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Mark's Article: https://sfmagazine.com/post-entry/april-2019-ai-new-risks-and-rewards/FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTMusic: (00:00)Adam: (00:00)Welcome to count me in IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm Adam Larsen and with me is my co-host Mitch Roshong. Our topic for this week's episode is actually based on an article written about artificial intelligence. Mitch, can you tell us a little bit about our speaker and what the article says?  Mitch: (00:18)Yes, absolutely. So I recently came across an article titled AI new risks and rewards written by Mark Nickerson. Mark is a CMA, CPA and MBA and is a lecturer for the state university of New York at Fredonia. I was interested in learning more about where the idea for the article came from and if Mark had any other insight into what kind of risks accounting and finance professionals should be aware of. He was nice enough to answer a couple questions for us. So let's listen to how AI could potentially increase finance fraud in the future. Mitch: (00:52)Can you tell us what led you to researching and writing the article, AI new risks and rewards?  Mark: (00:58)Yes. Thanks so much for having me. I wrote the article in response to a number of stories that I had seen recently, all of which seem to focus on the positives of utilizing AI, artificial intelligence or RPA, robotic process automation in both the finance and accounting industries. However, there was very little, if any credence given to what the potential negatives or drawbacks of instituting these technologies would be. Now,i'm not adverse to new technologies. I'm not adverse to being on the cutting edge of utilizing or implementing new technologies. Quite the opposite. However, I always want to make sure to play devil's advocate as well as take a realistic look at what the potential negative impacts are. I think it's always important in our industry to be proactive to what could go wrong instead of being reactive as we've been in the past now in these articles that speaks quite often about how corporations and businesses will use and implement and have already implemented AI in their respective finance departments or their internal audit departments and I believe wholeheartedly that those companies are seeing a large benefit. I cited in my article a recent MIT Sloan management review report where they surveyed 3000 executives and over 85% that they felt AI would give them a competitive advantage over those companies that were not using AI. And of those individuals, 79% felt it would increase productivity. I believe that they're correct. I also believe though that it opens up a brand new world for potential fraudulent transactions, potential accounting and fraud scandals that could go undetected for years or never be detected based upon the reliance of AI to find these things. And what I mean, there circles back to what AI really is in artificial intelligence. While I'm not a technology expert, I can break it down and have had it explained to me many times in a simple format of artificial intelligence does learn, but it doesn't learn on its own. It learns from you and I, it learns from millions and millions of data points that it is fed through in analyzing information. Those data points come from situations and occurrences that have taken place where humans have been interacting in some facet of the data that we are then feeding through the artificial intelligence because humans have interacted or touched some portion of that data point or that transaction. Human bias is inherently being fed into these technologies, into the artificial intelligence, into these quote unquote robots. And I cite a couple of studies in my article, one of which took place in the university of Virginia where a professor down there was utilizing AI and determined that it began exhibiting sexist views of women. simply again, based upon the data points containing human bias and human bias. Unfortunately, still today being skewed towards towards sexist views towards a female gender. Another study this time at the University of Massachusetts showed that a AI was able to put learn in quotes again because it does take it's lessons or it's education from human interactions. But AI was able to learn from these data points to essentially exclude African American individuals from data sets that were used for important items such as polling information, based upon their vernacular. So it was able to learn and essentially pull those data points out of the data sets. My concern then is the human bias that led to the large accounting and financial frauds in the late nineties and early two thousands such as greed and power and seeking to meet quarterly goals and sales records. Those issues will still be contained within data points, those biases that have been exhibited by humans for hundreds of thousands of years will essentially be contained in the AI and how are we as auditors, as accountants, as financial professionals, ready to combat that? I think that anybody who sees the articles that have come out on how AI has taken on these previously unprogrammed racist and sexist and biased views and does not think that items such as greed are essentially inherently contained in these transactions as well are not focused on the potential impacts. What if AI does identify that greed or that meeting quarterly reports, meeting quarterly goals increasing market share, taking home more money? What if AI learns that those are all things that certain humans that are involved in data points see as beneficial and therefore AI derives the fact that it should do more of that. If it does, we could be an appoint where essentially AI begins committing accounting and financial frauds on its own if not even more concerning committing these frauds in a complicit manner with executives or individuals that have to programming those technologies. So I think the main result is we need to make sure that we're not losing the critical eye of the auditor or the critical eye of the financial professional. The executives that was an are inherent in Sarbanes-Oxley just to be on the cutting edge of technology or increase efficiencies to cut cost. That in my opinion, is the real danger.  Mitch: (09:30)What do you think accounting and finance professionals should do moving forward?  Mark: (09:34)Yeah, great question. So I think the issue becomes, again, that I am in no way, shape or form against utilizing AI or RPA or data analytics to increase efficiency. But we need to realize that those technologies are limited and we is the so called gatekeepers of our profession need to ensure that our reliance is still on our professional judgment and our interactions and our decision making because another point needs to be made that AI isn't as flexible as some articles and individuals make it out to be. Again, these data points need to be repetitive in nature and very numerous for AI to be able to make good quality decisions and process information accurately. So if there are situations in audit, in business, in finance that are not repetitive in nature or independent, we need to make sure that we as CPAs, and professionals are looking at all transactions to determine, Hey, that needs to be pulled out and that needs to be something that we make the decision on because it's not a frequent transaction or it's a little bit skewed from the norm, so we might not get a good result from the technolog...

