Sage Transform, AI Add-Ons, & Automated Taxes with Scott Hollrah
Welcome back to another episode of The Junction 2024. We haven't done an episode in a while. I just wanna let our listeners know I am actually not in the studio with Chase today. Chase at the very end of the of 2023, he and his he and his wife had a baby. So he's, taken some much needed leave to enjoy the family.
Mel:Today, though, I am joined by our founder and CEO of Venn Technology, Scott Hollrah.
Scott:Thanks for having me.
Mel:Yeah. Just kind of chomping at the bit to get back in the studio. And so when you, you know, decided that you'd be up to task, thought that this would be the perfect opportunity for us to catch up on a few things. It's been a minute since we've had one of these recordings.
Scott:And timing wise, lots, lots and lots of cool stuff to talk about.
Mel:Yeah. So let's just jump right into it. You just came like hot off the heels of Sage Transform. So for anyone who's not familiar that's listening, Sage Intact is a cloud accounting software that we here at Venn work a lot with. Our we've got whole, you know, teams of people who know how all the APIs work and they build integrations and automations between Sage Intact and other really any other, application with an API all day long.
Mel:And so this is one of those events that you, Scott, have been going to for How many?
Scott:9 years.
Mel:Okay. Yeah. So you've seen a lot of transformation in the space over those 9 years. And so I'm just curious about, especially with AI, like, what were some of those big, announcements? What's happening?
Mel:What are you hearing? And you know, specific to to Sage and the event last week, but, you know, really any observation that you have in general about where things are at.
Scott:Yeah. I'm actually I'm gonna I'm gonna rewind even several years. It may not have been my very first Transform Conference, but many, many, many years back, the CTO of of of Intact or now Sage Intact, Aaron Harris, he has been talking for years about eliminating the month end close. And it really feels like we're we're getting closer. We're inching closer, and Gen AI is going to be a big part of getting there.
Scott:As an aside, I still think that we're several years out, but we're not decades out. So there's there's certainly a lot of talk about that. And and even before AI became a hot topic, this is something that that they have been preaching and talking about their vision for where this can go. They also, for several years, again, prior to ChatGPT revolutionizing every everything and everybody all of a sudden knowing what generative AI is, they've had things built into the to the product like, anomaly detection. Like, hey, you know, this person normally is logging in from this geography that we can tell by the IP address, and all of a sudden, they just popped up in Croatia as their IP address that they're logging in from.
Scott:Okay, let's send an alert because that's that's out of the norm. Other things that they've they've talked about is anomaly detection or outlier detection when it comes to looking at journal entries. And hey, you know, typically in the month end, we have all these, this one we've never seen before, hey, let's flag that, send that to the CFO and say, hey, is this real? So these are things that that they've had for a long time in the product. What we got last week was kinda look at at the future.
Scott:And what was really cool is that for a lot of what they showed, the future is not that far off. So coming later this year, they're going to do a small, a small kind of controlled release with, with with the products that that we don't work on but, within the Sage family. And you're gonna have this Copilot. The the product is Sage Copilot and it's gonna be kind of this little chatbot window that sits inside of your accounting system. And yes, you have the ability to go in and ask it questions and and prompts and ask it to go do things.
Scott:But what's really cool is they're actually coming to you and saying, here are things that need your attention. So one of the examples they gave was, hey, here are all of these POs that need to be approved. I've taken the liberty of auto approving the 90% because they they look like they fall within the norms of what we usually buy from this vendor at this time in this quantity and so forth. Prices look look normal. But, hey, these these just didn't look right.
Scott:Hey, you, end user, would you take a look at this and say it it's okay? So I thought that was really cool how they're they're now putting things in front of you, not just you going and asking it for things.
Mel:Well, and it's an app. It's essentially native, right, to the program. So you're not having to maybe go, you know, export that information into another tool. Exactly. And who knows if you want to because it's sensitive information, or you have to organize it in a particular way or logic that the other tool understands.
