“Not having the answer is no longer acceptable because you are 30 seconds from having the answer. You’ve just gotta ask.” – Don Tomoff
Don Tomoff, founder of Invenio Advisors, is a finance rockstar and a trailblazer in AI adoption for finance. As a CMA his life’s mission is to make work easier for literally everyone he encounters. The CMA and finance expert has more than 30 years of experience spanning accounting, being a CFO, and consulting. Don Tomoff is not just an expert in his field including AI. He’s a passionate advocate for using technology to drive efficiency and innovation.
In this episode, Don emphasizes how AI has transformed the speed at which financial professionals can access information and solve problems. “Right now, if you’re doing AI, you have a huge advantage against those that aren’t. But I think in the next year or so, you’re going to quickly shift to, it’s a liability for you if you aren’t doing it.”
In this episode
- Streamling finance tasks as an accountant and FP&A
- Why efficiency is only a part of the finance AI revolution
- Biggest area ripe for AI FP&A Disruption?
- Democratization of data science
- Retrieval augmented generation to analyze hundreds of documents (for instance filings)
- Get the Paid Plan
- TwinzTalk Tips
- Why what hat you can do in two minutes gets done
- Distinctions between OpenAI and Claude
- Finance in five years
- Power Query and UNIQUE
Follow and connect with Don Tomoff on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dontomoff/
Full transcript
Glenn Hopper:
Welcome back to FP&A Today, where we talk about the latest trends in technologies shaping the world of financial planning and analysis. I’m your host Glenn Hopper, and today we have a very special guest who I think his life’s mission is to make work easier for literally everyone he encounters. Wtih over 30 years of experience spanning accounting, finance, and consulting. Don Tomoff is not just an expert in his field. He’s a passionate advocate for using technology to drive efficiency and innovation. Don is the founder of Invenio Advisors, a consulting firm and a speaker and trainer on data and tech related topics. From his early adoption of chat GPT to his ongoing mission to educate finance professionals on the power of ai, Don has been leading the charge in helping organizations think differently and work smarter. Today we’re gonna tap into Don’s wealth of knowledge and hear how generative AI can revolutionize the way we work in finance. Don, welcome to the show. .
Don Tomoff:
Wow, I can just go now. I I’m that such a great intro. And, and Glenn, just an aside, I, I always hear this, that I’m passionate about this, and, you know, and you are right. I try to help people. I always say not really, but I am nuts about making work disappear. Okay. I always have been,
Glenn Hopper:
You and I fear this in common. It’s that quote, and I think it, it’s, it’s often misattributed to like Steve Jobs, but it is, if you want to find the most efficient way to do something, give the job to a lazy person. And that’s me. I’m like, if there’s something that I’m, you’re gonna expect me to do every day, I’m gonna spend 40 hours if I have to automating it and never do it again. Yeah,
Don Tomoff:
No, that’s, that’s why you and I get along so well.
Glenn Hopper:
Yep. Yep. <Laugh> and our shared passion for for generative ai, which we, we’ve got so much to cover here. We’ve gotta get into this.
Don Tomoff:
Dig in. Let’s
Glenn Hopper:
Go. So just a, a little little background. Don and I have known each other a couple of years now. We’ve done several speaking engagements before, and Don brings the energy and I bring sort of the pedantic lecturing. So Don, I’m gonna count on you to keep the energy up in this conversation, and I’ll try
Don Tomoff:
Not to get, it’s hard, it’s hard, but I’ll try.
Glenn Hopper:
<Laugh>. So, I guess to start, you and I have, have been talking for years on this, and you’ve been deeply involved with generative AI since it first became available. Walk me through kinda what initially drew you to this technology and, and, and how it’s evolved. And it’s funny, I’m saying evolved. This has only been a couple of years since we were at like GPT-3 0.5, but walk me through your experience so far with it.
Don Tomoff:
I can remember, and, and Glenn, it’s December 5th, 2022, and I can remember starting working with it. And one of the things, and I, I’ll refer to Seth Godin, who’s a marketing guy that I follow, and, and one of his blog posts is Build a hundred hour asset. If you invest a hundred hours into learning anything, you will have a skill that very few people will get to, even at that. And I remember, and as you know, my, I have a twin brother, bill, who’s a finance guy, and we just started saying, okay, we’re gonna start tapping the pipe every day, at least 15 minutes. And literally, we’d get up, I would get up and then first thing in the morning, all right, I’m gonna try this, I’m gonna try this. And as you know, it doesn’t always work, and especially back then, but it would just get things so far along that I was like, I, I could just see a, an explosion of opportunity, which has only gotten crazier since then. And, you know, we both know Tom Hood, and one of the, I remember it was probably mid-December, I sent Tom a, a email and I said, Tom, AI, let’s not miss this one. Okay. Because there’s so much opportunity and it, and it’s just gone crazy ever since then.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. And Tom at AI, CPA has been, I mean, he’s, he’s all in on it too. So the three of us get together and it’s just nerd fed <laugh>. Yeah,
Don Tomoff:
Yeah, exactly. It’s fun. A lot of fun. And that, the other comment I was gonna make is, you know, as you were asking about you know, how’s it evolved? And since then, and I go, it really comes down to a mindset. You’re gonna get bad answers. You’re gonna get things that don’t work, don’t give up on it. You know, you just gotta, you just gotta keep trying things. And generally, I always say, if it’s not giving you the answer, you’re right. It’s generally because I’m not giving it a prompt that is accurate enough or fully developed enough.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. And on that note, so you know, obviously finance folks listening to this and, and you and I both with the, with the finance background I think one of the things that I see talking to finance people is, well, yeah, it’s great for, for writing, marketing copy, but, you know, I, in finance, I can’t just have black box things being created. I don’t know how I could possibly use this. And I, I always wanna tell him, you should be meet my buddy Don <laugh> <laugh>. So, you’ve tried so many things with generative ai. Can you give us some examples of how you’ve implemented AI to streamline some tasks and the finance related?