Contact Richard Starkey:https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardstarkeyyves/CronosNow: http://cronosnow.com/our-why/Richard Starkey's suggested reading list:Tim Goodenough: https://timgoodenough.com/Tim Ferriss: https://tim.blog/.Ray Dalio: https://www.principles.com/Adam Grant: https://www.adamgrant.net/Carol Dwek: https://mindsetonline.com/abouttheauthor/FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTMusic: (00:00)Adam: (00:03)Welcome back to Count Me In and thanks for joining the conversation about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm Adam Larson and I'm joined by my cohost, Mitch Roshong and today we have a very interesting episode to share with you for this week's conversation. Mitch, you had the opportunity to speak with the managing partner of CronosNow Richard Starkey.  Mitch: (00:21)Yes, I did. Richard Starkey is what he refers to as a serial entrepreneur since his teenage years. His passion for business and education came across very clearly and we were able to talk about how important accounting and finance skills are to starting and running a business. He is also a great proponent for lifelong learning and share some valuable insight into how professionals can learn and develop through their careers. I enjoyed the conversation and learned a great deal from Richard and I hope you do too. Mitch: (00:54)So Richard, please tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up as the managing partner at Kronos Now.  Richard: (01:01)I started being an entrepreneur quite early in life. In my late teens, I started up a small kind of publication and I was actually riding horses for as a professional show jumper and realized I needed to make some money. So you know, started a couple of small businesses, nothing too sophisticated. And as I kind of got on in in my career I realized I needed a strong kind of finance background. So I studied accounting part time while working and running some small businesses and I did my accounting degree. And during that process I wandered off and became an operations manager for a large logistics firm, got into corporate finance and then really felt the shortfall of my technical finance knowledge. So then continued with the rest of my accountancy qualification or part time in my late twenties, actually. And once I kind of finished the qualification, I went back and did my internship and articles in my late twenties. I landed up in academics teaching financial reporting as my, you know, as my real teaching subject. And from that I grew into this quite a bit of an expert in financial reporting and later in corporate finance and a deal structuring for mergers and acquisitions, not a deal maker, more a, you know, a technical accounting and tax structuring kind of guy. And through that period I really just ran with academics, you know, sometimes more academics, less consulting, sometimes more consulting and less academics. But through that process a couple of years ago we did an education corporate finance deal where we brought and structured a couple of education businesses around the world. And by accident, you know, one of those deals didn't go so well and I landed up kind of holding the reins, temporary CEO for what was supposed to be for, for an interim period and landed at actually loving it and moved from technical accounting finance guy into CEO of an education business for good three and a half, four years and had to learn all the skills around strategy, building a larger systems and marketing. And in that process I had some wins, some losses, but I really fell in love with the idea of automating and developing processes from the front end marketing all the way to the back end accounting and last year off to some, you know, personal health issues in our family. We sold the business to take some time out and during the end of last year I realized I enjoyed the entrepreneurial space, not as as an entrepreneur but in helping entrepreneurs and that's where Kronos Now was born. And Kronos Now services and looks after my own entrepreneurial and my wife entrepreneurial activities from a systems accounting and finance perspective. But also we act as an accounting firm that we like to do, say there's more than accounting. And it's been a good, you know, first year and we're learning and helping small to medium entrepreneurs are doing initially their accounting in the most automated and efficient way possible, but then building that out into the rest of their systems and, and processes.  Mitch: (04:28)Well, that's great. Thank you for sharing that story. For someone who, you know, doesn't come from a necessarily traditional accounting background but you certainly put in the time with your studies and they chartered accountant. How do you believe that piece of your background has helped you in these executive roles that you assumed and then started.  Richard: (04:50)Such a good question. The reality is my accounting finance and specifically the auditing side has helped me understand the, the rules of the business games specifically around business process and risk. It has been a challenge getting out of just the process and a risk mindset when you start moving into the CEO and entrepreneurial state that understanding how businesses can build off of a good process is everything. That's the foundation, right? And quite honestly the auditing training has been exempt, just exceptional in supply me that skill sets.  Mitch: (05:31)Well, as you came from academia, right? And you kind of combined all of this accounting background and learned kind of on the go. How would you recommend, or how do you kind of see the needs of accounting, education and accounting preparation changing based on, you know, where today's business world is, as you previously mentioned, automation.  Richard: (05:54)Oh, accounting and systems or computers and AI. I think, you know, the level of understanding of computer systems and even programming for accountants is going to need to increase drastically over the next five to 10 years. And that's the one skillset I miss all the time. I've always got to rely on a program that even to do basic integrations and, and system checking.  Mitch: (06:18)Now my next question is kind of what's next, right? I mean, you are in academia, you talk about educating students, educating entrepreneurs, assisting accountants today. You know, once you have that education, you have your qualifications. how do you progress through your career? What are the next steps?  Richard: (06:39)I've mentored quite a few of my students as well as my previous financial managers, et cetera, on this kind of journey. And I see two broad forks in the road at some point, you know, I went through both of them so they don't have to be, you know, one choice forever. It can actually be, you make one choice now and five or 10 years locked on the line, you make a ...

