit more of that, but it's kind of just starting to take off right now.

Chad Davis: The AICPA. The reason I wanted to include this one is because there's a lot of wrapper companies, right, that are showing they have their proprietary information. They're doing as best they can to consolidate all these data sources. And then the AICPA just kind of launches this free thing, right? A bunch of research that draws upon all the authoritative content that they have for their members. It's one of these things where it's hard to get into a big corporate commercial agreement with tools that offer something similar when you just don't know what's coming down the road that could be as good or better, and it wouldn't cost as much money.

Chad Davis: Dext Payments launched in January. That was pretty big. Opus 4.6 was also released in February. So these 4.6 models were some of the first ones where, as accountants, we were starting to get traction, right, with work that was in a spreadsheet, or work that we were trying to generate based off of some accounting data. And it was really fun. And I wanted to show that and just remind you, we've gone through so much in 10 months, and looking back at 4.6 versus where we're at with the 6 family, it's just one of these things where you're like, oh yeah, that's nice, but when you look back... you're always at the frontier when you look back, right? Right now, okay, we think it's the best, but in a month there'll be something new.

Chad Davis: If you take a step back, I probably shouldn't do this because we only have like seconds per slide, but it's one of these things where it's more about how you're using it than it is about the model itself sometimes. And I think what these 4.6s and 4.8s kind of taught us was that the models are going to get better. And these ones really taught us about prompting. It's kind of funny now, because now they're trying to actively tell you not to prompt too much. So it's kind of cool.

Chad Davis: In February, the Intuit apps were now live in ChatGPT, so QuickBooks and TurboTax and all these other things are finally connected into ChatGPT. The first big accounting agent was released by Ramp, which is a big fintech for creating corporate credit cards and moving money around. The idea with Ramp there was that it would code all the transactions, but do it in a way that was just better than QuickBooks could do, or Xero could do. So early on, a lot of people were getting excited and moving a lot of their transaction coding over to Ramp, just because it was so good.

Chad Davis: Remember deep research, how you always had to turn on deep research mode if you wanted it to go search a whole bunch of websites? That was still a thing in February. Not much of a thing anymore. The projects in February also allowed you to connect Google Drive folders. Before, it was only a maximum number of files, and then we were immediately able to say this whole folder is now the source. So just these little milestones of things that happened early on, where we're like, oh, that changes how I think about context, and how I want to update that, instead of having to come back over into ChatGPT and update it.

Chad Davis: A whole bunch of money, right? This Basis company, I think pricing starts at well over $100,000 to get this thing up and running in a firm. And the idea is it's meant for big firms. And what they're doing, I'm not trying to say this in a negative way, but this is kind of what everyone else is trying to do now, too. And that's why I didn't want to go through all the smaller ones that are coming through. It is a really hard time to be an accountant choosing a tool today to purchase, because everyone promises the world, and then it's moving so fast that the demo you did now is going to be completely different next month. So, I don't know, trust is a big thing.

Chad Davis: I can skip that one. Gusto. So this is kind of cool. Finally, a payroll provider that created a connector into ChatGPT. I think there's a lot of risk that you have to be aware of with payroll data in general. So they released two different versions of this to appease people. One was just read on certain endpoints, and then there was a write one that you have to go through some permission to get. It was pretty closed off to some beta testers back then, but now it's fully out there, read and write mostly. And QuickBooks followed suit, and now you can get paycheck data through their connector as well. Security nightmare for some firms, but for some practitioners, it's exactly what they needed.

Chad Davis: Got some 5.4 action happening in March. So again, this early model stuff was about how much longer could it run. That was the novelty, right? Could it think longer? Could it check itself? And we got these iterations every single time, about these models that could go longer and longer and longer. And today, you have models that can run continuously and just not stop.

Chad Davis: ChatGPT for Excel was finally released. I say finally because everybody kind of wanted it. It was the sidebar, right? So you could hook up ChatGPT inside of Excel. I know a lot of people use that now. And the idea is that you could now have AI interact with a spreadsheet, check out how it was done, find some errors from the person that gave you the sheet in the first place. But it didn't launch with Power Query or Power Pivot, all kinds of stuff, at launch. It was really just to have the conversation.

