The Future of Accounting ft. David Wood

In this episode of the AI Rebels Podcast, hosts Jacob and Spencer welcome Professor David Wood from Brigham Young University. A trailblazer in accounting and technology, Professor Wood shares his journey from a traditional accounting background to becoming an innovator in the tech space, focusing on generative AI and its transformative potential.

The conversation dives into:

• Professor Wood’s Research: How his groundbreaking study on ChatGPT's capabilities in accounting exams revealed the accelerating power of AI tools.
• AI in Education: His approach to teaching students prompt engineering and encouraging them to leverage AI as a co-creative partner.
• Innovative Tools: The development of Skillabite, a platform revolutionizing professional and academic education, and Hidden Hawk AI, a tool aimed at streamlining auditing processes through AI-assisted workpaper reviews.
• AI Risks and Opportunities: Insights into the challenges, such as misinformation and copyright issues, and the unprecedented opportunities AI offers for creativity, efficiency, and learning.
• Practical Advice: Professor Wood’s call for individuals and organizations to embrace AI, experiment with its tools, and use it to enhance both personal and professional growth.

With thought-provoking insights, actionable advice, and an optimistic vision for the future, this episode is a must-listen for anyone navigating the rapidly evolving AI landscape. Connect with Professor Wood on LinkedIn or through his initiatives to dive deeper into the intersection of AI, education, and innovation.