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTMitch: (00:03)Welcome to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. Mitch Roshong and Adam Larson here with you again and today we are going to hear all about how blockchain works and how it applies to accounting. Now, Adam, can you give us a little more background on the topic?  Adam: (00:17)Yes, thanks Mitch. Some of the biggest curiosities and ongoing questions in accounting revolve around blockchain. To get some insight on the topic, I asked Dr. Ariel Markelevich to help us answer a couple of the most common questions. Dr. Markelevich is an associate professor of accounting at Suffolk university. He has written a number of articles for academic and professional journals and has presented much of his work. I think you're going to learn a lot about blockchain. I certainly did. So let's take a listen.  Adam: (00:52)What is blockchain? And do accountants really need to care about it?  Ariel: (00:56)Thank you. That's a great question. So many people have heard about blockchain, and I'm guessing that many people don't really know what block chain is. So block chain is essentially a technology. So when you think about blockchain, you typically think about a list of individual records. So, many talk about the ledger or a distributed ledger. In essence, it's a list of individual records. Now the records can contain any type of information. So when you think about blockchain in the context of accounting, it could be transactions. When you think about a blockchain in the context of Bitcoin, it again could be transactions between individuals. Now what is unique about blockchain is that it forms a chain by the name. You can get that. So there are the key thing to understand is that there are many types of books and systems. The basic process in a blockchain system is that each record would include some information. As I said, for example, a transaction and it would contain a digital signature for each of the parties. Now the records, before added to the chain, they're checked and they're approved. We'll talk a little later about different ways to prove the records, but in essence, they need to be checked and approved before they're added to the system. Once they're approved, they're record is added to a block and then the blocks are in essence linked to each other and create the chain and we get the block chain. Now there are other common characteristics of blockchain. One of them is that it uses group cryptography. So instead of just having the information there we go through a crypto process to create what's called the hash, which essentially is a list of digits and letters that represent, in essence, the record, you can also think about it is the key to the record. Now the hashes connect the records and the blocks together in a specific order. If you were to make any change to the record, that would cause the hash to change as well. And hence you would know that there was a change in the record now because the next block contains still the old hashes. If you wanted to hack and change a potential record in the system, you would need to change all the subsequent records. Because again, all of them contain the previous hashes for the previous records. And that makes it hard, which is one of the key advantages or interests in blockchain. A key thing to understand is that blockchain is not Bitcoin. So many have heard about Bitcoin, which is a cryptocurrency. I'm guessing that some of you are sad that they didn't buy Bitcoin years ago. But anyway, Bitcoin uses blockchain. Blockchain's was introduced when Bitcoin was introduced, but the two are different. So the way Bitcoin uses blockchain is just a specific use for blockchain. And in many cases, when you think about blockchain, blockchain could be converted or used in a variety of different situation and variety of different settings and not just the one that Bitcoin is using. So for example, the Bitcoin use of blockchain is what's called a decentralized or a Galatarian network. The basic idea there is that there's nobody in charge of the system. There are many users within the Bitcoin blockchain system. All those users or nodes, sometimes that's the technical term, but again, no central authority. You don't need to get approval from anybody to join the system. In the Bitcoin network. The members are kept anonymous. Now I'm saying all this because you need to think about blockchain for potential business uses. And for example, you may not want to keep the blockchain system decentralized or egalitarian. You may not want to keep the members anonymous, but the fact that Bitcoin is using it that way doesn't mean that all blockchain applications would be the same. Another characteristic of the blockchain use in Bitcoin is the fact that transactions are approved by consensus. So in essence, what you have is you have what's called miners. Many of you have heard or potentially heard the term minor. A minor is somebody who is part of the blockchain system. Again, we're talking about Bitcoin specifically and they approve the transaction by solving, a variety of mathematical equations essentially checking that the hash represents the information in the transaction that is being uploaded to the system. And you have many miners that are trying to solve this equation or sets of equations. And the idea here, the reason for the miners to try and work is because they get paid in Bitcoin. So many of you have heard, that potentially the payment is going to be reduced in the future, things like that. But in essence, the way it works now is that miners are paid using Bitcoin for the work they're doing to approve the transactions. Again, since many there are many miners out there and the approve the transactions, it is approved by consensus. And what once it's approved, it's added to the system as we were discussing before. Now these characteristics of the Bitcoin application of