Overview
Our business is seeking a part-time Consulting Director of AI to lead our team in improving the use of AI in our accounting business of about 30 accountants. We have used AI for some obvious and easy examples (such as rewriting parts of our training and process manuals, translating documents from our international clients), but we are looking for a thought leader who can guide us in exploring AI in more advanced ways. Our business has accountants and business managers who are generally comfortable with software and technology, but none have the time or focus to become the thought leader for what is possible, what is easy, and how to create a path to continuously improve our use of AI as the technology evolves.

The ideal candidate to help our team would:
– Have flexible availability to work with our team while also maintaining flexibility to work with their other existing clients.
– Have strong written and video communication skills in English.
– Have a portion of their workdays, or at least some workdays, overlap with the availability of our team’s work hours, which are primarily US work hours. Virtual live meetings will be important to align on goals and work towards solutions together.
– Genuinely enjoy working with and interacting with other team members, likely to include teaching others and soliciting user feedback.
– Charge an hourly rate and work with our leadership team regularly regarding the balance between budget and planned accomplishments.
– Work with our leadership team to establish expectations for timelines, milestones, and delivery dates, and then develop a track record of reliably accomplishing those on time.

Possible Projects

Overview
We are looking for a thought leader regarding AI who understands how AI can improve our business using examples from other businesses and experience. It is not our intention to dictate exactly what should be done and for you to simply implement it. We want you to understand our business and our existing processes and propose initiatives and solutions. We are looking for solutions that are possible with existing technology and without substantial programming or customization. Solutions that require custom programming in Python or other computer languages will be considered if you highly recommend them, but that is not the hope or expectation.

Easy Projects
– PDF Summarization: Create an easy, step-by-step guide for using AI to review, critique, and summarize any PDF. We receive legal contracts to review, for example. I have experimented with this, and there are a number of solutions out there (including ChatGPT 4, which seems to be making this easier). The objective would be to create a simple, step-by-step guide (possibly with screenshots) that can be distributed to all team members explaining the steps to do this.

– Other Guides: Similar to reading PDFs, there may be useful ways that team members can use AI in their profession that are not widely known. Identify those (if any), propose them to our leadership team, and create guides for our team on how to use them.

Medium Projects
– Custom-Trained ChatGPT for Our Team: Our team members use ChatGPT for regular tasks such as researching business topics or tax codes to reduce research time based on widely available information on the internet. It would be my intention and hope to have a custom ChatGPT model in which we can also teach it about knowledge unique to our business while maintaining confidentiality. For example, if someone were to search "at our company, what is the standard process of formatting a financial report in Excel before we send it to a client" or "what are the dates of our next all-company meeting?" or "Where can I find the process doc at our company about how to do IOLTA accounting?" Our company has an extensive knowledge base hosted through Knowledge Owl that contains processes our team members follow, but there is no integration with AI-based search. Here is a short video about our existing knowledge base in case that is helpful in understanding this better:
  https://youtu.be/WhvQMCCMnGE

– Use of AI with Communication and Project Management: Our company uses Slack and email for communication and a variety of software tools to plan our deadlines and tasks and communicate those deadlines and tasks to our clients and team members. We do not use AI related to this at all. AI does not integrate with our email (Gmail-based) or Slack or our task management. We do not know if this is possible or how to implement or use it. However, our company is quite good at identifying what consistent processes are best to use. For example, if there is a way that AI could help our company communicate with every team member on Monday to ask what their top priorities and plans are for the upcoming week, identify which team members did not respond, and analyze and summarize responses for management, that might be helpful. At our company, we deliver financial reports to 50+ businesses every month. If AI were able to automate the tracking of which financial statements have been delivered, that might be helpful. If AI were able to identify that an individual does not have on his plans for the week that an important deadline is coming up, that might help us miss fewer important deadlines. We ask for your help to consider if or how AI can help our business with communication and project management, or whether we need to wait until those solutions become more mainstream.  Perhaps this would be development of an AI-powered chatbot to handle routine client inquiries, schedule meetings and provide updates on ongoing projects.

