The Genius Who Doesn't Know Your Business.
With Jez Rowe and Cam Lynch
AI is not a magic pill you pick off the shelf. The intelligence is already good enough, and the slow part is workflows, training and change management. Jez and Cam land on starting with a general purpose tool like Claude, skipping the everyone-gets-a-licence rollout, and handing AI to your curious people first.
What this episode answers
Is AI good enough to use in my business yet, or should I wait for better models?
AI is already good enough to start using in your business, so waiting for a perfect tool is the wrong move. The intelligence is not the bottleneck. The slow part is working out where AI fits in your workflows, then training staff and managing the change. In white collar and professional services work, that takes time no matter how good the next model is. Start on the workflow and people side now, because that is where the delay sits.
Which AI tool should a small business or accounting firm start with?
Start with a general purpose AI tool, the Swiss Army knife, such as Claude, Codex or Grok. General purpose tools can head in many directions, which suits accounting and professional services firms, where workflows vary from job to job. That gives you the best chance of finding value as you test different ideas. Don't try one narrow AI product, get little from it and walk away from AI altogether.
Should I give every employee a ChatGPT or Copilot subscription?
No. Cam Lynch, founder of Vibe CFO, puts it simply: giving everyone Copilot or ChatGPT does not make you AI enabled, it just makes AI expensive. The cost hits twice. A 20 person business paying around $20 a month each, or about $150 each on a pro plan, adds up fast. Then there is the time every person spends exploring AI instead of doing the work that currently makes you money.
Who in my team should lead AI adoption?
Give AI to your curious people first. Often they are the staff who have adapted to every shift so far, from computers to cloud software, so AI is just the next step for them. Let a couple of them test it against your real workflows while everyone else keeps business as usual running and revenue growing the traditional way. Pick the curious ones, then keep them moving along the journey.
How much AI change can a small team take on at once?
Only so much, because a team's capacity is finite. Think of an all you can eat buffet: however much is on offer, you can only fit so much in. A few extra hours a week can stretch your team a little, but there is a ceiling, and every hour spent on AI is an hour not spent on the work that pays. That is why it pays to roll AI out through a small group of keen people while the rest of the business keeps delivering.
Episode notes
AI walks in like the smartest hire you've ever made, and has no idea where anything is. In this theme episode, Jez and Cam get into why the intelligence is already good enough while most businesses aren't ready for it, why people keep treating AI like a magic pill off the shelf, and what actually slows adoption. The moves that work: reach for a Swiss Army knife model like Claude before writing AI off, and skip the spray-and-pray of handing a subscription to the whole team. Find your ninjas and your curious ones, let them build the workflows, keep the revenue flowing while they do. Plus the buffet problem nobody admits, your capacity to absorb change has a hard limit.
Five minutes. One thing that matters. We ignore the rest, so you can too.
Vibe CFO is Australian founded. An AI CFO for small and medium business, out of the box, governed and secure.
Vibe in 5.
Transcript
Read the full transcript
Ah, yet another big week in AI. This is The AI Exhale, hosted by Vibe CFO with Jez and Cam. Five minutes, one thing that matters, or maybe two. We ignore the rest so you can too.
Jez: We hope you've enjoyed our adjacent news episode this week. We talked a bit about Grok, a bit about Zuckerberg, and something more close to home out of South Australia with the Royal Commission. So as we always like to do, we do a theme-focused episode as well each week. And this is really around the product, the tool of AI, and behaviours where perhaps people are waiting for something that's perfect, when really the intelligence is already good enough.
Cam: Yeah, I just think we need to get away from this idea that AI is this employee magic pill that you just pick up off the shelf when you're shopping and it just does everything you need it to do. And it's just, oh, wow, I hardly had to think and I've got such value from it.
What's going on? Like, it is a tool that you can use that needs just as much empowering of the staff, and staff knowledge and training and usage. And we haven't even actually worked out the exact workflows and where it fits in, let alone training the staff and the change management. So I think this is part of the bubble speculation, is that the tool itself is incredible, but change management and upskilling people and working out how it fits into workflows in the white collar world.
This is not something that's going to be fast. Like, this is the slow part of it, to work all this out.
Jez: It's also which tool you choose. I think people hear the word, I mean, I heard the word AI back in the mid 2010s in startups, and that was within their product, and it was just some tree diagram level machine learning.
So it's spruiked around in every pocket of conversation now. And is it a matter of picking the right tool for that sort of use case, instead of people just walking away from trying one thing?
Cam: The overarching comment is that you pick the Swiss Army knife first. So you pick Anthropic, you pick Claude, or you pick Codex or Grok or whatever Swiss Army knife of your choice. But basically they are general purpose, they can go in many different directions.
And it's probably the best choice of system for a white collar, accounting, professional services sort of industry, because of the different directions of how your workflows work. I think it's the best chance of getting value in building out these different ideas and concepts.
Jez: And you touched on just handing it to the team, or to the people. It is about picking the right person, not just handing everyone in the business an expensive AI subscription. We talk about DISC profiles. We talk about intergenerational skill sets, digital natives, AI natives with Gen Z coming through.
Cam: Don't give the tool and go, I'm AI enabled because we've given everyone Copilot or we've given everyone a ChatGPT subscription. Go for it. Get into that AI. Just go crazy. It's just proving to be an expensive exercise. It's an expensive exercise on two fronts. One is just sheer numbers.
Even if you're a small business, say you're a small business with 20 staff, 20 times the monthly subscription for Anthropic. What's the entry, like 20 bucks a month? Or if you put them on a pro plan of 150 bucks, it just adds up. But also their time, each one of them working on this instead of working on what's currently making you money, is the other challenge. So what is the best way to go about this?
Do you just give it to a couple of your staff that are your ninjas, right? The ones that over the past 20 years in your firm have always been able to adapt to cloud and computers and software. And so AI is just another stepping stone on that. Let's give it to those people that we know deliver, right, and let them see and adapt it with your workflows, right? And in the trade-off, you go, right, we also need to keep working, by the way. We can keep growing our revenue in traditional ways while we're exploring.
Jez: Yeah, natural, I guess, opportunity costs there, keeping BAU flowing whilst also remaining opportunistic. And I'm going to throw back to, I think it's 2022, McKinsey, some sort of leadership, employee empowerment buzzword, and I'd say pick the curious ones.
Just whoever's curious, because damn, you need to get on the journey and then keep ticking along it. And curiosity, it fills my belly on this journey we're on.
Cam: There was this guy on a podcast I was listening to, and he was giving the metaphor of walking into an all you can eat buffet, right? And eating everything you can, just putting it all into your belly, and you just fill up. And it doesn't actually work like that, because your tummy is only as big as it can be, right? And this is to do with your capacity as well. You can move things around. You might be able to stretch it out a bit by working a few more hours potentially each week. But there's only so much space.
And that's your five-ish minutes back. Vibe CFO, Australian founded. An AI CFO for small and medium businesses, out of the box, governed and secure. vibecfo.ai. Now you know.
Now you know.
The AI Exhale is made by VibeCFO. Australian founded, an AI CFO for small and medium business, out of the box.