blockchain may not be a good fit in all implementations. So as blockchain evolves there are other types of blockchain systems that exist. One example is the Hyperledger which is a consortium of companies that is developing an open source blockchain. So one question that comes up out of this is, okay, should accountants care about blockchain? So something that old transactions can be on a blockchain. So imagine a case in which the blockchain would include all the transactions that accompany has. Everybody would have access to that information. We can think of a case in which, and there's actually some, some academic research that talks about this, that users would have access to all these transactions and could use some software or some code to create their financial statements. Auditor's would have access to it and things like that. Personally, I don't think that would happen. Companies are not likely to be willing to share the information of all their transactions with the world. So I don't think things like that would happen. Just again, it doesn't make business sense. Now, it is true that blockchain systems can be used for some underlying relationships. So for example, when you think about your businesses, transactions with customers or suppliers, we could have all our supplies on a blockchain system. The idea here are the advantages that is that all the transactions will be recorded there. Now the approval would most likely not be by consensus. Maybe we do a two party verification. One of the attractions is that it could make it easy for some smart contracts. So, for example, if you think about a contract in which I promise to pay you, once you deliver some shipment, let's say we could have all that information in the blockchain, once that ...

Contact Dan Smith:https://www.theorylane.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-smith-data-scientist/ Dan's Work: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/acid-just-sweet-80s-jeans-datapossible-daniel-smith/ Visit Dan Smith's work on Github: https://github.com/thedanindanger#datapossibleFULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTAdam: (00:03)Hey everybody! Welcome to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm Adam Larson here with Mitch Roshong. And this week we covered the topic of data analytics and emerging technologies in accounting and finance. Mitch, can you tell us more about it?  Mitch: (00:16)Thanks Adam. Yes. So earlier this week I had a great conversation with Daniel Smith. He is the head of innovation and founder of theory lean integration solutions. I reached out to Dan because I wanted to ask him a few questions about data analytics as it pertains to accounting, but our conversation got so in depth, we ended up talking for well over an hour. Dan offers a great perspective on the impact technology and data have on the accounting and finance world. I really enjoy talking with him about these topics and I'm excited for you to listen to the first part of our conversation. Mitch: (00:54)Being that technology seems to be very disruptive in today's world between the jobs that it's overtaking and the economy. Many people seem to be a little scared about these emerging technologies. So my question for you, in your opinion, how do we as humans prepare for a future that's kind of dominated by this artificial intelligence or machine learning, blockchain, all these buzz words like, that. Daniel: (01:18)I get this question a lot, Mitch. It's an excellent question and a valid concern for anybody who's worried about that or who is kind of on the periphery of this space. I will tell you, anybody who's deep into this space is not that worried about it. You'll hear a lot of doom and gloom and fear, uncertainty and doubt and doubt being spread. This world that's dominated by artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, blockchain, whatever word you want to use for it isn't as different as people foresee it to be. AI machine learning. Those solutions aren't giant monolithic replacements for humanity. If you think about it as any time that you repeat an action, something that you do over and over again, if you try to speed it up and you feel like, Oh, I'm gonna get so fast at doing this. I know all these keyboard shortcuts and I know all these things and I'm going to optimize this. That's a optimization problem. That's a locally optimizable solution. Those are the types of things that AI can do well. It can make a little bit of problem solving for itself. It can make slight judgment calls, but it can't deviate from the path that's been set in front of it. Look at it as a intern if you will. You get an intern to do a single thing really well and make a little bit of judgment for itself. But the second that there's a deviation, it's going to spill coffee all over itself or do something that's a mess. AI is exactly the same way. So we can think of ourselves as we learn programming and as we learn basic technical competencies, we'll figure out how we can act as managers for AI and how we can have the business itself be focused on deployment of these small applications and these small things to help the business. It doesn't hurt us. We just have a different skillset that we're using to benefit the business or benefit or even do business for us. So it's not scary. It's just a little different, which also can be scary until different is normal and now it's not scary anymore.  Mitch: (03:54)That's right. So I kind of see this from what you're saying is we need to look at this as more of an opportunity rather than something that's scary. Daniel: (04:03)Absolutely. We should always be learning and developing our skills. This is just another opportunity to learn and when there's an opportunity to learn, there's an opportunity to apply it and grow our career.  