00:00So, Matt, I'm going through my taxes right now and through the portal of my accountant, who I won't name.
00:05They do a good job. I upload all of the documents, W-2, 1099, 1098, whatever.
00:10But there is an element of observability because I still have to go in and double check all of the
00:16automated part of it.
00:17I know that's not the same, but the case study you gave of a business tax filing start to finish,
00:22the observability piece must be critical if you're handling that for businesses of scale.
00:31Yeah, absolutely. Good question.
00:33We think that the ability for an accountant to understand what's happening at a granular level as the AI is
00:40helping them get work done is extremely important.
00:42That goes back to a little bit about what Caroline was referring to in terms of what makes us different
00:47than generic tools.
00:48Having domain-specific user experiences and domain-specific auditability functionality is extremely important.
00:54And then we also think that accounting firms have a very important role to play.
00:58At the end of the day, what people like yourself and what businesses around America probably want is a human
01:02that they have a relationship with,
01:04that they trust to do this incredibly important work.
01:06And so having the AI collaborate with humans to make that possible in an even better fashion maybe will improve
01:11the experience that you have on your taxes in future years
01:13as firms figure out how to bring these two things together is extremely important.
01:16So here in the central question is, is it an aid to an existing job or does it displace an
01:23existing role in accounting going forward?
01:25We just have 30 seconds.
01:26Sure. Not a 30-second question, but I'll give you my best answer on it.
01:29Sure.
01:30I think if you look at what's happened with software engineering over the course of last year, and you can
01:34look at this internal basis,
01:35pretty much today no engineer at the company should be writing any meaningful amount of code.
01:40And yet our engineering team, our machine learning team, is as busy as it's ever been.
01:44We're hiring as aggressively as we possibly can be in those areas.
01:47And that's because there's so much additional engineering work that we want to be able to do that when you
01:51free up time to focus on more things,
01:52you can do more ambitious things.
01:54You can build things you never thought you'd be able to do.
01:56And the same thing is true for accounting.
01:58There's tons of accounting work in the world that doesn't get done today.
02:00The Pentagon just failed its eighth consecutive audit.
02:03You know, companies are misstating financials because they don't have enough accounting resources.
02:07Beyond that, you know, the accounting, you know, if you go to any hospital system in America,
02:11they can't tell you how much it costs them to provide a simple procedure like a knee surgery.
02:15These are all things that accounting can make possible.
02:17It is sort of the fundamental way that we understand economic activity that goes on in and around our organizations.
02:23And so we think there's a huge opportunity to do more accounting work.
02:26Most accounting firms see that opportunity as well and need the capacity to be able to do that.
02:30And so from our perspective, this is going to allow firms and the accountants at those firms to take on
02:34even more work
02:34and get things more done, get more things done in the same way that sort of software engineering
02:39has been able to take off over the course of the last 12 months.
02:41Let's do this.
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