Scott:So Yeah. And taking that a step further, one of the other things that they showed was the ability to leverage the the Sage Copilot across multiple Sage applications. So if you had, for example, their Sage HR product, it would know that somebody is scheduled for PTO today, and it would send them the reminder request to approve time entries on, you know, the next business day that they were back from PTO. Actually, on that note, one of the other use cases they showed, which I thought was was really interesting, was, the idea of somebody hadn't submitted their their timesheet or they'd submitted a timesheet, but it was missing time for Thursday afternoon. And they realized that that person did not have PTO approved in the system.
Scott:So like, hey, what's up with this? You need to you need to do something about it. Again, kind of going along the lines of that outlier.
Mel:That's really interesting. And it sounds like it was I mean, you sound very excited about it. Like, you could actually see it in action. I know I've been to a handful of these conferences myself and having seen even Erin up on stage doing a demo. They're pretty good about, you know, kind of the show and tell and it doesn't, at least to to my, eyes, doesn't look like all smoke and mirrors.
Mel:But I know sometimes it can come come across that way. So you said this is gonna be readily available to a subset of Sage customers.
Scott:Yeah. I think they're starting it with a group in the UK, later this spring. And then the Intact community, it'll probably be, you know, a year out, maybe maybe a little bit longer.
Mel:So we're coming from this as more of a partner perspective. We're a marketplace partner with Sage Intact. Did you hear murmurings from from customers, you know, that are okay, so maybe they don't have it intact, but was there also general excitement around that from the kind of the general Sage customer?
Scott:Yeah. There there was. And, you know, I think some people are still in shell shock when when it comes to, when it comes to generative AI. You know, this came out of nowhere for a lot of us. And and let's be honest, the accounting community, like, they're not quick to embrace new things like this.
Scott:But I think that the the the the winds are shifting a little bit there based on the the responses that, you know, that we saw. Something that's really interesting about the way that Sage has built this is it it yes. You access it from within the application that you're using, but they've built it in what appears to be a fairly app agnostic manner. So they're not building a version of Copilot for this product and a separate Copilot for this product and a separate one for this because Sage has, you know, tons and tons of software products. They built it in a way that they can go put it into whatever application it is that the customer is using.
Scott:I'm gonna jump ahead, but you'd asked about, like, what was the customer response? And something that was interesting and eager to get more details on, they're making APIs available for developers and ISVs and and marketplace partners like us to be able to tap into their AI engine. And it'll be really interesting to see what what we can do with that a little bit down the road.
Mel:Yeah. Absolutely. Were there any other kind of key trends or things that you're seeing when outside of CoPilot, which side note, I do feel like every major technology company that has an AI bot of sorts is calling it Copilot. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense from a it's sort of like, you know, when someone says, can you hand me a Kleenex?
Mel:Like, you know, they're talking about tissue. So by calling something CoPilot, there is a general association of like, this is AI.
Scott:You just know what it is.
Mel:Yeah. But do you also further dilute this space where when I talk about Copilot, I'm talking about Microsoft, and you're talking about Intact or Sage? It's just kind of maybe that's just my marketing kind of, brain going off there. But
Scott:We're we're we're getting CoPilot fatigue.
Mel:Yes. Just a bit. Well, that I mean, it all sounds exciting. Was so let's go back to AI automation, you know, Sage showed off their copilot and some of the features. Were the sessions was there AI heavy sessions available to attendees, any other, notable topics around generative AI and what it's going to do for, the landscape for accounting and finance?
Scott:You know, I think that just in general, this whole the proactive nature that Sage is taking this, I think that's huge. Backing up, you know, when ChattGbt came on the scene and it became this household name, I think that a lot of people were and I think a lot of people are still overwhelmed by this because these things can do so much. But because they can do so much, it's like, then what am I gonna do with it? Like, you need these prescriptive places to start. And and that's why I think that the the market places that OpenAI has made available that you can, you know, get all these chat GPT plugins that do these, you know, very specific point things, I think that that that is going to help really get people acclimated to it.