Mitch: (04:18)That's a great perspective. I really think you know, a lot of publications coming out now, you know, there's a lot of articles and a lot of research that's going into this and the more tools that are becoming available to us you know, it's more stuff to learn. But again, it in my opinion, looks like it could potentially increase jobs and, and create new ones. So I know the whole field of data you know, we talk about financial data more or less in accounting. But I think there's other data that goes into, you know, a successful business. So my question to kind of follow up on this at what point do you kind of see maybe an organization suffering from what people are saying is like a data overload? How do you figure out what's really meaningful for your business and what should be used with all of these new opportunities?  Daniel: (05:14)Hmm so this is a great question and another one that I get a lot. Okay. Every question is a great question to me because if somebody's asking it, it means that they're interested. So I love, questions, period. A lot of people don't even bother to ask. I digress, though. I don't actually look at it as it being anything different in the emphasis on data. Any accountant knows that data is the lifeblood of an organization. If anybody me present, I always talk about the data creation to value process. How any stakeholder or business activity creates data in some form or fashion. What we used to do and nobody thought anything of it was we would have our general ledger, our general ledger would take all the purchases and sales, the activity, payroll, et cetera, all the activity of the business, put it into a transactional system, a general ledger. We would then take that information and we would clean and shape it. We would aggregate it into our various financial statements and financial reports that would then subsequently be used by business specialist to make business decisions based on that information. Say what volume of inventory should I order in support and correspondingly, what should my sales budget be in order to sell that inventory? That would result in our sales and marketing mix. That sales and marketing mix would then result in stakeholder activity as they purchased products, resulting in more information that would lead to other business decisions. It's the same thing we've always done. It's just a little faster now and we're learning. If we can generate more data, we can create more opportunities for making business decisions. Sometimes that needs to be accelerated and the problems that are being created that need to be solved through having all this data no longer fit within the traditional bounds of an organization. Remember, all the organizational specialties that were created were as a result of what is effectively the accounting information process. We only were able to put paper on a spreadsheet or a t-table or a clay tablet, all of which are proxies for the same thing. Now that we're in a digital environment, data has a whole new way of moving around. So we have to reorganize. We have to have these cross functional...

Andy's Finance Training Website:https://www.superchargedfinance.com/free-stuff/Contact Andy Burrows:https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewburrows/ FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTAdam: (00:03)Welcome back for another episode of count me in Adam Larson here along with my cohost Mitch Roshong. As we look to cover all things affecting the accounting and finance world, our topic for today is highly relevant. We had a great speaker, join us from the K and talk to you, Mitch, about strategic business innovation. How did the conversation go?  Mitch: (00:18)The conversation was great. Andy Burrows is qualified as a chartered accountant in the UK and then moved from public practice audit to big business finance. He was quickly promoted through the ranks to finance director at the age of only 29 and has since worked in various sectors of business, including energy professional services and software. Andy is truly brilliant and had a lot of great stories to tell. So let's take a listen to the conversation.  Mitch: (00:43)What is a strategic business innovation?  Andy: (00:52)Sure. Well, I guess first of all, I started using the phrase strategic business innovation to talk about a big change that transforms the business in some way. But I'm not too specific. When I started using that phrase at all I wanted to do is distinguish from innovation in the finance function itself and look at what's going on outside of finance in terms of innovation. I guess secondly if you look at the definition of innovation in some published material, innovation is like translating an idea or an invention into something that creates value that a customer will pay for. So it's customer-focused, you know, for example, online banking or online grocery shopping, it makes customers lives easier or online shopping, like Amazon or even iPods. It just makes customers life's easier than it was before and I guess I'm not just thinking of technology, I think I'm open to thinking about other transformation ideas as innovation. Things like you know, for example when Southwest airlines brought in the 20 minute turnaround, it wasn't necessarily technology based, but it saved millions of dollars and it was transformational in terms of their business and enabled them to sort of dominate as a low cost airline for a number of years. So it's kind of transformation and new ideas for value creation within the business rather than within finance that I'm thinking about when I talk about strategic business innovation.  Mitch: (02:44)And then in your opinion what should a finance professionals attitude be towards strategic business innovation?  