Chad Davis: Intuit Accountant Suite kind of got bundled in. We have some Codex plugins. So this is kind of interesting. If you use Claude Code and you want to use it with Codex or ChatGPT, there's a bunch of techy ways that you can do this, but for a bunch of normies, it's using this official plugin that makes it kind of interesting. So you can actually press slash codex, and inside of Claude Code, you can call your Codex session, right, which is the Claude Code for ChatGPT. And a lot of people use that for checking the quality of the code and doing security reviews and handing off certain work. I won't say it's how the techiest of the techy people use different systems. If you're into that kind of stuff, you can look into tools like Orca and things like that. But that happened in March, and that was a pretty big moment for the nerds.

Chad Davis: Okay, we got a whole new model picker. Remember when they got rid of all the techy 4.8s, 4.7s, and just said, there's your four choices? That was in Q1. And again, we got some more thinking, more plugins. But in March, we also got org-wide skills. So there's, I think, a couple of sessions here that actually talk about skills, and how to teach those to your team members and get feedback on them and store them centrally. It all started back at the end of Q1, which was kind of nice. Anthropic was allowing you to assign tasks, which was really cool, in Cowork. There was custom visuals. So remember the first time you could get a response and get a pretty graph? That was at the end of Q1.

Chad Davis: The Workspace CLI. I still meet people today that are big Google firms, and they're like, wait, there's a CLI? If you were frustrated by some of the things you can't do with the built-in connectors, this is where you might go: to this command line interface tool. And I think it's a general tip, which is, if you're unhappy with the MCP, and you don't have the access you need through that, and the connectors aren't working very well, if you have access to the API, you can use this command line interface to interact and get a lot more done.

Chad Davis: So for the longest time, this is how I was editing existing Google Docs and Google Sheets, because a lot of the connectors didn't edit those, and some still don't. So using the CLI as part of your Claude Code or your Codex was pretty cool. I know there's some nerdy stuff here, so I apologise to some, but it is just a reminder that we're going through a lot of change, so if you didn't know you could do that, now you do.

Chad Davis: Xero did their big Anthropic deal in March, and I think that had a lot of mixed reviews. Like, how are they going to use our data? And I think that was the sentiment a lot. We did get answers eventually, but it is a thing. Digits gave us an iPhone and iPad app, so working with the business owners around answering questions and communicating with the accountants, just to make it a little bit easier.

Chad Davis: If you're a big Make user, they did what was, I won't say an n8n killer, but if you were using n8n because you couldn't merge a bunch of data inside of Zapier or Make, they released the functionality, because that was the biggest reason why people were moving to n8n: that joining functionality. So Make did that, and not a lot of people came back from n8n. It's really hard to come back to a tool after you've already switched over, and telling that to a lot of accountants, it probably lands pretty well, because I know I didn't, even though that was the reason why I was using n8n for some things.

Chad Davis: Ramp released their CLI. If this stuff is all kind of new and you're like, yeah, I know what an MCP is: if an MCP kind of peeves you off and it doesn't have the tools you want, typically the CLI will. I know I've said that before, but I think a pro move by an app is to give out a CLI at the same time that they give out API access, or an MCP. It lets the nerds figure out how they want to use it, but also if you have MCP access, it's a little bit more accessible. So, super happy with Ramp. That really helped a lot of people build their own infrastructures into Ramp, like to create cards when onboarding people from HR, and that kind of stuff that an MCP is just kind of too risky to deal with.

Chad Davis: Awin Tax bought this company called Column Tax, and they were marketing 100% accuracy through generative AI, which is a little bit crazy, but it is what happened. I know it's not all generative, but they were one of the first ones to connect in, and I still don't know a lot of people using it, but it's very expensive.