More Complex Projects
These desires might be slightly ahead of what is easy today, and therefore we may prefer to be patient rather than create extensive custom programming or development to make these happen.
– Financial Analysis: Extensive financial analysis is very important to our business, and we do all of it manually using the intelligence of the individuals on our team. We provide financial statements based in Excel (see example: https://precisionf-public.document360.io/v1/docs/precision-sample-financial-report) that show trends and details in the balance sheet and income statement of many businesses. We analyze recent numbers and long-term trends for our business owners and draw connections to provide guidance to business owners about how to improve their business – just as a great CFO should do. We would like to integrate AI when the technology is ready, as we believe AI can be more systematic in preparing written summaries of key financial analyses (such as trends in expenses and margin and balance sheet ratios), and we believe AI is probably better at noticing trends or inconsistencies that humans could miss. We seek expertise to consider how this may become a growing integration between our business processes and AI.

– Financial Statement Production:  The link just above showing the type of financial statement we provide to clients is prepared manually each month, requiring hours.  If it were possible to automate more parts of this, or to automate data analysis within the report (such as "do total assets on the balance sheet equal total liabiities + equity?", or "when last month’s Total Revenue number is reported on four different pages of the report, do the numbers all match each other?") that would be helpful.  Using AI for data visualization tools may be more efficient than having people spend time generating them.

– Accounting Data Entry and Quality Control: We currently update the QuickBooks files with bank and credit card transactions for over 200 businesses. In most situations, the bank account is electronically linked to QuickBooks and QB has developed rules like "when I see the vendor is Starbucks, record that as Meals Expense." We aren’t sure how to improve the efficiency of this process using AI, but we believe it is possible (or will be in the future) to use AI to help with this. For example, our accountants receive vendor bills as PDFs and manually enter information from those into QuickBooks by reading from the PDF. Perhaps we should be using AI to read the PDF to create an import file, then import the file to QuickBooks? These are the types of efficiency improvements we want to make in the future, but we seek a thought leader to help us with.

– Other Ideas:  If it is possible to use AI to analyze financial trends or transaction data for fraud detection, internal audit accuracy, or forecast development, that would certainly be of interest.
As a final point of emphasis, we are interested in what is already possible and reasonably easy at this time. We do not know what that is, because we do not have time to understand the details of what AI can easily do.

Marketing Related AI Projects
The items mentioned below are not expected to be the responsibility of the individual that joins our team as the AI expert, but they are mentioned here in case you believe they should be.
Our company does very little marketing, and we plan to change that. We are aware that many marketing-related tasks that historically required a trained individual can now be done using AI with much greater efficiency, including website development, email marketing, social media planning and post creation, and marketing planning. We are looking for one or more part-time individuals who would lead the following for us because, even though these can be done using AI, none of the leaders at our company have the time to learn how to use AI to do these ourselves.

– Develop and implement multiple email campaigns, likely eventually totaling hundreds of emails. For example, we want email campaigns that:
– Email our team members weekly with company updates and education topics.
– Email our clients weekly with education topics.
– Email referral partners about reasons to refer more clients to us.
– Email people who visit our website and input their email address to be on an email list.

– Develop personal branding websites for the top partners at our company so we can drive more business to the company by being the face of the brand. (These might also need separate email campaigns).

– Develop and implement a multi-channel social media plan for multiple brands we own.

Again, this is only mentioned because experts in these areas above will likely use AI as a component for fulfillment. Since this is a summary of our AI-related needs, it seemed appropriate to mention them here, at least briefly.

About Our Company
We provided outsourced, part-time accounting services to businesses, from bookkeeper through CFO. We do not provide any audit or tax services. More than half of our workforce works remotely from locations throughout the world, with the highest concentrations of international team members based in India and the Philippines. Most of our senior leaders are based in California, United States. Our core values are heavily focused on genuine and personal care for the people we meet, including team members and clients.

Additional Information
There may be other opportunities to provide similar consulting to some of our clients after our leaders are able to speak to the accomplishments from working on projects with you.

Hourly Range: $7.00-$29.00

Posted On: June 22, 2024 23:49 UTC
Category: AI Integration
Skills:Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, Data Analysis, AI Chatbot

Country: United States

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