Andy: (02:56)Well, I guess start by thinking about an example of like blockbuster. It's an old example. I guess to reiterate blockbuster video could have had the chance to buy Netflix for about $50 million in the year 2000, but they refused. I think Netflix were even the laughed out of the board room. But a few years later, obviously blockbuster went bust and Netflix is now worth, it was about $30 billion when I last looked. That's incredible. And it's one of those examples. I mean, why didn't blockbuster want Netflix? And you know, I will say is because they weren't interested in customers except to make money out of them. So anyway, it's a big case study, but a and best not get sidetracked. Our main point in mentioning it is as a finance person, you don't want to be working for the next blockbuster or the retailers that are going out of business because of Amazon and so on. So that's why we're going to pay attention really to the likes of blockbuster and innovation. The other thing I'd say is that finance, and this is my slogan over the last few years is mainly in the business to drive performance. So finance has got to take to find this is going to care about the success of the business and we've got to desperately want to help the business to succeed and avoid failure. So we've got to have an open mind when it comes to innovation. We don't want to be the ones to say no to the next Netflix or Amazon because we were too risk averse. But at the same time, we don't want to support a repeat of the dotcom bubble, which had very little substance and was fueled by excitement and people throwing money at things just so they wouldn't be left out. So I guess that's the kind of balance for you I'd encourage for finance professionals with innovation.  Mitch: (05:13)Sure and just as an aside to that, it was your article I came across on LinkedIn about the blockbuster and Netflix and that's what really interested me into bringing up this conversation and learning a little bit more about your mindset because it seems, you know, 20, 20 hindsight, right? You come across situations like that and it's just unbelievable to look at those numbers and the opportunity missed. So as finance you know, look to support innovation as part of their business strategy what kind of advice do you give those who are considering, you know, maybe a little bit of a riskier initiative as you said, or something innovative for their organization that's a little bit outside the box. How would you kind of coach them through that?  Andy: (05:56)I think the first thing I'd is make sure you don't stifle research as far as resources in the business permit. Just allow and encourage research into new technology and new thinking and even research into competitor activity, you know, keep tabs on what competitors are doing and it may take a long time for that research to yield any results. And actually it's impossible really to do a business case for it because it's like we're researching to find out what we don't know yet, so how can we say what the returns are going to be? But we've got to give that like I said, as far as resources permit, we've got to give that that opportunity to do that. but it's important to, for those people involved in that, to know that what the purpose is, is to work out what new things could benefit the customer and that we should listen to those views really when we have strategy discussions. The second thing I'd say is related to that, we'd have to be careful not to kind of stamp out innovation too quickly on the basis that the business case doesn't stack up. You know, you could argue that online banking may not have had a very good business case if you measured it up against the do nothing scenario because all it was was a new technology. We're an offering new accounts or it wasn't gonna particularly you know, move people from one to another. But the fact was it was going to keep customers from going going away because of the technology used by competitors. So it wasn't a fair comparison really to say you know, to compare against the status quo. I suppose the fair comparison would be, what if we don't do it? That's a different ballgame. So you know, can we afford to let our competitors do a better job of serving our customers? So you've gotta think of it that way rather than just say you know, think of it in isolation.  Mitch: (08:28)Well, as somebody who solely does their banking online, I'm very happy to see that all of these banks made that transformation. So great example once again now and, and I believe you did write something on that topic as well, so, yeah, that's tru...

Contact Dr. Sean Stein Smith:https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-sean-stein-smith-dba-cpa-63307444FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTAdam: (00:00)Welcome back Count Me In. I'm your host, Adam Larson joined as always by my cohost Mitch Roshong. Today we have another episode about the captivating topic of blockchain and who better to listen to about this topic than Dr. Sean Stein Smith. Mitch, you talked to Sean. How did the conversation go? Thanks Adam.  Mitch: (00:18)Yes, Dr. Sean Stein Smith is an assistant professor at Lehman college in New York, but he is also on the advisory board for the wall street blockchain Alliance. He does countless talks on blockchain and recently received the NJ CPA 2019 ovation award in innovation and our conversation, we talked a lot about blockchain but we also talked about other technologies and innovation which we'll get to in future episodes. Let's take a listen to the first part of our conversation.  