Chad Davis: Amalgam had a Slack connector. So if you haven't heard of Amalgam, there's a guy named Joe who runs that, and the whole idea is that he wanted people to be able to talk to the accounting system through Slack. So there's a whole bunch of apps that can do that: Victor, there's one called Blue, another one, I forget the other one, but there's even Claude Tag, I think, that uses Slack as well. But Amalgam was really early to try to get people to interact with their Xero and QuickBooks data, maybe mostly QuickBooks, through Slack. So good on them for creating that and being a little bit innovative pretty early.

Chad Davis: Dext AI Assist kind of came out of beta in March. This company called Thread, out of, I think it's the Netherlands, launched as well. The reason why I wanted to share this is because Thread also supplies the accountants, but they're an AI-native ledger. So bypassing accountants altogether and just being that thing, I think that's not new. That's not a novel thing. I think a lot of these AI-native ledgers are going to be doing that too. But I wanted to show that one because that's European, and they're going after this. There's a few of them like this.

Chad Davis: Back in March, Vinyl updated their context to 20 hours. That was a big move in a world where we were just starting to get into the half a million token context and the million token context. So good on Vinyl for keeping up with that. Zendu bought Botkeeper. Good on them. And now we're into Q2.

Chad Davis: So, I'm just looking at the time, holy cow. You're gonna see me go a little bit faster. So, Digits had an MCP server, allowing you obviously to connect into anything relating to Digits. At this point it was only read, not write. They put write in later. Black Ore, interesting company. They are doing done-for-you, AI-assisted tax returns in the US. I think a lot of people might use this. I think the returns are going for like 60 bucks a pop, and they are working with small firms, not just big firms. So they have a whole small firms program, and this is a full done-for-you tax return, all with AI, and then it just comes back to you. They're really going after the offshore model for speed and accuracy.

Chad Davis: Y Combinator called out for accounting firms or accounting-related apps, and they're putting hundreds of millions of dollars into that. Grant Thornton tied their bonuses to AI adoption goals. I don't think this is ageing really well, but that was all the rage back in April. We had a cyber version of GPT-5.4 be released. This was one of our first looks at the enhanced cyber abilities to be able to hack a bunch of stuff. October was a lot, but this was when we got introduced, back in April.

Chad Davis: The Codex app for Mac with native computer use came out in April, so being able to actually take a desktop tool, or a desktop app, and do something with it. We got some workspace agents. Brand new 5.5 came out with OpenAI back in April. There's some routines that came out as well, so the ability to start scheduling stuff. So we're just starting to think about that.

Chad Davis: The advisor tool came out in April. This is kind of cool. I'm not sure how relevant it is today, but if you do slash advisor inside of Claude Code, you'll be able to have a higher model review stuff and give you an advisor-like type of response, and then it can push it down to a lower model. Nice. I mean, it's been used for the last little while, but it is a nice little tool. Claude Design came out in April, and Cowork became generally available inside the enterprise as well. We got Claude for Word, we got managed agents, and we finally got some Copilot in Outlook. There were a lot of memes and jokes about Copilot finally being able to search, back in April. I remember those fondly.

Chad Davis: Zapier is doing a good job of trying to stay alive. They have done everything right. The second brain, the AI agent work, the self-fixing of broken Zaps, good on them. There's no better company right now that's trying to stay alive in a very, very competitive type of industry or category. Canopy, which is a project management system in the US, launched their own note taker. So it's kind of early on for AI meeting assistants right in the project management system.

Chad Davis: Digits did more outcomes-based pricing. The reason I wanted to show that was because they were saying, if they don't get it accurate enough, you don't have to pay. I don't know where that's at right now, if they ever got rid of that, but it's an interesting model, because I think a lot of accountants are going to need to see that before they start moving a lot of people over. Perplexity gave you some access to Plaid. I remember seeing it from one accountant who took one Perplexity account, and then started putting all their clients' connections into Plaid, because there was no maximum number of connections you could put in. And that's how they got all their bank transactions and their stuff, back in April. I don't know if I would recommend that, but it was a way to think outside the box. Probably get in trouble too.