Scott:And in the same way that those those very precise prescriptive things are are are helping make Chat gpt more, more usable for for the many, I think that the way that Sage is going and making this a proactive tool where it is pushing things to you is huge. I had a family friend that that started this company a few years ago that is monitoring your your network, and they had this tie in with with Alexa where you could ask Alexa questions about your network performance. And and and he's telling me about it, and he's he's really excited. And I think it's it's really cool what he's working on. But I'm like, I don't wanna ask Alexa.
Scott:I want Alexa to come and tell me, hey, Scott. You need to contact your ISP or better yet, I've contacted your ISP for you because your performance hasn't been what you're paying for. And we're gonna get a credit or we're gonna go get them to come out and fix it. The way that Sage is doing the the push and allowing for the pull, I think is the sort of thing that's going to help drive adoption.
Mel:Absolutely. I think about the tools that I use on a daily basis. So we're a big HubSpot, shop with our marketing automation. And when we were watching the inbound sessions last year, there was a lot of talk about these AI tools and what they were gonna do. There's not been a whole lot of, I would say, like push mechanism.
Mel:There's a, hey, you can rewrite this sentence, you know, kind of some of the shiny point and click stuff, but it would be pretty powerful for it to start, really pouring over your data and pushing insights like, did you know? I mean, there's there's errors many multiple emails of the same type to the same segment and can make recommendations that are richer beyond like well, I guess I gotta go scrub my email list again and figure out how to filter out my criteria that makes it a better list next time. Like, I don't know, there's so much power in that. And so you're making me want to, ask HubSpot where their copilot is.
Scott:All right. I I wanna I wanna just ideate here for just a minute. Bear with me. HubSpot has tens, if not 100 of 1000 of of customers. Right?
Scott:And my email address is probably in, I don't know, a1000 of those, maybe more. And they know the stuff that I open, they know the stuff that I click on, what if they were aggregating my behavior across all of these different HubSpot instances that I'm somehow tied to
Mel:and Well, and you've already agreed to it. You you agreed to the terms of service across any, you know, like, even if there was no, he didn't agree to that. We all know.
Scott:Right.
Mel:In order to sign up for any new app today, you you click the cookie, you say accept, agree, I wanna use the app.
Scott:Right. Well, what if it could dynamically change the subject? What if it could dynamically change the preview text? What if it could dynamically change the image that would get me to click on it because it knows across all these things
Mel:Yeah.
Scott:That would be that would be fascinating.
Mel:That's next to all.
Scott:If you're if you're listening.
Mel:Yeah. Well, jumping on, so we've covered is there anything else you wanna talk about on in the land of Sage?
Scott:Yeah. Not not necessarily just Sage, but, I I kind of joked earlier about Copilot fatigue. And last week, this this thing just hit me. I as I was getting ready for my flight, I went and I downloaded stuff to watch on Macs and on Paramount and on Netflix and on Apple. Anyway, you get the picture.
Scott:I don't know how many streaming services I have subscriptions to, and I probably need to, you know, play the game where you, like, watch a bunch of shows for a month and you cancel and do that. Anyway, I feel like we're headed that same direction with these different AI services. We we're a we're a Google shop and Google, they've they've rebranded Bard. It's now Gemini. And if you wanna leverage the generative AI features inside of the Google Workspace, it's a $30 add on to be able to use Gemini inside your Gmail and
Mel:Live Docs
Scott:per user Oh, wow. Per month. And what's crazy is I think the Suite's only about that much. Maybe it's a little bit maybe it's $40. So it's a it is a significant premium.
Scott:I'm actually using a trial right now, and it is not great yet yet is the keyword. But so alright. If I if I go forward with this, I'm gonna pay $30 a month on top of my subscription for, for Google Workspace. We've we've got OpenAI, and, you know, we've got a corporate plan and we we do all this bulk stuff and that's that's great, but like, alright, maybe maybe you're not in that boat and you're buying individual $20 a month users for for ChatGPT. I guarantee that at some point Salesforce is in fact, they probably already are, and shame on me for not knowing.
Scott:But, like, we're gonna start to see this across all of our business apps. And just like I've got subscription fatigue for my streaming services, I think we're gonna find ourselves in exactly that same spot with all of these AI tools. And I think that somebody could make an absolute killing if they could somehow build 1 service, one bill that spans all of the different services that you use and offers the same kind of experience and features that you're getting, with these native or or point solutions.