Don Tomoff:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I spend, like most accountants, we spend the majority of our time in, in fp and a, which is, your focus is no different. We spend a lot of time with data, and we spend a lot of time in Excel and Power BI and those tools and, and summarizing stuff. So when I started using it, I said, okay, if I’m using Excel or I’m drafting a document, I would start with ai. And there’s a, a phrase that’s become a little bit popular in the past month or so, it’s called an AI first mindset. Okay. And, and I’m sure you do this, if I’m thinking about something, I go right to ai. I don’t go to Google. I haven’t gone to Google first, probably in a year and a half. So it’s making that a priority and just seeing what it returns and working with it.
So I always say, start where you are and, and people will you know, start to focus on, okay, well, but it does bad things and it can, it can hallucinate. Yeah. But if you’re doing things that you know the answers to, it’s just gonna get you there and go, yeah. That, that’s it. An example would be, I can have it right in Excel, a complicated Excel formula. Well, if you know Excel, you’ll quickly realize maybe that’s not the best way to do it. Can it use the IFS function instead of a nested if function? Things like that, you know, and you’re not muscling through the syntax yourself. That’s probably the biggest thing that hit me immediately.
Glenn Hopper:
I love your approach to this, and it reminds me a lot of, I’m sure you follow Conor Grennan
Don Tomoff:
Yeah.
Glenn Hopper:
And his, and he’s, he’s got a new course out on it too, but it is, everybody
Don Tomoff:
Should follow him, by the way. Yes.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. He’s, he’s, he’s got a great approach to this. And every time someone asks me about prompt engineering, I kind of have the same response I think that you would, and that he would, it’s, I’m not gonna just give you canned prompts that you just copy and paste in, because that’s not how you’re gonna get the most benefit. That’s like, that’s handing you a fish. And the, the AI is not always gonna respond the same way. So instead of, you know, just thinking, I’m gonna copy and paste prompts in here, or I’m gonna be this great prompt engineer, instead, it’s understanding how to use it. And like you said, I, I think that’s great advice because whatever domain you’re in, you’re the expert in that, you know, if it’s on the right track or not. And then you can tweak it. I’m not gonna know the expertise that, that you have and what you’re doing.
So if you’re able to actually fine tune and, and tweak the prompting, then you know, you’re gonna get better results that way. And here’s one thing I think I talk to a lot of CFO level people and, and people in, in the upper ranks. And what I always tell them is AI is not, like if you’re putting in a new ERP or a new CRM system, it’s not gonna be a top down directive. The way you’re gonna get the most results out of it, it’s gonna be bottom up. You give it to the frontline workers, put the policies in place, let ’em understand data privacy, make sure you’re in a protected environment. But people are gonna figure out, if you give them basic training on how to use this, they’re gonna figure out how to make themselves more efficient. And it’s gonna spread that way, rather than you telling them, use it this way, you know, coming from an on high.
Don Tomoff:
Absolutely. And as soon as you start, and I, you know, I’ve had a few people at, at talks I’ve given, said that what really triggered them, and I think this is a great idea, we get into this a little further, but they say that if they, they used it for personal reasons, planning, vacation, you know, doing whatever. And when they started to see those dots connecting, they immediately went, okay, wait a minute. I, I can do this for work. And it started the momentum going. And that’s really the best way to, you know, do something you enjoy with it and see where it goes from there.
Glenn Hopper:
At this point, and I know we have a, a running bet with someone at the AICPA about how many people are gonna be exposed to this and using generative ai. But I think that that’s good advice is okay, I understand day one, you’re not on a paid plan, you’re not in a, you know, protected environment or whatever. Yeah. You’re not dumping proprietary information in there, but you’ve at least gotta go use it and understand the potential here. And once the more you use it, the more you understand the potential. And I think I’m now talking to companies more and more who are leaning in and they are giving their employees this, these tools, and they’re starting to see some pretty amazing results from it. Yeah. one example I saw to your formula comment to Tipalti they’ve leaned the, you know, the billing the AP company, they’ve, they’ve leaned pretty far into ai and this guy who pretty good Excel guy, finance guy had a report that it was gonna, taking him an hour every day that he had to put together.
And he’d never done macros before or any kind of programming, and he just thought, I’m not gonna spend five hours a week doing this. So he spent about, ’cause he didn’t know what he was doing, <laugh>, he said it took him 12 to 14 hours back and forth with I think he was using chat GPT and Claude. But he figured out he’d never done any kind of programming, figured out how to automate this report, saved an hour a day that he, on a report he was gonna have to do through the end of the year. And that is the perfect example of something that would’ve just been mindless work. He figured it out. And now though that he’s done that, he’s sharing it with other people in the organization and they’re figuring out ways to automate things. So this is just, I mean, this is the biggest efficiency booster to come along since the calculator, I dunno, <laugh> well,
Don Tomoff:
You just mentioned Glenn and I, I, there’s really three categories that I think of, and I think you and I’ve talked about this before. Everybody thinks of efficiency. Okay. I’m doing what I do faster. Okay. Yeah. That’s a piece of it. Another piece is because you can do things so much more efficiently and effectively, you start doing things that you wouldn’t have done before. And the example I use is we’re documenting things that we really should have been documenting all along Excel workbooks, processes, whatever it is now, it’s easy to do. So we do it. And then the story you just told goes to the top level, which is, we’re doing things that we could not do. Okay. This person writing macros. That’s my biggest win organizationally, is I used to outsource automation of things that I had would build for clients. I haven’t had to do that since January of 2023. And, and it’s enabled building some really sophisticated models. Okay. Which, that’s what is hidden. There’s an effectiveness there that is like, once you get the hang of tinkering with it, you start to put things together that will literally rock your world.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, yeah. You know, thinking about it. And as companies start to figure it out, and as the employees get good at their particular jobs, it’s gonna, it’s gonna trickle upstream and you’re gonna start seeing it impact, you know, at, at a department level. And I love that you mentioned documenting things because one, you know, the, the former CFO in me is thinking about controls and thinking about SOCs and <laugh> and data and, and having more documentation around it. That’s huge. But then this, so it all builds on itself. So maybe the SOPs that you had before were lacking, but you have to sort of create these SOPs so that you can feed it into the AI so that it automates, but you also in turn get better SOPs. And as the AI gets better, you can automate more. So you can, if you take functions and you have all these SOPs across ’em, well, once you have the AI moving across, connecting to various systems through APIs, connecting to data through it, and you know what the process is, that’s what you use to train the ai and then you get even more efficient.