Chad Davis: Double, used to be called Keeper, had their first AI chat-based journal entry creation. That was kind of novel back at the time. Double had an MCP server. There's a whole AI accountant, named Flynn, piloting, doing a whole bunch of agentic work. I'm realising we have less than 10 minutes, so I've got to go a little bit faster if we're going to get through this. So Karbon AI came. We had Claude for Excel and PowerPoint, which was super game-changing for a lot of people that were in the Microsoft environment. Kik, another AI-native general ledger, had this ability to read and write and give access to every API endpoint. So that's what got them sort of in the lead. There was a full-on audit firm that was created just to work agentically, and they got all kinds of funding.

Chad Davis: A mobile plan for OpenAI came. Anthropic had a whole bunch of ways to peeve off people that were on accounts that eventually got less at that point. We got our first look at Opus 4.8, and looking back, you're like, what was the difference between 4.5, 6, 7, 8? We made a big deal of it at the time; looking back, not such a big deal. Copilot Studio came out. This was our first look at being able to interact in the Microsoft environment kind of like you could with Claude. So in May that made a lot of people happy. Intuit Intelligence launched.

Chad Davis: XeroForce was announced in May. I don't think it's public yet, but I know there's some people that are beta testing it. So good on them. Maybe there's more information that I don't know, but good on Xero. Campfire was the first big ERP system to release an MCP store. Anchor was able to create an MCP connector, so note-taking tools and things could go in and create proposals, just like with Ignition. Caseware, I think they spent like $100 million creating this AI platform for assurance engagements, back in May. More chat interfaces for doing work with Double. Ignition launched their MCP server. Good on them for launching it, but there were some limitations; hopefully that's all fixed. Karbon had their individual time entries finally available. I know that was on a wish list for a lot of people.

Chad Davis: Anthropic had their first, you know, Fable and Mythos, launched back in June. Ramp Stack was this thing that you could start to do month-end close work in, that connected into QuickBooks and some of your other tools, so that was nice. There's some guidelines finally released by the American IRS around how to use AI responsibly. Big companies buying a whole bunch of other accounting firms: I threw this in here as a reminder that there's people with billions of dollars trying to buy accounting firms. So if you don't want to deal with all this stuff, and you just want to sell, go reach out to them.

Chad Davis: OpenAI had some scheduled tasks. Codex allowed you to record and replay your skills. This is back in June. So being able to say, here's how I do my work, and then it creates skills from it. I mean, I know a lot of accountants that don't use that, but it's, what, four or five months old now. The Codex sites was there to compete against the Lovables and Cursors of the world. You had Anthropic inside of Microsoft, even deeper, back in June. You had this cool idea around nested sub-agents. I know this is a lot, I'm sorry. But the idea is you can run a whole bunch of stuff at once now, and they can create their own agents to do a bunch of work, so it didn't eat up all your context.

Chad Davis: We were able to now start creating links that we could share with people inside of Claude. The whole Slack thing was there. The ability to create your own accounting GL inside of a GitHub repo: I don't know, some people do it. I'm not, but you can do it. Kai with Karbon was released, a whole bunch of month-end close stuff. We're into Q3. Opus 5 was released. Everybody was super happy, and then it kind of sucked and everybody was kind of mad at it. And now we have Opus 5.5 and everybody's loving it. So things can get better. ChatGPT Work was released, confused a lot of people, still confuses people to some degree. And the idea is now you have one better, cohesive place to do your work.

Chad Davis: The Tax Practitioners Board, oh, I have an Australian one, back in July released their guidance on using AI more efficiently. They merged ChatGPT and Codex together in the app. We can skip a couple of these. Remember when the big model got out from the OpenAI land and found all its answers? That all happened in July. So the start of all the security issues. We can just keep going through here. We finally got access to Claude Cowork on the web and mobile. We could record some more skills in Cowork, just like you could do back in ChatGPT, so this going back and forth stuff.