Mitch: (00:45)Blockchain is a very hot topic when it comes to emerging technologies and as being brought into accounting very frequently, however many do not fully understand the different types and options for blockchain. Can you please explain that to us? Sure. Thanks. So  Sean: (01:06)Obviously the whole topic of blockchain, cryptocurrencies and that whole sort of blockchain space is arguably the hottest topic in accounting and finance for the last 20 years. Right. But it's always important to know sort of what exactly is being talked about, whether it's being talked about internally inside the firm or externally, right. Offering advice or some services to our external clients and partners. And sort of the term blockchain is tossed around a lot, but it's really more of a umbrella term than one point of data, right? Because a blockchain can be a public blockchain, it can be a private blockchain or it can be a consortium blockchain or basically sort of a joint venture, right? And so a public blockchain basically is the true idea of a blockchain. It's totally open source, decentralized model of storing and then sharing information in a encrypted manner. And it's the type of blockchain that is probably what most of us are going to think of in our conversations and is also the type of blockchain net underpins Bitcoin and Tther. So on top of being the biggest option out there right now in terms of active users, in terms of you know, individuals and and, and all the rest. It's also the probably the most high profile one. Now from an enterprise point of view though, having all of the corporate data on a blockchain, right? And please don't forget, even though the blockchain is a unhackable or it has been unhackable as of right now having your information stored on a public blockchain is going to give some corporations pause. Right? So and on top of that though, the actual way that blocks of data are added onto the blockchain, the proof of work model is awfully tough actually do because it takes a lot of hardware, software and also power, right? So really from a enterprise point of view, public blockchains are moving out of favor and it's pivoting towards more of a private model or a consortium model. So a private blockchain is basically a, it's almost like a traditional ERP or a application hosted inside a affirm, right? Cause it has the traits of a blockchain, meaning that it's a group based model, basically, that it's immutable in nature and that it's a permanent record. Basically after data is added onto this blockchain, it's a permanent record, can't be altered on that block by block basis. And sort of the best example to highlight this is the joint venture, right? Or the joint venture model built up by Walmart and IBM. So basically in that context, Walmart is the organizing firm and so has organized the actual blockchain, hire the programmers and all of the coders to actually build it out and isn't pushing that out to its network. And so that's, that's almost like a hybrid model, but it's more like a traditional ERP or augmented by some blockchain traits. And sort of the third big, bucket is a consortium model. And the best way to sort of think of this or to highlight this is to almost think of it like an industry focused option, right? And it can be retail, it can be healthcare, it can be food safety, it can be finance or accounting. Right? And so the big four firms have actually partnered up to form a consortium model or a joint platform basically to help them audit information out of banks. And so this consortium model currently is being used and tested with 20 banks headquartered in Taiwan. So it's going to be interesting to see sort of how this whole field evolves, right? Because all of us who got interested in blockchain probably via Bitcoin, right? And sort of that's a public blockchain model. Totally open source for, any company to join or to be a part of. But from an enterprise point of view, again, for me, the accounting and an audit point of view that's really not as helpful as a private blockchain. And again, a private blockchain is more like a traditional ERP system augmented by some traits of a blockchain. But the area that I'm most interested in going forward is this idea of a consortium model or basically a industry group or a focused type of blockchain for a certain industry. Again, be it accounting, healthcare, finance is not really as important as the idea of a common platform to store and to actually transmit data in a manner that is encrypted and safe. Right. Both for the institutions involved and their end users.  Mitch: (05:58)That's great. Thank you Sean. Now artificial intelligence or AI is another major focus in accounting when it comes to technology, but what is the difference between AI and RPA in terms of accounting purposes? Sean: (06:12)So the field of AI, right? It's been talked about in the media mainstream since the 50s right there there are whole movies, you know, focused on the applications of AI for good and for bad, right? But as far as a accounting focus goes, AI really is not very yet for most firms but the idea of RPA or robotic process automation is actually more tangible and more, I think sort of are currently useful for firms. So sort of the best way to illustrate the difference between RPA and AI is to almost imagine a pyramid or a ladder. Right? And so the sort of the first step there is basic automation of processes using your current ERP systems, be it you know, Oracle, SAP, Hyperion, zero, QuickBooks, whatever you are using. That sort of baseline automation. RPA though is that extra layer right? Where it builds on that baseline automation, that baseline. So documentation and then helps firms automate either entire processes or pieces of of processes. Now a interesting point to keep in mind though with RPA is that even though we are having a conversation on the counting and on finance RPA, that idea and that process, it's actually being used in a whole host of industries, right? So HR, right? HR, every person who is hired is obviously a a individual and is hired as such. But that underlying HR process, right, the onboarding process, benefits process, all that stuff is actually pretty consistent from person. The firm is actually a consistent from person to person and firm to firm, right? So then automating those processes and then really sort of thinking of how RPA can be used at a much broader level. Be it in the hiring of people, inventory counts, get bank recs. Obviously all of those types of things really unlocks sort of...

