EP406: David Hartley - Embracing The Future: AI - Part 1

Michael Palmer: I think there's just a lot of opportunities here. And I do have ideas and thoughts around, you know, kind of how to get started with this, because that's where I see a lot of people struggling with this in the small to midsize business is really sort of, okay, now what? I've read about it. ChatGPT has been out 18 months. What do I do? You're listening to The Successful Bookkeeper with your host, Michael Palmer. Listen each week as inspiring guests share their secrets of success to help you increase your confidence, work smarter, and build a business you love. This episode of The Successful Bookkeeper is brought to you by purebookkeeping.com, the proven system to grow your bookkeeping business. Welcome back to The Successful Bookkeeper Podcast. I am your host, Michael Palmer. And we have a special two-part series with David Hartley, who is a business and technology executive with over 30 years of continuous innovation and leadership. In part one, we'll discuss the impact of AI on our industry and how you can embrace it. Let's get to that conversation now. David Hartley, welcome to the show. Thank you, Michael. It's great to be here. It's great to have you, David. And for those of our listeners that maybe haven't heard of you or listened to you online, please tell us a little bit about you, your career leading up to this point.

Guest: Okay. So I've been in this game a long time. I've been— it's shocking to me sometimes how much experience I have. I think probably a lot of people get that way, but I'm at that point. So yeah, I've been doing this since the early '90s. So I started, passed the CPA exam. I had a very wise friend of mine that said, and when I was trying to figure out, did I want to be an engineer or did I want to do business? And he said, dude, you need to study accounting. You don't have to be an accountant, but it's the language of business and it's a skill you need to have. I said, great. So I went that route, passed the CPA exam, realized I really liked the accounting community. Uh, so I joined Ernst Young, uh, coming outta college, was there for 9 years. And then I've had several hops along the way. Probably one of the most interesting things is about halfway through my career, I took a complete pivot. And I went to technology and I actually led technology for a public company. And I did that for 6 years. And then I came back to the CPA world. And I think that experience of me being on the other side of the desk in the