Chad Davis: The checkup command was released inside of Claude Code, so you could check on unused connections and skills. This is actually pretty good. There's a few other ones right now that you can use too, but if you're running out of your weekly usage pretty quickly, it could be that you have too many connectors or too many MCPs connected. This checkup tool will help you clean that up. Fable 5 was released. Great. More models, models, fine. Xero started their journey into competing with Dext in July. Let's see where that goes. Big changes to the XPM API were introduced around the middle of the year, where we're finally going to be able to get proper data back instead of big long XML stuff.

Chad Davis: Bank feeds got expanded. I'm just going to keep going here. Oh, this is a pretty good one. If you search Jason Staats accounting firm AI use cases, 127 use cases. He has a whole PDF of just examples from his tour, of what people were sharing of what they're doing with all this stuff. It's a really cool way of just seeing what all of our peers are doing. It's a really good resource there. I'm gonna go faster.

Chad Davis: I'm just gonna find some good ones. There's a recording here. You can pause if you need to. Vinyl had their Ignition integration, which was nice. Codex allowed for multiple Gmail accounts, ChatGPT for teens came out. Lots of cyber issues. Boom, boom, boom. I know this is weird. The Chrome extension got a lot of updates around this time as well, for both Claude and for ChatGPT. We got some new Fable stuff. They got rid of NotebookLM and now call them Gemini notebooks.

Chad Davis: Intuit has this thing that you can do inside of their developer portal if you're going to be building some stuff, where they'll walk you through how to use the API, and you hook that up with Copilot or Claude or ChatGPT and get it to explain things. It's actually pretty accessible to be able to hook up your firm to Intuit and then just get access to all your clients, if that's what you want. Again, not saying you should if you're not up on security things, but it does walk you through that connection if you're really interested.

Chad Davis: Xero prepayments webhook stuff, XeroForce, more information. Oh, 1Password started releasing these environments, and the ability for your agents to not always have to store text-based keys, which is kind of cool. Lovable shipped a Xero connector, so you could connect your Xero with a Lovable website a little bit more securely and easier than it was the other way. People developing all their own different connectors. Vinyl did some meeting notes that are filed automatically into Karbon. We got more merging of Cowork and chat. I know we only have a couple of minutes, so we're gonna get through this.

Chad Davis: 6.1 for Astra was cancelled. I mean, looking back at this, I'm glad they kind of cancelled it. The Slack and Teams threads: you know how you can use this app called Victor to be able to go in and do work for you? You can call ChatGPT right through Slack as well with the native integration here. We got new spaces and pages, kind of getting rid of the old custom GPTs; they're going to be moving over there a little bit. They're gonna be retired by December 11th, so make sure you plan for that. It came to Microsoft Word, finally, instead of it just being in Excel. We got these new agents called ChatGPT dots. Again, Trent said I can go two minutes over, so I'm going to take the two minutes.

Chad Davis: A whole bunch of new model releases, and Claude is trying to take over Google Docs and Microsoft Word and Sheets by introducing their own stuff. So they're going to be pushing a lot of that, if you see it. There was just a new update today on that as well. Claude skills: if you're an admin, you can see how often the people in your firm are using your skills. So if you didn't know about that setting as an admin, that's a pretty good one. We got 5.5, which is a fantastic thing to build in. We got background computer use. So if you were scared about an AI taking over and doing something on a desktop app, now on a Mac it can actually create its own desktop in the background, do a bunch of stuff, and it doesn't even affect what you see on your screen.

Chad Davis: We got a whole bunch of stuff there. We got Gemini, who nobody talks about anymore. There's a Xero connector and a QuickBooks connector now. Copilot got a whole bunch of updates. We only have one minute left. Oh yeah, do you know QuickBooks Advanced costs $340 a month? At what point does this become unreasonable?

Trent McLaren: Take four minutes, Chad. I think you're probably fine for another four minutes, mate.

Chad Davis: Yeah. Look at you. All right. Campfire. So...

Trent McLaren: The audience is king. They love what you're doing, mate. Keep going.

Chad Davis: Okay. Pretty sure people hate me right now, but...

Trent McLaren: No, no, they love it. If anything, they're upset that I've not given you enough time. So yeah.