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTMitch: (00:03)Welcome to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. I am Mitch Roshong and with me, as always is my cohost Adam Larson. The topic of this week's episode is the deceptive allure of emerging technologies. Adam, can you tell us a little bit more about this?  Adam: (00:17)Sure can Mitch! A technology's an intriguing topic in today's accounting profession as the future is here, yet still constantly evolving. We hear all about new technologies there, benefits, hype curves, et cetera, but I was curious to hear about how it's actually implemented. So I reached out to Pierce Kohl's CFO of TENTE to ask him what he thinks about this trend and what he and his company are doing with emerging technologies. Pierce definitely has a great outlook on this topic. So let's take a listen.  Adam: (00:51)What kind of technologies do you utilize at your company and how do you see the impact of emerging technologies affecting the accounting profession?  Pierce: (00:59)That's a great question. You know, emerging technologies is such a great topic, mainly because it includes all those buzz words that everyone loves to throw around. Things like artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, blockchain, and all the other ones that I'm sure but listeners are aware of. But the important thing that I want to remind listeners is not to get lost in the world of emerging technologies and forget about those existing technologies, which is why I kinda like the title of this, the topic of this podcast to be the deceptive allure of emerging technologies. You know, and I trust me, I know this is something easier said than done because I struggle with this as well as the CFO of TENTE. I not only lead the finance and accounting departments, but I'm also responsible for it, which I actually love because I'm so fascinated with technology and you know, it's probably something most likely due to my age, but I don't like things staying the same for an extended period of time, which is why I'm constantly looking into different ways of doing things, mainly by utilizing technology. But something that I see is that people, and like I said, I'm guilty of this as well, is we tend to get too hung up on this topic of emerging technologies and we forget about, like I said, the existing technologies. You know, you take a look at, you know, certain department leads, you know, they're thinking, okay, how do I utilize things like artificial intelligence, blockchain when if you take a step back, the departments that they're leading are utilizing technologies that are like 10 15 years old, which is kind of crazy to think about because of how fast we know technology changes. And I kind of look at technology the same way you would look at dog and human years where one human year is equivalent to seven dog years. Technology is not that much different. And I think it's important for people to kind of keep that in mind as they think about technology and you know, they need to keep in mind, it's important to stay up to date and relevant because if you don't, your competition might, and that might be a competitive advantage that they get on you. So don't get me wrong, I also love the buzz words. And TENTE we utilize technologies such as IBM's Cognos for our BI needs and we use it for predictive analytics. Something also we use is Microsoft's power BI, which I would highly recommend people to look into. We utilize it with our CRM software and it's become a game changer for our sales reps and sales managers. They got visibility that basically they've just, they've never had before. So a little side note there, I really recommend people look into Microsoft power BI. But moving on, when it comes to technology, the thing to keep in mind is that it does not need to be emerging to be worth implementing. You know, the cool thing about technology is that there are some very simple technologies that can be utilized that can make a, maybe not a huge significant impact, but can make people's lives easier. And in my opinion that's one of the main purposes of technology. You know, there's two main things I look for when deciding on whether or not to utilize some type of technology, one, does it make the user's lives easier or to does it break the bank? So that first one should be a kind of obvious answer. But trust me, there are things implemented that have made user's life worse. And then to, it's also an obvious one in my opinion, but that's more of the finance guy and me coming out. You know, if it's gonna cost an arm and a leg, you know, you always gotta have a return before you move forward with something. But the main point there I'm trying to make is when it comes to technology, it does not need to be emerging to be worth implementing. You know, at TENTE, we use things like Expensify for our expense tracking. We use something called Tax Jar for automated sales tax reporting. We use Trello for project management teams and communications. You know, these are all great uses of existing technologies that are simple to use and implement and can definitely make a positive impact on the department. So as you can tell, the point I'm trying to make is that you don't have to implement emerging technologies to make an impact. It can be something small that can just maybe make your life a little easier. You know, another thing we've started utilizing at TENTE is our banking's mobile application. Mainly the reason why is because we used to approve payments and transfers via physical token IDs. And what that meant was if I wasn't physically at my desk with that token ID payments could not be approved, which would cause issues because if I'm traveling or on the road and I don't have that with me, payments aren't going out. So our banking, our bankers told us that they came out with this app and basically told us that there was, that the token ID was actually contained in the app. So no matter where we were, we could get on our iPhones and basically approve ACH is and transfers right there on our phones and get all of our banking information right there on my phone so I don't have to be tied down to a desk, you know? And that was something that was very small to implement but may a nice impact and made my life much easier. So that was just another example there. Now to the second part of the question, as far as the impact that emerging technologies are going to have on the accounting profession, you know, it should be no surprise to anyone that technology has already in, is going to continue to make significant impacts on many different job functions and accounting is right there among the rest of them. It shouldn't be no secret that there are technologies out there currently that can kind of do certain accounting job functions that maybe in the past it took, it required a physical person to do, for example, at TENTE we've started utilizing a program, called Paymorang where basically we pay, send a wire or a payment to Paymorang and then they are responsible for distributing that payment they received to us, to our vendors. And so this saved us from, you know, headaches like stuffing and mailing checks, clearing checks off the bank rec. And not only that, it made the bank rec a lot simpler. There are some negative things with it. Like you kind of lose out on the float. But you know, so when cashflow is kind of an issue, maybe you might want to look into something a little different. But those are kind of things that we started to look at and utilize and the department that I lead, another thing to really keep in mind when it comes to the impact that technologies are having on the profession is, you know, ...

Your hosts, Adam Larson and Mitch Roshong, preview IMA's upcoming podcast series, "Count Me In". Adam Larson, Senior Manager of Educational Technology Enablement, and Mitch Roshong, Senior Manager of Educational Products, team up to talk with thought leaders and transformative business professionals from the accounting and finance industry about the future of the profession. With the goal of answering the FAQs on the job and offering innovative insights into fulfilling the duties and responsibilities of today's management accountant, Adam and Mitch interview experts from the field to bring the latest perspectives on accounting and finance.https://podcast.imanet.org/https://www.imanet.org/about-ima/ima-podcasthttps://www.imanet.org/https://www.linkedin.com/in/larsona/https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitchellroshong/