Is your accounting firm stuck between AI enthusiasts who move too fast and skeptical team members who refuse to adopt new technology? Bridging the gap between enthusiastic leadership and hesitant team members is one of the biggest challenges facing modern firms today.

In this episode of Growing Your Firm, host David Cristello sits down with Jan Haugo, founder and AI researcher at smartaccountant.ai and co-author of Intuit's official AI certification curriculum. Jan researches and validates 50+ emerging AI tools annually for controllership, Record-to-Report (R2R), AP/AR, and advisory workflows.

Jan breaks down how to bring your entire firm onboard with AI safely, navigate critical security and redaction requirements, and use AI to transform sales, onboarding, and advisory workflows.

In this episode, we explore:

Bridging the Team Divide: How to align AI enthusiasts and detractors to move the entire firm forward together.
The Enterprise Security Advantage: Why staying within Microsoft Copilot or Google Gemini ecosystems solves the PII (Personally Identifiable Information) and redaction hurdles.
The Danger of Adobe Redaction: Why blacking out text in PDFs isn't enough to hide underlying metadata from AI models.
Mapping Workflows Backward: Why defining the desired outcome before selecting software leads to better automation.
Building a Custom AI "Sales Agent": How to train AI on your unique brand voice to research prospects, analyze websites, and guide discovery calls in real time.
The Bleeding Edge: How unified AI awareness layers (like Town.io) aggregate transcripts, email, and task managers into an automated personal assistant.

Key AI Tools & Solutions Mentioned:

Smart Accountant AI: smartaccountant.ai
Enterprise AI: Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and NotebookLM
Workflow & Data Aggregation: Town.io, Notion, Asana, and SharePoint
Custom AI Prompting: Claude and ChatGPT

About Jan Haugo

Jan Haugo is a leading AI researcher, trainer, and founder of smartaccountant.ai. She specializes in testing, validating, and deploying practical AI tools for controllership, financial close, and firm operations.

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