Chad Davis: Okay. Campfire. So you're going to see a whole bunch of ERPs now going for this continuous close. And all continuous close kind of means is, at any point in the month, you'll be able to go in and forecast what it looks like to end your month, right? It'll know what hasn't hit yet, it'll be able to record things that normally get recorded at the end of the month, it will take new schedules from your accounts receivable and contracts that it's never seen before, but you know will affect that month, and it'll let you forecast out to the end of the month. It's meant to push people towards this always-on chat. Yeah, it's going to come with a lot of issues, but Rillet and Campfire are really pushing it, and you're going to see a lot more of it. So that was just in September.

Chad Davis: The self-healing automations from Zapier are there. Again, if you haven't used Zapier in a long time, you can go turn this on. I think it costs a little bit extra. But if a Zap breaks, before you have to go in and fix it, it can turn on and try to use AI to fix it itself. Use at your own caution, but it's kind of a cool little feature. Canopy, again, another project management system, released their external API. Month-end close for Canopy was finally released. So being able to do agentic work in your project management system, I think we're all really hoping that comes to Karbon, XPM, all these other things. But in the States, you've got Karbon... sorry, you've got Canopy, and you've got TaxDome and Financial Cents, all trying to do this, and Double, all inside the PM, and that's gonna be who wins, I think.

Chad Davis: The Canopy coworker is kind of like the Ramp Stack. So they're all getting these; September was the big month of releasing those. Ramp got accounts receivable, because of course everybody wants their hand in the pocket of accounts receivable and payments. Xero Emilio. Accrual acquired Puzzle. Some might say that it might have been struggling, some might say not, but they acquired it to be able to fold the close and Cowork-style stuff into their agent.

Chad Davis: Double also did Bank Network. This is so cool. I actually built an app in 2020 that did this with Plaid, Flinks and Finicity. And what it does is you can connect into any one of those. So they have massive coverage for US and Canadian banks, not just by doing it through one. So really cool that way. Open Tax Technology Alliance: people are trying to create open source tax schema. And that is cool, I love that, because the more we can get on the same page, like with MCPs and other types of schema, it is important for us to develop around those. So good on them for trying to create a standard that makes working with AI and tax a little bit easier.

Chad Davis: Financial Cents to the month-end close. Float did a direct card issuer. Ignition finally released their Claude and ChatGPT connectors in September. Multi-entity proposals. Karbon, their MCP connectors in beta. I've got a connection. Not bad. Kai can retrieve email threads; our company's loving that. Kik did their automated multi-entity consolidations. Again, these AI-native ledgers are moving super fast. MakersHub has this little button. It's an AP system, and it can extract, say, 50 pages of an AP bill. You press a button and then it shows where every item that was extracted is, back to the PDF. So you don't have to figure it all out. I think it was a really cool feature.

Chad Davis: A bank became a bookkeeping company, sorry, or is offering books. Some more collaborative skills. I know some firms that are doing some really cool stuff with Notion and skills management, because they keep running into problems with GitHub or org-wide skills inside of Claude or ChatGPT. So that's a cool little alternative. Ping did some botless meetings, Wreckhound did some more accruals features. Write Tools, a big QuickBooks-integrated Chrome extension: they now can right-click inside of QuickBooks and do stuff in Write Tools. And then Copilot accounting capabilities in Excel got way better. Digits MCP allowed you to write. A whole bunch of banks are not allowing agents to get into their tools. So we're going to see a lot more of that crackdown.

Chad Davis: Agentic close in Intuit is starting to come out. Everybody kind of hates it. Some people like it. Double had their auto close again. AICPA offering more certifications for AI-related things, so not just SOC 2, but now you have this AIUC-1 thing you have to pay for again, too. More Chrome extension upgrades. Oh, there's so much more. Let me just go through quickly. Oh, dashboards were brought out, but then I think they just changed to Claude Data today. Something happened today with this. But remember, with dashboards, you can't connect into Excel, so you have to have these big data sources. Copilot partnered with Xero, QuickBooks and Zoho. Good on them. You'll see lots of stuff over the last couple of weeks around people talking about that. I gotta go faster.