Yeah. So it just builds on itself.
Don Tomoff:
That’s exactly right. It’s hard to comprehend, and we know this, but the speed that things happen at, we’re just, we cannot conceive of until you get in and start doing it, you know, that that just output and the quality is so much better. And I like to say it, if you’re a football fan, it gets you to the 20 yard line every time.
Glenn Hopper:
We’re talking about individual use cases, but how do you see generative AI transforming fp and a, like what specific areas have you seen, have you played around with where you can say, Hey, this area is pretty ripe for disruption by ai?
Don Tomoff:
Well, the big one to me, and this is something you’ve touched on, is analytics. And it’s, I think what you’re doing is you no longer need to understand exactly how to clean data. It’ll explain to you what you can do, or if you can give it the data, it’ll do it for you. So I, I like to explain that the days of, as a, as a leader or a senior person handing off data to a, a team and saying, Hey, I need this analysis. We’re gonna quickly move away from that where preliminary analysis will be coming out of the senior level because they’re just going to be able to explain what they want and get it done. And there’s, there’s people far more knowledgeable than me about integrating Python into, you know, advanced data analysis uses Python, we’re all all gonna be using Python and code via chat GPT, and doing things that never before would we have even thought about doing. So, I mean, to me, that’s, that’s a huge win. You know, and you, and you look at that and you go, how does that ripple through an organization? Everybody’s gonna have data skills and automation skills because you don’t have to know the nuances necessarily of every single little piece that is getting done.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. And that’s a great point. And I always think of it like this. So we’ve been talking about democratization of data for what, I don’t know, 15 years or more now.
Don Tomoff:
Yep. But
Glenn Hopper:
What AI gives us, what generative AI gives us is democratization of data science, because, you know, there’s a lot of cool stuff you can do with data, but historically to do that, you had to know Python or r and you had to be able to write SQL queries or know Power BI and all that. But now you can in natural, like, it, it’s like English or whatever your natural spoken language is, becomes a new programming language because you can say, build, build me a random forest machine learning algorithm that will determine if these loans are gonna default or not. You know, so there’s so many applications and you can do it now without having to wait on data engineers, because the data analytics tools will do it. I’m really in a couple of my courses that I’m teaching on it, I’m really pushing the limits on it. Loan approval is one that I just did in one of my courses. Also. I just built one yesterday trying to predict the likelihood of a recession based on 30 years of of financial data. So just grabbing stuff from the Federal Reserve Yep. And plugging it in and trying to predict recession. And that’s the kind of thing I did that in a couple hours that would’ve taken me days in Excel. Exactly. You know, I just think into the old days of doing that
Don Tomoff:
And you wouldn’t have done it because Exactly. We dont have the Exactly. We don’t have the time. Okay. In fact, one of the examples I use when I, when I speak is I use a slide of a growth stock of Amazon and Netflix. ’cause I’m making a point that entire chart was built just by feeding it stock activity by week for 20 years and asking ChatPT to build it. So I didn’t have to clean the data. I didn’t have to do anything. You get, as you know, from doing the charts, you gotta play with that a little bit to get it right. But it’s right there. Literally in five minutes, I have a chart that I wouldn’t been able to do that. Now I will say, one of the things I, the point of validating, I asked it to put a box on the chart showing me the annualized return over those 20 years. And intuitively I said, yeah, those are right. But I went to Excel and I proofed it. Okay. <laugh>, I said, I’m, I’m not gonna put this out there if I don’t know for a fact that those are right.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. So trust but verify, right? Like, we’re not, yep. We’re not turning over the, the keys to the kingdom to our new robot overlords, <laugh>. But we’re leaning on them pretty hard. But we’re gonna check everything they do, especially if I’m a public company, CFO, I’m not signing anything that the, the robot put together for me yet. But well,
Don Tomoff:
And I I always say don’t trust and verify.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. Yeah.
Don Tomoff:
That’s just don’t even think it’s right. Which, which, Glenn, you did this at our session back in December last year, the future finance where we were kicking analysis on public filings. Okay. And one of the things that you can do now, and I think this is an improvement because they’ve tied into the internet. I can give it a link to a 10K and have it summarize the MD&A for me. Tell me what the risk factors are. You know, and I came out of investor relations. It’s unbelievable that you can just literally give it a link and say you could look at 10 companies in a matter of minutes knowing that you have to check the information it gives you,
Glenn Hopper:
I’ve gone a step further since then. So I’m using automation tools where, so in, you know, instead of building the GPTs, you can build the behind the scenes, the assistance on OpenAI where you, you know, it, it’s basically GPT, but it’s not, you’re still not coding, but you’re just you know, writing in more. It’s not a, a prompt back and forth, but you can put in documents. And for that 10 k analysis what I’ve done is created an army of bots. And so some of them are experts at creating charts. Some of them are experts on sort of the qualitative overview. Some of them are experts at, you know, financial ratios. And what I’ll do is I’ve, I’ve used a couple of them. The e the most accessible is make.com. It’s just a drag and drop automation tool. But I’ve used flow wise and some others that where you can use retrieval, augment generation, where you can drop more documents in and have it referred to it. But like, I’ll, I’ll have one bot who is just there, <crosstalk> now it’s
Don Tomoff:
Just behind the scenes in chat GPT.
Glenn Hopper:
So it’s actually, you interface it through, so you can put a web hook in. So I’ve got a, you know, a web interface and I can just upload a 10 K into my web book. And it’s, we’re still testing, so it’s not publicly available yet. But when you put the 10 K in and all you do is click a button, it costs about a buck to run because I’ve got so many assistants
Don Tomoff:
And you’re tying into the API to do this, obviously. Yep, yep,
Glenn Hopper:
Yep. So it’s passing through, but it takes that 10 K and it gives it to all these different bots, and then they aggregate everything and assemble it. So, because you know how it is, if you ask too much in, in one prompt or, you know, you could still, you could get a good analysis, but you’ve gotta go back and forth and back and forth. But this through some chain of thought prompting and through having these bots you walk away for, it takes about five minutes to run. ’cause It has to go through all of ’em. Some of ’em are sequential, some of ’em can run together. But then you get this report that don it looks as good as what I would, you know, expect a financial, a human financial analyst output. And you get it in five minutes and it cost a buck. Yeah. Okay.
