I asked ChatGPT to write me a sentence about value pricing this week. It came back with "game changer" and "unlocks growth" in the same sentence. I actually winced. That's the thing about AI writing... it slips into the same handful of phrases, and your clients can tell. In this week's live session I shared the prompt I use to fix that ("humanise the response"), plus six more I use regularly: turning a set of financial statements into a client-ready analysis in under a minute, handling the awkward client fee email, checking your own cybersecurity, pricing models beyond the hourly rate, and building a full business plan in about ten minutes using agentic AI. 🎥 Watch the replay: [Link below 👇] All seven prompts are in the AI Academy's prompt library, along with 250-odd others built specifically for accounting firms. If you want the full library (not just the taster prompts in here), grab the 7-day free trial: https://www.skool.com/theaiacademy/about Which of the seven would you use first?

AI note-takers are everywhere now. Plaud, Otter, Fireflies, Zoom AI Companion, Copilot. Most firms are using at least one. Here's the bit that catches people out. Somebody asked me recently about adding standing text to meeting invites ... "unless advised otherwise we will record this meeting". Reasonable instinct. It feels like you've covered yourself. But as consent, it fails. Under GDPR consent has to be freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous, through a clear affirmative action. Silence and inactivity don't count. So an opt-out isn't consent. Here's the link to the guide I created that shows how to fix this. What's interesting is that the same sentence works fine if you're relying on legitimate interests instead, because that needs transparency and a right to object rather than a yes. Same words. Different basis. Two practical things while I'm here. First, if you record in person with something like a Plaud ... turn the recorder on before you ask, and say that you've turned it on. Otherwise the one thing not captured is the agreement itself. Second, check your platform settings. Since January, Zoom makes every participant acknowledge the AI disclaimer before the meeting continues. Google Meet can require explicit consent before note-taking starts, but it's switched off by default. For video calls that solves most of the problem for you. So ... are you recording client meetings? And if you are, how are you handling consent at the moment? Honestly interested in how many people have thought about this 👇

Ever feel like you're constantly reminding your AI of the same things? Or it goes off and does something you never asked for? It's not you. It's the setup. I've just put out a full walkthrough of how I set up agentic AI — Claude Cowork or ChatGPT Work — so it knows my firm and gets things right first time. In the video I cover: - The one rule that stops your AI drifting and forgetting - The four levels of instructions ... and what belongs in each - How to build a "second brain" for context without burning tokens - A simple prompt-injection defence to keep it safe Watch it here 👉 https://youtu.be/BPiH1oGd2HY Then tell me below ... which of the four levels are you going to set up first? 👇

Ask an accountant how they keep client data safe with AI and you'll almost always hear the same line: "I've turned off training." It's a reasonable thing to believe. It's also, on its own, close to worthless as a compliance position. Turning off training stops one thing... the provider reusing your conversations to train future models. Everything else still happens. Your prompt still leaves your computer. It's still processed on a server, usually abroad. It's still retained for a while. It's still, in the language of the law, being handled by a third party on your behalf. If you process client data through AI, and virtually every firm does, you're the data controller and the AI provider is your processor. That's a defined legal relationship with eight separate obligations attached. The training toggle covers roughly one of them. This isn't hypothetical any more either. The PCRT bodies, including the ICAEW, published AI guidance in January. The IRS issued its first Circular 230 guidance on AI in June. The UK's Data (Use and Access) Act landed in February. None of it created new duties. All of it confirmed the existing ones apply, and that regulators are actually looking now. I put together a free guide walking through all eight things compliance actually requires, in plain English, with a simple framework for deciding what's safe to do with client data. Fifteen minutes to read. Attached below. The full course covers the other four chapters this guide doesn't (agentic AI, connecting AI to QuickBooks and Xero, prompt injection, and the 2026 rules by jurisdiction) ... that's inside Premium if you want to go deeper. Where does your firm genuinely stand on this right now... sorted, working on it, or hadn't thought about it until this post? 👇

A few months ago, someone who isn't an accountant built the world's first AI accountancy firm. Eleven AI "colleagues". Each with a name, a job title, and a workstream. And a managing partner called Grace Ledger. I sat down with Alexis Kingsbury ... the man behind it, and author of the number one Amazon bestseller Accrual Intentions ... to find out what actually happened. It's not a story about AI replacing accountants. It's far more useful than that. In the conversation we get into: - What "agentic AI" really means, and why it changed everything in 2026 - How his AI team built 108 files in 8 minutes ... and where that went badly wrong - The moment the AI confidently pushed him to take paying clients with no AML registration - Why you should never let AI do your calculations, and what to do instead - Why confident, beautifully presented AI errors are harder to spot than a junior's - What this all means for junior roles and the future of the profession My honest take ... this was one of the most eye-opening chats I've had all year. Alexis is refreshingly straight about where AI is brilliant and where it's genuinely dangerous. 👉 The recording is here (Please help support the YouTube channel by Liking the video and subscribing). Have a watch, then tell me in the comments ... would you ever let AI loose on your own year-end accounts? 👇