Chad Davis: Some more developer plugin, let's not do that. Oh, if you want to catch up with Intuit, maybe take a screenshot of this. Sorry, I can't make it clickable, but there's a feed of every update, and sometimes there's like seven updates a day. So if you find it hard to keep up with Intuit stuff, you can point your agent at that, or get a little summary every day from this page. It's a really good way to keep up to date with Intuit. Xero into Gemini. And this is kind of cool: Campfire allows you to take your vibe-coded app, or your big fancy thing that you bought, like SAP or something like that, and put it into Campfire through this connected app OAuth stuff. Really, really cool.

Chad Davis: I feel like we talked about Digits enough. There's a security report from Jason. Please read it, if you are on the fence, if you're curious how the US is thinking about this. It's still relevant to Canadians and to everybody around the world, around what data to put into systems and not. I saw a session on this here, I think it's today or tomorrow? I think it's at the very end here: "Is it safe? AI, client data and a simple plan for your firm." That one looks pretty interesting. And then on the... yeah. What else have we got? You probably need me to stop, right? What else is left? Briefcase ledger. Yeah, we don't have to talk about that. Combinely, Dext finally launches in Canada.

Trent McLaren: I think just, let's get there. Oh yeah, that's interesting.

Chad Davis: Yeah, which... oh, the Vinyl one?

Trent McLaren: Well, obviously, yeah, no, the Parks one I thought was interesting.

Chad Davis: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so Parks is, I think there's 10 firms trying it out right now or something, kind of launching December 1st a little bit, being branded as a safer ChatGPT and Claude experience for your connected apps and your accounting systems. I guess time will tell. Obviously, we love all the people there, but we just want to make sure it's super helpful.

Chad Davis: Yeah, TaxDome. This is actually kind of funny. I'll end on this because it's the human part of this. I had a friend who has a TaxDome account. He needed to move 3,500 to 4,000 different documents and folders around, and he had no idea. He was gonna hire somebody to do it. He's like, can you help me? I was like, cool. We hooked up the API, not the MCP, through Claude Code, taught him how to do that a little bit more securely, and he was able to, in two hours, because we had to teach along the way, do all the work that he would have hired somebody to do. And now he feels a little bit more empowered to use the API.

Chad Davis: I'll end on that story, even though there's a few more left, because it just shows you... let me just go back to here... it shows you that the human side of this is that we're all moving along with the technology, and just because something exists doesn't mean that you're going to implement it. So finding a friend, being part of communities, watching stuff like this, attending some of the sessions here today and tomorrow, it's going to give you more access and ideas and inspiration. And there's some incredible people here that are just willing to share all of that. Listen to the panels, listen to the skeptics, listen to the people that are really, really helpful. And I know I'll be kind of staying up. It's midnight here in Spain.

Trent McLaren: It was active. No, it was good.

Chad Davis: And thank you for this. I couldn't look at the chat all the way through, and I'm sorry for going a little bit over. Whew! This was a lot. We went through two...

Trent McLaren: I said this to you before, the biggest gripe you were going to get is that I didn't give you enough time. I've received some serious feedback about that. We will try and improve that for next time. We'd love to have you back next time, mate. Hey everyone, please give Chad a warm round of applause. That's the equivalent of flowers thrown at your feet, mate. Follow Chad on LinkedIn. Chad, how do people find out more about the stuff you do?

Chad Davis: I post really stupid videos on LinkedIn every single day, and there are links in here in the chat somewhere. Connect if you want to, if we're not already there. I'd love to learn more about what's happening in Australia, and the more people I'm connected to, the better. So, thank you, Trent.

Trent McLaren: Turns out you're going to come visit us sometime. Yeah.

Chad Davis: Yeah, let's make that happen. I think so, I think so. Okay. Thank you, everybody.

Trent McLaren: Thank you, Chad. Love your work, mate. Thank you, everyone. Chad, you're a legend, thank you so much, mate.