Mel:And are you talking about the ones where you're opting in to get benefit from the AI features? Or you so my head goes to are there apps that I use today where there is that like add on feature? So HubSpot, no, not that I've seen. They're kind of rolling out new features in app. Canva, they're rolling out all sorts of AI, generative AI, features.
Mel:If the annual or per user fee increases that, you know, that seems to be maybe that's their play. Right? I would think that that would be the way you would wanna go and then you're backing into, like, and here's all the additional functionality that you get. I'm trying to figure out in what in your opinion, what is the benefit for them to position it as an add on? Like, other than just increasing or adding another tier that includes all of the AA features.
Scott:You you make a very good point, and it may be that what happens is these publishers just they declare a price increase and to soften it, oh, and by the way, you get all of these additional things. I think that for now, them playing it the way that they are, it at least allows the consumer to feel like they have a little bit more control and that they can opt into this added expense versus having it just placed on them. Long, long before I started then, I did a project at my previous consulting firm with a large, we'll call it a pharmaceuticals company. And Salesforce, we were helping with their Salesforce implementation. Salesforce had released this new feature called Chatter.
Scott:In fact, it'd been out for years. And the first time I logged into this environment, the UI was 3, 4 plus years back, and I was in shock because I hadn't seen this UI. Well, I asked somebody, like, what is going on here? And they said, well, we never opted into Chatter because our lawyers wouldn't let us use Chatter because the concerns about communication logging and so forth.
Mel:Attorneys would never do
Scott:that. Right. So because they didn't enable this feature, they couldn't use all of these other features, will we be forced into paying for enabling these AI things, and what's gonna be the impact for organizations that take very conservative approaches to these kinds of things go, ant, we don't want that.
Mel:Well and that's I'm so glad you said that, Scott. That is one of the biggest, I think, recurring messages that in the first, you know, 20 episodes of The Junction, Chase and I kept coming back to was there is a lot of unknown unknowns, and we don't know that could be the path that that it goes down. But for anyone who's listening to the podcast, who's subscribing to the newsletters, who's having conversations with their network about what do you see with AI? How are you using it? You're gonna be more prepared for when that day comes.
Mel:Hopefully, you will have at least given some form of critical thought to it. Or you have a baked in network now or resources that you can potentially turn to. It's the I don't really want, like, think about that. I mean, that's really the mission of the podcast is let's understand how we coexist with these tools. And then when you learn how to coexist, then you can learn how to leverage it.
Mel:And I think that actually brings us to our, one of our headlines.
Scott:That that was a good segue.
Mel:Yeah. American Airlines makes major change passengers won't like. Break this down for me, Scott.
Scott:So as a frequent American Airlines traveler, yeah, not not so not so sure what to think about this. Before I actually dig into it, there's been a lot of debate about whether or not AI is coming for your job. And, the doomsayers say, yes, you know, put on your tinfoil hat. Other people and again, kinda going back but someone who knows how to use AI better than you is going to take your job. Well, I think that there's an asterisk in that statement.
Scott:I think that there's so much truth in in what he's saying there, but I do think that some jobs are potentially in danger or have the potential to to really be majorly changed. So the the article here, American Airlines actually has terminated a fairly large number of their call center staff. So when I when I'm stuck somewhere and there's a delay or whatever and I'm trying to figure out what flight that I need to get rebooked on, it sounds like in the fairly near future, if not maybe even today, I'm not gonna be talking to a human. I'm gonna be talking to an AI bot. And it's gonna be really, really interesting to see how dialed in they have the service.
Mel:When you've called recently, and are you getting a person upon first interaction?
Scott:You mean after the like 45 minute hold and we'll call you back?