Don Tomoff:
<Laugh>. Yeah. And for, and somehow I’m on the short list to get that. I don’t know when, but I am <laugh>
Glenn Hopper:
<Laugh>. Yeah. Maybe when we talk about that at future Finance in December. Yeah,
Don Tomoff:
No, that, that is what we talk about. But anyway, what you said is, you know, I’ve taken it to another level as usual, you’ve taken it about a hundred levels, but that’s okay. <Laugh>. I can’t wait to actually see that work.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. I figured since I have AI R&D in my title, I better be pushing the limit <laugh>. Otherwise I don’t get to use that title anymore. <Laugh>,
Don Tomoff:
What are we paying you for? Yeah, <laugh>. No, that’s, that’s actually, that’s fabulous. I mean, I can’t wait to see it. ’cause When you look at just, people worry about confidential information as they should. Okay. But when you’re dealing with public company information, that’s just a big sandbox. Okay. you’re gonna learn a ton like you’re doing, just playing with that. And if you’re in that world, if you’re an accountant, I always tell people, if you’re an accountant and you’re doing reporting, you should be looking at SEC filings, whether you’re public, private, or whatever. And you’re gonna learn a ton and chat. GPT has just made it insanely easy to, to do that.
Glenn Hopper:
And to that end, if you wanted to build a GPT that was an expert at, at filings, what you would do is load up, you know, here are a hundred, you know, you’d have them from different industries or whatever, but here are a hundred different filings from these different companies. And you don’t even, you don’t have to train it, tell it what to do. It’s just got access to ’em. And so you want to do your own filing. It’s got these in its knowledge base. You ask it to start drafting a filing. Now you’re, again, you’re not gonna just take the human out of the loop and just turn it over, but you suddenly have a shell for your filing that is solid and you’re, you get it immediately.
Don Tomoff:
So let me ask you this, what you just described there, it sounds like a GPT on steroids, overdrive, whatever. I mean, because you’re really limited in A GPT to just upload
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah.
Don Tomoff:
Like 10 documents. So Yes.
Glenn Hopper:
Good. Yeah. Good point there. Okay. So, but with the assistance and with something called retrieval augmented generation, where you can actually put these external documents in and have it refer to them. And then you, you can also use these documents to fine tune. So now chat, GPT just announced that you can fine tune 4.0 and it’s, again, you don’t have to be a programmer, but you take all these documents, you fine tune it, then you use the Retrie retrieval augmented generation, and you’ve got not just the, the generalist, you’ve got a subject matter expert on whatever you’re tuning it for. But this is, this is to your, to your point, to be fair, it’s not just the GPT you create, but anyone who has the paid account can go into the playground at OpenAI and make it. You just have to, but then it’s asking a little more. You have to go and be able to you know, have the API that goes into it and, and a way to call it and output and all that. So,
Don Tomoff:
Yeah, I wanna make sure that you jot down a note right now that we’re gonna set up a call for you to show me what you’re talking about.
Glenn Hopper:
Okay. We’ll do it. We’ll do it <laugh>. And actually, so you know what, Don, what we’ve done is we’ve gone too deep though, and you are the master of taking the fear away from people. So actually I wanna, I want to get out of that nerd level. Sure. And just in case we’ve in, in case we’ve lost anybody, stick around for one more second because <laugh>, because Don’s gonna make this approachable and accessible here. So, and,
Don Tomoff:
And he lost me too, so that, you guys are all good.
Glenn Hopper:
<Laugh> <laugh>. So to that end, what advice do you have for finance people who have, you know, they’ve heard about this, maybe they’ve done some things on the personal side, but if they want to start, they wanna upskill, upskill, they wanna start thinking about using this, what advice do you have for people who aren’t out there building their own assistance?
Don Tomoff:
And, and that’s, that’s a great question. I, I, I always say one, and, and this is not very successfully do I get this, but I always say, get the paid plan. Okay. I, that’s just a given. Okay. There’s just that big a difference between the free and the, and the, and everybody always asks what plans I pay for? I pay for Claude and Chat g pt, those are the two. Okay. And I also use Perplexity a lot and some of the other ones. But get the paid plan. Okay. Let’s assume you don’t. What else would I recommend? Go mobile, put these things on your mobile devices. Make it so that they’re right there, that I can open it up and ask questions. And I’m sure you’ve done this, Glen, but being able to talk to the app of ChatGPT when I’m in my car or out on a walk is absolutely insane What you can get done at any time.
And then I, I say, you know, I talked about this earlier, but start, just start e everything starts with just starting and then don’t stop. Okay. It’s just, you’ve gotta stick with it through thick or thin. You’re gonna have some wins, you’re gonna have some failures. Just stick with it. And then look for the easy wins. And then finally, collaboration. You know, find a group of people that, you know, kind of are trying to figure this out and do it together. It’s your organization, whether, you know, Glenn and I are a perfect example. And Tom Hood, we, we trade ideas all the time. Okay. And it, and it’s just making sure you stick with it. And, and I know we’re gonna talk about this, but it’s changing. It has changed so much from when we started to today. You really just gotta start running on the treadmill and keeping up with it. Yeah.
Glenn Hopper:
And I, I love the collaboration and networking part of that too, because there are so many groups out there. There’s, I’m involved with the chief executive group. There’s a AI connect that they have where there, we do monthly calls. There’s a, you know, interaction going on between the community. We do a bunch of tips and demos. There’s Nicholas Boucher has the AI Finance Club. Yep. Yep. I mean, there’s, there’s a, a million groups out there. And really the best learning comes from everybody’s out there trying it. They’re, they’re coming up with new use. It goes back to my idea of it’s not top down. It’s coming from the community itself. And this is a really unique technology in that way.
Don Tomoff:
And you described the, the person who developed an automated program, you know, on a much smaller scale, you can automate things in Excel in like two minutes, never having written code before. You know, you start with that, you’ll start to feel what this can do. And it will explain, and this is one of my favorite features, Glenn, I don’t know if you do this or not, but I’m doing training. Some people’ll say, well, okay, how do you do that?
And I always ask if they’re with their laptops, have your laptops open? Okay. Ask ChatGPT, how do we do this? Okay, ask it. How do I get it to open to a specific page in an Excel workbook? Oh, that’s the auto work. It’s the workbook open VBA. That’s exactly right. You don’t have to explain it because the answer is right immediately available. Which one of my favorite expressions, Glenn, which when I talk to people I go not having the answer is no longer acceptable because you are 30 seconds from having the answer. You’ve just gotta ask.
Glenn Hopper:
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You know, another thing that I think about is, we encounter this all the time. So we’re talking to finance and accounting people who are inherently risk averse, <laugh>. And you know, they think this all sounds great, but they’re just, this is unknown to me. It’s a, it’s a black box. I don’t know what sort of voodoo magic is going on. I’m not touching it. So and you know, you can, you can give the demos and you can talk about it. And I think you and I probably see a lot of the same challenges, but also opportunities. So maybe talk to me about when you go out and you talk to these groups of finance and accounting professionals, what are some challenges you’ve seen when talking to ’em? And I, I don’t wanna just keep it negative because I think we’re also Right. Very smart people, and there’s also kind of a, a positive side. There’s a, that moment, I love it when you see the light kind of go on with people in, in these demos sometimes. But walk me through maybe some of the challenges Yeah. And opportunities you see just from talking to the groups you do,
Don Tomoff:
I, I recently did a session. This kind of ties into what you talk about. I love it when the light bulb goes off. I did a session and, and I do, I repeatedly say, if you’re not on the plus plan, get on it. Okay. And one of the young guys came up after the session. He says, do you collect an affiliate fee for recommending chat GPT? I go, no, I don’t. I go, but I get a fee. It’s called a feel good fee. I feel good whenever somebody adopts it and they, that light bulb goes off. So yeah, the mindset’s the biggest thing mindset. You, you’ve got to realize that we don’t like change. But if I’m not doing this, and, and Glenn, I’d love your opinion on this. I mean, right now, if you’re doing ai, you have a huge advantage against those that aren’t okay.
If you’re integrating it into your workflow. But I think in the next year or so, you’re going to quickly shift to, it’s a liability for you if you aren’t doing it. Okay. Oh, totally. It, it’s gonna be expected that you’re gonna be able to augment your work and be able to go toChatGPT to figure things out. In fact, Glenn, I got one quick story I wanna share with you. I was doing a panel at a conference, and one of the people on the panel, this is an accounting firm, he was talking about an intern. He was talking to an intern and he said, well, here’s what we need to do. We need to take the information. He says, I don’t know how we’re gonna do this, but you know, we gotta get this done. So this gal disappeared, comes back in 15 minutes, and Daniel was this guy’s name.
She goes, Daniel, I was able to get chatGPT to write a macro to automate almost all of the data retrieval. This is an intern. And I go, okay, did you hire her on the spot? Because everything she demonstrated right there, that’s what you’re looking for. Initiative, thought process. How can I do this better? And that’s the level that thinks to you talking about bottoms up. That’s where it’s happening. Okay. You give ’em a challenge and they’re like, you and I going, well, I’m not gonna go sit for a day and try and finger this stuff into a spreadsheet. I’m gonna see if I can do it easier. Yep. Okay.
Glenn Hopper:
Yep.
Don Tomoff:
So mindset, there is no easy answer. Okay? An accountant, and I’m even closer to the accounting world than you are. I’m a CPA, and you know, I’ve been in the shoes that they’re in. It’s hard. It’s really hard because you don’t have time. I just talked to A CFO and I said, he said, man, I wish I had time to figure this stuff out. I go, nobody has time. You gotta find the time. I mean, I don’t think you woke up, Glenn, back before you started to write your first book when all this stuff wasn’t even like on anybody’s radar, I don’t think you woke up and said, I got a year to fill, so I’m gonna write this book. <Laugh>. Yeah, <laugh>. Right? <laugh>.
But, but on the other hand, and I think the, the thing of having to figure something out is daunting to people. Okay. They, it is just, I’m not sure. I don’t know where to start, et cetera, so on and so forth. And you mentioned Conor Grennan it’s one of the reasons I love following him. He’s got a very practical thought process to explain how to approach these things. But you talked about the opportunities, if, if you’re a knowledge worker, okay, and we’re focusing on FP&A, but just in general, if you’re a knowledge worker, this is a career changer. It’s going to just open up so many opportunities and doors for you.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. And it goes back to that sort of, you know, how are we gonna get more efficient? And, you know, I don’t think anybody, you don’t go get a master’s in accounting or, or finance because you wanna be a data entry person. And you know, I think young in your career, it is fun putting together really cool models in Excel. But as you progress through your career and you, you want to sort of broaden what you’re doing and the value that you’re adding beyond just building a model, it’s, it, then it becomes about interpreting and driving. Yeah. And, and sort of understanding what the assumptions are in the model and all that. And if you’re spending, if your whole team is spending their time focused on that, rather than on doing kind of the, you know, building out the massive nested ifs and pivot tables and slicers and all the cool stuff that we, yeah. Honestly, it’s still fun, Don. It’s, it’s still fun to do, do stuff in Excel, but
Don Tomoff:
<Laugh> Well, it’s, it’s even more fun if you do it in 10% of the time that you used to do it. Exactly.
Glenn Hopper:
Exactly. Yeah. <laugh>. But,
Don Tomoff:
But you just made a point, and I, it just slipped away from me. But you made a point that and this is where I come from, and both of us, Glenn, are our senior level finance people. So we’re used to working with the staff people and the managers. And I, I always say, if you’re a CFO, if you’re a senior fp and a person, you need to have an awareness of what’s cap, what the possibilities are, so that you know what your team should be understanding and integrating. Okay. Like away from AI for a second, if you’re using Excel, your team’s working with data, and if they’re working with data, or if they’re using Power bi, they have got to know Power Query and Power Pivot. Okay. They gotta understand data transformation, and they gotta understand data modeling. But if it’s a leader, we can’t point that out. It’s not a priority to
Glenn Hopper:
Them to learn it. I don’t know how often you do these A lot. It’s, it’s, it’s like almost hard to keep up <laugh>, but Twins talk and your, your tips,
Don Tomoff:
And I, and I’m doing very well.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, <laugh>. But twins talk, the, the tips you give on LinkedIn, they’re always so practical. And also you have a better skill of, whenever I try to write something, I just ramble and blow it up. You give these like quick hit, fast tip that you can get in, in like 30 seconds. So talk me. So those, I think they’re all twins talk tips. Yeah.
Don Tomoff:
Yeah. Talk
Glenn Hopper:
Me through that. And you’re at like 1300, 1400 of those tips. 1327
Don Tomoff:
<Laugh>. Okay. Glenn, I’m glad, I’m glad you brought that up. Twins talk with a Z on LinkedIn, on Twitter at different places. It’s me and my twin brother. I tend to focus on the, what I call practical tips. But one of the things I’ve really started doing, because it struck me the other day, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the two minute rule. Okay. The two minute rule is, and this is a David Allen I forget off the top of my head, I forget the book, but it was productivity book years ago. And this is, if it takes less than two minutes to do something, do it right then. Okay? Don’t put it off. You’ll waste more time thinking about doing it later. And I said, well, with ai, so many things have moved into the two minute task, okay? And that’s always been a mantra of mine.
If I can get this done in two minutes, so how do I do that? Well, I get digital information instead of paper. I convert everything to electronic. I have search capabilities instead of having to click on folders, et cetera. But when you, when you start using AI and you go, which you quickly realize that things now become two minute tasks. And that’s really, I’ve started adding that hashtag because when I do something, and I did this one the other day, you may have seen it, but I was driving home from the East coast, and I’m gonna be doing a Power Query session. So I just go into Whisper, which is the transcription voice part of GPT app. I’m driving, I said, I’d like 20 or 10 Power query transformations. Explain what, why, and how for each one, I’d like 10 more done it. Okay. Explain, give me, well, no, at that point I said, I would like you, and this is talking to it, I would like you to export an Excel file with those with a grid and columns for what, why, and how really on my phone while I’m driving.
And that was a two to two to three minute task. And I go, you don’t really think about how fast these, well, you don’t know how fast these things can get done, but the voice and whisper is like crazy. Okay. We talked about personal use, you know, you want to, you want to get into that. So I tend to focus, at least I, I hope we do, we tend to focus on things that people are gonna be able to immediately use. And you can tell if you, but by the way, Glenn, if you talk ai, we talk Excel, those posts tend to resonate really well. If I talk about knowledge management, which we hit a little bit before <laugh> <laugh>.
So, so those are, you know, and why do we do that? Because if I learn it or you learn it, Glenn, and you’re the same way, Hey, I can help somebody. It’s not hard to just share that. Okay. That’s a, that’s a passion. You talk about a passion of helping people do things better, that’s probably where it shines through the most. And I’m, I’m the only other ones have we talked about this gen Glen, but you talked about the prompt engineering. You know, I really like to recommend that people lean into the custom gpt.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. ’cause Yeah. Yeah. And we haven’t, we haven’t talked you, I know you and I talk a lot about it. Yeah. And we, and I took us off down the road with the assistance, but custom gpt Yeah. Actually fill us in a little bit on that, because that’s, well, that’s an area,
Don Tomoff:
Well, it’s, you know, I’ve written not as many as you, but I only have probably three or four that I share, but I’ve written 20 of ’em. And yeah, it does, it take a little bit of figuring out. Sure. Okay. But as an organization, I could easily see these things being everywhere in an organization. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Moderna White paper. Moderna has 750 gpts that people have developed. And I go, this is real. Okay. And, and they do, they do anything but the, but the beauty of ’em, for folks that don’t know, is it eliminates the need to do prompting. So I have one that’s an Excel formula. I call it the Excel formula dominator. You’re no longer thinking about how to write formulas. You’re asking it what to do, and it’s doing it. I was talking to a client the other day and I said, we’re, we’re doing formulas and functions. And I said, pick a form, pick a function that you don’t understand. And they go, and we had a list of all these functions. They said, indirect. I said, okay, let’s ask chat GPT using this GPT to explain that function. It gives me a full, nice laid out function. Then I go, now create an Excel, create an example and export. Give me the example in an Excel workbook. And within two minutes, I had a simple example of the indirect function in an Excel workbook that I could share with somebody.
Glenn Hopper:
Okay. So I, that, that actually begs another question because I, I have used GPT to write formulas, and it’s been a while since I’ve done it, because I’m not in an Excel as much. I’m more in, you know
Don Tomoff:
Yeah.
Glenn Hopper:
Programming kind of stuff. But when I used to do it, and maybe there’s a better way now, if I wanted to be able to just copy and paste the formula, I would say, okay, I have a table. It’s in, you know, C five to, to F 316 or whatever. Because I, I want, do, you know, I don’t know, a v lookup or, or whatever I’m doing, I, I want it to have the exact right cells. So all I have to do is copy and paste. But it takes a while to say, you know, so how do you have it set up so that it’s giving you actually the right cell references
Don Tomoff:
When you’re <crosstalk>? I think that’s a complete setup question, but it’s good. I would use vision, take a screenshot. Oh, so it can see the columns and the rows and it will figure it out.
Glenn Hopper:
That’s awesome. Yeah. Yeah. We haven’t even talked about vision. Right.
Don Tomoff:
That’s just <laugh>. Right. You know, there’s so many things to talk about. And again, that’s the paid plan, which I’m sure you’re aware Glen, but everybody has access to the full capabilities now. But if you give somebody a GPT, they’ll get like three uses and it’ll go, eh, okay, you’re done. Gotcha. Okay. It’s like, okay, that’s nice. You tasted it. Now you have to pay if you want more. But you’re right, the, the vision, and I, I’ll tend to ask it generically how to do something before I get into a real formula. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Okay, how do I have it look up a value? You know, I have dates across the months, across top and I and products down the side. And it’ll tell you that an index match will do it. Okay. And, and you go, okay, and this is where, you know, people are concerned that these things are gonna make us easy, et cetera. I go always take that extra step to say, explain to me what’s happening here, and it will do it perfectly. Okay. So I mean, that’s a, your observation there is a, is a great example because if you’re trying to get a real precise formula, you do have to set that prompt up pretty good. Yep.
Glenn Hopper:
I love the vision idea. Okay. Okay. So that, that’s, that’s good. Good advice. Have you tried, I know it likes to deal with CSVs just because they’re smaller files than Excel. Yes. Have you tried uploading the Excel file and then telling it what you’re trying to do and see if it can reference that? And does, does that work as well?
Don Tomoff:
Yes, it can. In fact, I what I, what I primarily do not to write formulas, I don’t do that. But what, I’ll take an Excel file and say, explain the contents in here and what’s the best way to organize this data for data analysis purposes. Okay,
Glenn Hopper:
Got it.
Don Tomoff:
And it’ll actually, you know, if you’re a senior person and you didn’t wanna do it, but you wanted to analyze the data, it’ll actually do it for you and export it to an Excel file. So you could then do the analysis, but more than anything, and then Glenn, you know, when you have to do analysis, you gotta structure your data a certain way. And, and it’s not the way accountants think, it just isn’t, we think reports, dates across the top, et cetera. But it will, it will explain to you how you need to structure it, why you need to structure it that way, and it’ll help you do it.
Glenn Hopper:
I love that you said that because I just went through this yesterday. I was explaining it to someone. So we, you know, dates are the columns and then the accounts are the rows. But if you’re working in machine learning, it is, the accounts are features in the model model, and then the rows are observations. So the every account is a feature, so that’s a column and then the row. So every time I put finance in, I have to tell it to trans. If I’m trying to get something back out, I have to have it transpose it back because, you know, to the, to a machine learning model, the observations are the rows and the observations are the months. Gotcha. So it always transposes those Gotcha. Financial statements. And you always, and then the other thing it defaults to is instead of doing what we like, where the oldest date is on the left, so if you’re plotting like revenue growth or whatever, it always does it backwards. So it puts like the most recent. So it looks like the company’s tanking when actually they’re going <laugh> Yep. Going in the other direction. There’s a lot of that back and
Don Tomoff:
Forth. And what you’re, what you’re describing there, these are kind of the nuances of, of data analysis that nobody thinks about. You know, and, and it takes time. Okay. And, and once you kind of figure it out, you go, Hey, wait a minute, I can ask. And, and I don’t think, you’re not an M code or Power query guy much, are you?
Glenn Hopper:
No. No.
Don Tomoff:
Okay. Because you can actually have chat GPT write you that M code. Okay. And it, and for a guy like me, you’re getting away from the interface and saying, I would like you to create the M code that will do this, and then you just tweak it to get it to work. That’s, that’s huge. That’s mind numbing.
Glenn Hopper:
One more on, because I, I saw this on one of your twinztalks posts recently. You know, you and I try all these, we, we, we’ve banged around with, you know, Gemini Llama Chat, GPT, Claude and I always, I keep going back, I don’t wanna be a homer for open ai, <laugh> and Chat. GPT does so much. But we were talking before we started recording about Claude. Walk me through what you like about Claude and maybe some use cases. Okay. Because I do, I also have the, I have the paid, you know, the team account for OpenAI, and then I’ve got the Pro account and Claude and I, I do love the artifacts tool. I just, I don’t use it as much. So what, walk me through some of the use cases you’ve seen.
Don Tomoff:
The distinction between for me is if I’m summarizing documents, and if it’s a large document, like let’s say a couple hundred pages or you know, let’s say it could be a hundred pages and I’m thinking like, you know, McKinsey reports, stuff like that, that’s, that’s dense. I will defer to Claude to do that analysis. Now Claude doesn’t have access to the internet, so it doesn’t get any of that. Right. But it does just a phenomenal job at going through large documents that are kind of, I won’t say beyond the scope, it just does better than chat pt. On the other hand, if you’re trying to get links or you’re trying to pull things out of a document that are links, it doesn’t do very well. So I go to chat pt and it’s really what, and I know you know this, but it’s finding what works best. Okay. And, and tinkering with all these different models and going, okay, like if you’re writing a document, Glenn, and I think you described this before we got going, if you’re writing a document, Claude is much better at if you feed it documents that you’ve written and saying, okay, write this in the tone of Glenn Hopper.
Glenn Hopper:
Mm-Hmm <affirmative>,
Don Tomoff:
It’s better than chat GPT. Okay. So that’s another big advantage. And we talked about artifacts. The fact that I can create a document right in Claude and then share just that document via the artifact is, is super handy for me. It’s like, oh boy.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah.
Don Tomoff:
Yeah. That’s great.
Glenn Hopper:
The last thing I would say on that is, and I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but so in Claude Sonnet, the 3.5 is their best model right now. Yes. But the Opus three is better at writing and it’s better at long tasks. So really, I dunno if you’ve if you’ve seen that difference. Yeah. So if I’m looking to, I, I use <laugh> my, whenever I’m writing something, the phrase that I use most often is rewrite for clarity. And I’ll plug in like my mess of something and Opus does a really good job. Okay. It, I’ll just take, you know, a couple sentences or be like, I need a transition between these and it’ll, it’ll come up with something
Don Tomoff:
That is
Glenn Hopper:
Great to know. But I also noticed when you do that it picks up the AI detector will be like, ah, this is written by ai. And it’s like, well, it was edited by ai, <laugh> and <laugh> and it was a lot faster than me banging around with it. <Laugh>, bing
Don Tomoff:
Go. That’s what I say. It was started by ai.
Glenn Hopper:
Yep. Yeah. So alright, well we really appreciate the tips and if anybody’s not following Don on LinkedIn, they really are, they’re, they’re great, they’re practical and they’re quick reads, quick hits and stuff you can use. That’s the key.
Don Tomoff:
Yeah. They’re quick.
Glenn Hopper:
You and I are obviously power users. We’re, we notice every time a model is updated slightly and, and we, you know, use it enough to see that. But I think, you know, even us I’m looking around my desk here, I don’t have my crystal ball, but it maybe you have yours handy. I mean, how fast all this technology has gone. Like where, where are we in five years? What, when you and I are revisiting on the podcast, what are we talking about then? Particularly using in finance or maybe just globally, what do, what do you think just in general?
Don Tomoff:
And I think this is not our opinion, it’s what we see and is out there is practically every job is gonna be augmented by ai. Okay. It’s just, it’s just going to be, so understanding how you can take advantage of that today is absolutely critical. Getting, getting comfortable saying, okay, how do I use this, prompt it, et cetera to get it to do things that are helpful to me is key. And it takes practice. You know, again, back to that a hundred hour rule and back to quoting Tom Hood, one of his favorite expressions is we may not be able to learn everything, but we can learn to ride the wave. Okay. And that’s really the key. You, you’ve got to just do what you can to try to keep up. And Glen, I listen to some of what we talk about and I go, I, I just can’t even imagine getting there because it’s hard enough to keep up with just the things that I’m trying to focus on. Okay. It’s like I’ll see a, a on a, here are a hundred top apps. Okay, whatever. Okay. I got like two or three. Okay. Unless Glenn Hopper says, you need to look at this, I’m not gonna be looking at something else. <Laugh>. Yep. Yep. And I’m focused. That’s, that’s another one of my favorite expressions is narrow the path. Make it easy for you to stick with it. Okay. So if it’s ChatGPT and cla, okay, I’m gonna start using them. Or if it’s co-pilot Gemini, whatever it is in your, in your workflow, start with that.
Glenn Hopper:
Great points on that. And I, you know, there’s a couple other things, <laugh> that you and I talked about before. I wanted to talk about memory, but I think in the interest of time, follow Don on LinkedIn and you can learn about how to make use of memory capability on chat GPT. We’ll, we’ll give ’em a little something to, to look for there. You know, we went straight into nerd stuff. We forget there’s a human element to everybody here. So maybe for our for your followers on LinkedIn and the, and the listeners on this show, what’s something that maybe people don’t know about you? Something that they couldn’t just learn by looking on Google?
Don Tomoff:
That’s a good question. Or
Glenn Hopper:
Asking ChatGPT
Don Tomoff:
<Laugh>. Yeah. Well, that, that’s a good question actually. Fun fact is, well, I got two for you. I was the CFO at the Cleveland at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland for a year. Okay. For a year. That was a, a little break in between two of my public entity jobs, which was really fun. Some of the things we got to experience. But fun fact, my, both my brother and I were competitive college distance runners competitive marathoners for a number of years, and both two time Boston finisher. So we were serious back in our younger day on the, on the running front.
Glenn Hopper:
That’s awesome. So you two racing each other a lot too?
Don Tomoff:
Yeah. Oh yeah. In our best effort, he beat me by 30 seconds. Over a marathon, over 26 miles. It’s like, really? You think he could wait for me, but he,
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. <Laugh> <laugh>. So do you do you still do marathons?
Don Tomoff:
No, no, no. I, I barely run as I like to say, I have no place to put the pain anymore. <Laugh>. Yeah, <laugh>. But I appreciate those af those efforts. Lemme tell you, I was watching the Olympics and I go, these people are, that’s crazy.
Glenn Hopper:
I rode my bike the other day and it was about 20, it was like 26.1 miles, so I was just shy of the 26.2, and I looked down at my time and it was like an hour and 32 minutes, and I thought I, I was out there moving. I felt, I mean, I was, you know, it’s 16 miles an hour or so, and I was thinking the world’s fastest marathoners are, you know, they’re not right there with me, but they’re done in 30 minutes, like running this whole distance, two hours robot fight,
Don Tomoff:
Two hours than eight seconds is the Yeah. And, and here’s the fun fact for, for anybody that’s somewhat familiar with distance running, when he, when he set that world record, I believe in mile 24, he dropped a four 18 on the field, a four 18 mile. And you, you just, you know, think about running a hundred yards at that pace. It’s like, forget it.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. I, I haven’t done a marathon in a, a couple of years, but I’m, in recent years, I’ve been more of the if I get under four hours, that is a win.
Don Tomoff:
Oh, that’s, you know what, that’s impressive. Good for you. That is,
Glenn Hopper:
You know, it’s funny because I’ve had a lot of I’ve had some AI guys and some data guys, and I had an author on the other week, and for some people they really don’t like this question. Like one of ’em said, I, I know you ask everybody about Excel. I don’t wanna answer that, but <laugh>, I, I know you’re gonna love this question, <laugh>, and I, I bet you have a, a really good answer or two, but <laugh>,
Don Tomoff:
I got an answer, that’s for sure.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. <laugh>, what is your favorite Excel function and why?
Don Tomoff:
Okay. I would tell you two things. Not function, but capability would be Power Query. So that’s the data transformation piece. Absolutely. The, the biggest change in Excel in the last 10 years. Okay. Just crazy what it allows you, you know, we’re no longer working in access like we used to back in the two thousands, Function?. I would say that the unique dynamic array function is my favorite. And what I use it primarily for, and I get the most benefit out of it, is I’m big on creating data validation dropdown boxes and using dynamic arrays or the unique function makes it really easy. If I had to pick one, there’s more than one. But if I had to pick one, that would be it.
Glenn Hopper:
Love it. And honestly, so you know, I was a, an fp a today listener long before I was the FP today host. And I think that might be the first time I’ve heard unique, but I get it. I get it. Really. Wow. All right. Yeah, <laugh>. So now though, now though, I feel like I need to take one of your Excel courses so I can <laugh> ex expend my knowledge. Well, you, because I’m not spending near as much time as I used to in
Don Tomoff:
Excel these days. I know, but you give me the course on rag and then we’ll talk this, we’ll talk Excel <laugh>. Perfect. We’ll do it. We’ll do a trade. Yep. <laugh>. Hey, Glenn, this was, this was fantastic. Thank you for the opportunity. I’d love talking about this topic, and every time we talk, you school me on something. It’s been fantastic.
Glenn Hopper:
Well, likewise, likewise, Don and I, you know, and on and to that end for our listeners who, who have gotten their first drink from the Don Tom off fire hose of knowledge what’s the best place for for people to connect with you and learn more
Don Tomoff:
Linkedin? That’s that’s where I’m most active. You mentioned Medium, and I do, am I, I am on medium, less active than I used to be, but you know, it’s LinkedIn’s the best place to find me. And I share, we do share the twins talk tips, so there’s a steady diet of hopefully helpful in insight for people.
Glenn Hopper:
Excellent. Excellent. Well, Don, thank you again for coming on.
Don Tomoff:
Thank you, Glenn. Thanks very much. <Silence>.