Mel:Well, I will say so, you know, I think back to my interactions in the last 6 months with the American Airlines phone number, when I need to make a change my itinerary, The I have been relatively impressed with the upfront, you know, they recognize your phone number, they're able to go, Hey, are you calling about this trip? And so it makes me wonder, have they been beta testing this anyway, and they're like, yep, we've had enough success turning over calls and x number of times, you know, we've successfully resolved the passengers, what they came for. Even if you do end up getting connected to somebody, I guess, I don't know. Just it begs the question, have they how long have they been using it?
Scott:The the functionality you spoke of, that's been there for I don't even it's been there a long time.
Mel:It's gotten better, though.
Scott:Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. I mean, ultimately, they want you to not talk to a person. Right?
Scott:The the, oh, gosh, what's the thing? Like, after they go through the, are you calling about this and you say yes, can I text you a one time link to such and such to download the American Airlines app? No. I wanna talk to a person, please.
Mel:No. Because the app just told me I can't do what I need to do. When will AI pick up on that? So Melissa Bell has been in her app. She called.
Mel:We see that you tried to do this thing. Now now we're talking. Now we're cooking with gas. Yeah.
Scott:Alright. So is that creepy or is that welcome?
Mel:No. I'm I'm all for it. Okay. Like, I need to get this thing solved. I consider myself a pretty patient person, but it's the revisiting.
Mel:You have talked about this for a long time, going to the doctor's office and getting filling out all the papers. I know I'm gonna open up that window.
Scott:My blood pressure just went up.
Mel:I believe it.
Scott:And I need to go to the doctor's office.
Mel:Yeah. Well, he already knows because your phone your watch just sent it to him. I mean, seriously, though, it's like, how many times do I need to reenter my information? So I mean, that that I think we can all rally around. We can all rally around the idea of, like, you feeling known and seen and especially when you, you know, you have loyalty with a company.
Mel:You've spent whether a lot of money or a lot of time, in an airplane seat. You expect I do. I think people have come to expect that tech experience with all of those the brands. Like, keep up. Like, you don't know me yet?
Mel:Like, you know what I wanna do. What's my next step?
Scott:So kinda tagging on to this, not to get too far off of the the headline, Brett Taylor, who was at one point the co CEO of Salesforce alongside Marc Benioff, he and He and another gentleman whose name I'm blanking on, they've actually gone and and they've started a new AI based customer service startup, and, you know, this is exactly I I don't know that that's them. I I would be surprised if it is that's that's working with American Airlines, but more and more of this is coming. And so kinda tying back into the is AI coming for your job? I think it really depends on the kind of work that you do, And I think that something like a call center is probably pretty ripe for having some some major, major change.
Mel:Yeah.
Scott:And and, you know, something, that somebody else kind of observed in in light of this is what is this gonna do for all these call centers that have been offshored for years? You know, for for a long time when you pick up and call your bank or your cable company or whoever, you're talking to a call center in India or somewhere else in the world. And what's it gonna do to those economies? Yeah. I guess time will tell.
Scott:Time will tell.
Mel:Well, before we wrap up this episode, I got one more headline. TurboTax and H and R Block. That's hard to say. Helpful. And H and R Block.
Mel:AI chatbots are giving bad tax advice. This reminds me of, like, when the early versions of chat gpt came out and everybody was, like, slamming the LSATs into it to try to see if it was a good lawyer. I think, here's my take on it. It just reminds you that, like, only it only gets us so far. I mean, if you're already going to pay a service to do your taxes anyways, like I think it's just that like little extra push, but still like dot your i's, cross your t's, make sure that you're like, coming things over because these technologies are really new still.
Mel:I mean, to us. I know they've been around for a long time.
Scott:They've been in development for a long time.
Mel:Sure. So I don't know. I'm I can't say that I I don't have any crazy, unwieldy tax situations. TurboTax has been a a trustee adviser to me for for many years, but, like, I don't know what your take is on it.
Scott:You know, I don't know if they still offer this, but if if you if you have a very, very simple return and it's literally just a w 2, I'm sure, like, if you got 10.90 nines from investments and things like that, like, you're you're auto you're already out. But if if you just have a w 2, they had an app, and you could literally take a picture of your w 2 and boom, it would file. You're done, and I think it was free.
Mel:Yeah. That was the gateway drug.
Scott:That was
Mel:the gateway. Yeah. Yep. I was actually talking with Randall about this a couple weeks ago. He was, remembering a Far Gone time when he it used to be free when he, you know, filed his taxes.
Mel:And I was like, well, we all know nothing nothing in life is free. And then I found myself feeling like I'm I'm being that person. Because, you know, you think about, like, there's some developer back there that built the features that you're getting used from. But, the freemium model, like, definitely, you use it enough and you're kind of like that's your your brand oriented. Like, every year I do my taxes, that's how I got into it.
Mel:I haven't made the switch. You know, there's been some compelling ads I've heard lately, that have made me wonder, should I look elsewhere? But I've already I've already started mine for this year, so maybe next year, I'll look into it. I'm not quite at the point of, like, having Chad GPT do them for me, but, like, I think we're we're almost there.
Scott:I've already filed an extension. You're you've already filed. I've already filed an extension.
Mel:I mean, you're a business owner. You've got you've got children. I don't know. Like, we've I've got 2 dogs, and they don't count as write offs. So
Scott:Well, I I think that and and this is another recurring theme on the junction, the future, the future, the future. I don't think that today is the day that AI can file a correct tax return, not one with any level of complexity anyway, and maybe any level's too strong. But I don't know that I would trust it today. Down the road, maybe. But I don't want to be the guinea pig that gets tested on.
Mel:Do you use a firm or a person? Yeah. I
Scott:look, and this is part of our message at at our firm. It's not not not that we're promoting ourselves here, but like we talk all the time about use an expert. Use an expert. I, I run another podcast as as part of our, what we do here. And literally, just before this, interviewed a guest who is, he's a commercial real estate agent.
Scott:And we talked about the idea. Thankfully, there's not a whole lot of people out there that are trying to do commercial real estate transactions representing themselves. But the more and more he starts talking about why that would be a bad idea, I'm like, oh my gosh, I can't like, you're you're talking about things that I wouldn't even think of. Mhmm. And so I'm a big believer in leveraging the expert.
Scott:And today, in my mind, the expert is the human being that I can have a person to person conversation with.
Mel:Well, and outside of the expertise, we all long for the human connection.
Scott:Without a doubt.
Mel:I was having a conversation at lunch today around, like, going to the gym and, you know, the individual I was talking to, shout out Jacob. He was saying he goes to the gym. He's got his own kinda puts his own plans together, asked me, nope. I like to go to the gym and have my plan put together by my coaches, and I like group training. And, part of that is not because I I know there's apps out there.
Mel:I know there's you know, I could jump into ChapQPT and have me ride at a 9 week program and go to a gym on my own. But there's the camaraderie, like and then there's the coach on the spot telling me, hey, your technique is wrong or try this kind of cue. And so commercial real estate is far more complex. I'm sure, law doing your taxes. But I still think that end of the day, bottom line, people still have this, like, innate desire to have a person and to know the person.
Mel:But, you know, at the end of the day, you don't really wanna get your taxes wrong. And I guess if they are, you at least have someone you can point to and not just a a piece of technology that doesn't have a lot of feelings to deliver back. But
Scott:I, I I will say you you love the gym. I hate it. I've I've been working out, again recently, and that's that's been a very, very good thing for a lot of reasons.
Mel:Chase just wants it to be automated.
Scott:I was just gonna say, like, is there like an exo skeleton that can put me in and just, like, do it all for me?
Mel:He's ready for it.
Scott:Can I sleep while it does that? And I I get ripped of the
Mel:I mean, give me an AI bot that helps enhance my sleep. I'm all about that sleep hygiene. Sign me up.
Scott:There there you go.
Mel:Alright, Scott. Well, thank you so much for coming in the studio. I know it was a really far journey.
Scott:Around the corner, down the hall.
Mel:We'll, we'll be back. Chase and I have, recordings booked up here over the next few months. So thanks everyone for hanging out while we, let him, like I said, kinda tend to his duties, and we've got a lot of exciting stuff planned. And so in the meantime, y'all know what to do. Keep it automated.