Transcript

0:06

hi everybody and welcome to another episode of the AI Rebels podcast we're very excited to have Professor David Wood here from Brigham Young University out in Provo Utah my Alma mater and actually one of my professors I had when I was there in the uh the accounting program and he's he's a big name in um information systems the text space I had him for a class where we touched on RPA Robotic Process Automation so he's kind of always been a big mind in my head for tech and AI so I'm very excited to have you on press award thanks for coming on well Jacob it was fun having you in class but I didn't teach you enough because you you can't look through the hubris and see that I'm just a simple person haha I know I know but it's great uh professor I'm gonna keep calling you Professor Wood I'm sure um tell us a little bit about your background I know you've done so much in the space can you give us a high level of what has brought you to this point yeah so I came to BYU as an undergrad and was just interested not sure what I want to do Sciences technology accounting took a couple of counting classes really enjoyed them so I went down that path went out did my PhD in Indiana and then they hired me back all along the way traditional counting was fine but I always kept gravitating back to technology oh can I do that better can I do it faster can I do it differently and a number of years ago the data analytics thing came on big big data and data analytics and so I got big into that movement of okay let's understand this let's start teaching it to our students and once I started down that path I realized I'm a technologist at heart I love playing with new tech um just to explore what's possible I love the possibilities of technology so my research my teaching of all move that way and then generative AI came out and that opened up a whole ton of unique and fun doors so that's been the latest kind of today I've been here 17 years I think at BYU so it's been a good run so far that's amazing do you remember the first time you used chat GPT when it kind of watch this came out late November 2022 is that right and about a week or two later a colleague in the hall stopped and said if you heard about this chat chat GP something chat GPT and I'm like no tell me and they start kind of explaining so just go back to your office and try it so I went back I pulled it open and it was like the first time I heard the sound of the internet you're too young to remember when it went but it was like that I type something I don't remember what I type but you know tell me the answer to something and you know spits out this answer and I do a couple of those I said this is cool yeah I wonder how good it is at accounting I'm a nerd so haha you're like let's get serious yeah so what can I do with numbers and well I pulled up an exam and I was thinking I wonder what students are gonna do and I put in an exam question and it got it right and I put in another one and it got it right and then it got this the third one wrong and I said this is cool so I actually started a research project that day um oh my gosh and I'm just wanted to start exploring what can this tech actually do so that research projects kind of a fun one um I've always wanted to do a crowdsource research project and so I put out on LinkedIn and said hey there's this new technology any professor will put their exam questions in let's see how good it is and we had over 300 faculty from across the world put in over 25,000 questions wow and it was it was crazy how fast the project went academic accounting research is usually really slow but but we got the whole thing accepted the day it was accepted chat GBT4 came out and the final original studies no this isn't very good don't worry about it and it went wild in media and then they they got accepted for came out and we redid the study with professional certification exams not you know just exams in my class and it passed all of them so it went from oh my gosh no AI is no problem to oh no now it can be a CPA CIA CMA etc oh my goodness that's insane wild especially did that affect your study at all did you have to thankfully no this one went through fast and so it got accepted and then we did a follow up paper and and so actually got two papers for the price of one I guess I'd be curious did the did the follow up paper receive as much attention as the first paper no the first paper I think everybody really wanted AI not to win and so they're really happy to say see you everything's okay don't worry about anything the second paper got attention but not nearly as much um and and and that's kind of funny I I think there's there's a lot of people have strong feelings about AI either this is awesome it's the future or kind of I want to ignore that this exists and hopefully it will go away yeah I think that's a still a challenge we're seeing is this lingering almost denial people living in denial that this is that it's here to stay it's not gonna it's not gonna go anywhere and it's changing industries it's changing the world like you said it's it's a licensed CPA at this point it's a licensed lawyer at this point it's it can does half my coding for me like yeah when you first see it there's a reaction of well that's kind of interesting cool it's almost like magic how does it make that funny poem or whatever you put in the first time then you start thinking oh what are the implications of this and a lot of people get scared at that point saying oh no I'm gonna lose my job it can do everything and it can't I mean we can set some of those fears aside but I think that sinks in and rather than confront it and get through that fear of saying okay so what does this mean think a lot of people just say okay no let's just put the genie back in the box and pretend it doesn't exist which is exactly the wrong approach because it's not going anywhere it's just coming on stronger and stronger and stronger yeah it's amazed me just how much more capable each model is and and it started eating to like the little marginal gains that I thought were gonna be really really hard for it to get right um but it just continues to amaze me I mean little things like like chat TPT for like could not write very good poetry it didn't know how to do slant rhymes etc I did I I did a lot of experiments with this cause I thought it was a really interesting exploration of like you know what are the capabilities of this both from a technical perspective and a created perspective um and then Chachi P t 4 o um way better shockingly good when prompted correctly and and and it's just gonna keep continuing that way um and I think that that yeah to your point like people need to be aware of this and that's a big reason why Jake and I bring people like you on uh to bring more you know bring more awareness to the space um I'd be curious so with uh your work on exploring the the accounting capabilities of language models have you since tested other language models so for example of you like run Claude through through the same paces yeah so we focused on chat GPT first came out first and was what everyone was talking about I now play with I have both chat GPT and Claude I like them both for different reasons and I think that's what I'm starting to see a specialization but we've done research on the mini models on the full size models we started playing with llama co pilot Gemini I mean they're they each have a different personality I don't know if that's the right word to describe it but they all act a little bit differently and as as I play with them you start to see okay this one's better for this task I like this one for this task and even more than the underlying model is the cool features they're putting on top so with applaud that you can program and have it create you know these widgets and and see your programming work live that's been awesome for making things for the classroom just quick demos and then canvas comes out on chat GPT and how cool that is to be able to real time edit and just change little words and rewrite this paragraph and that sort of thing so I think the features are starting to to come to the forefront not just the model but how do you use these features to actually be productive and accomplish real tasks totally agree yeah like the user interface is now being developed they built this big engine like okay let's figure out how to let the user actually access everything I can do well and I think that's really got what got me into thinking it well should I step outside of academia to start thinking about a business proposition because now we have this tool and how do we apply it for good and how do we where could we improve things going on and it started for me with education thinking how could I one of the initial reaction of a lot of factors let's just ban it you know this is bad it's like cheggy yeah people are gonna cheat and once you got people pass it to say well what can we do differently now that we have AI that we couldn't do before and that's been a fun exploration and I think that's what really set me on the next step of okay let's let's see what can we do better because of this not just how do we work minimize yeah yeah I'm curious um where that where that took you so as you were going down this road what have you identified you could do so I now teach Prompt Engineering on day 2 in my classroom and I flipped it to tell students you you better use AI for every single thing you can in the classroom to learn unless I tell you not to and if I tell you not to you should ask why shouldn't we do this and I need to justify why you shouldn't and I've loved that approach cause the students understand I say well as a professional you need to be able to speak in front of someone and you can't just type it in and get an answer and read it so you have to have it memorized and like oh well that makes sense I need I need to know that as a professional and and so that's the traditional education but then you start thinking about the cool new things um I've hired a team of students and we can build stuff that never before you thought you could build with students just because of their level experience and so the ability to do is just is is off the charts what we can now make that's what's always impressed what's impressed me most about AI is the just the iteration speed that it that it grants you um it it always shocks me how how correct AI will get things on the first try even now after after 2 years of using it um it's it's a delight every time um I'd be curious uh have you have you experimented or looked into it all any of like the AI agent architectures um and and whether or not that represents like a significant step change for you know accounting purposes and stuff like that yeah so we're just starting to play with that um we've got a couple different things we're trying to do from a research perspective with that um I have I haven't figured it out haha that's for sure it's complex and it's weird and it doesn't just function like computer programming you know you type it a B and then it produces C and so that's the process we're doing um I'll give you one from a research perspective we're trying to do we do a multi agent tool that will read an academic research article which is dense and boring and repackage it so that a professional could read and understand and get the important things out of it and we've had some initial success in programming that so that we can take something that's super highly complex and written for one audience click a button and it will repackage it for somebody else and Multi Agent has done a lot better than you know just the traditional put it into Claude or Gemini and have a spit out something else so that's one place that we've started playing with it's interesting do you have any theories about why that is so far is that just because you know you have the agents prompted to look for different things or do you believe that it's just you know kind of like a a breath um essentially a breath problem you have more more minds on the topic I think that some of it I mean AI is trained to kind of act like a human and one human can do something well two humans usually do it better and there's a there's got to be a diminishing law of returns that once you have 50 agents working it's gonna just completely go kapu but um when you have one just focusing on one task just like with students and professionals your job is to read and summarize this article your job is to do copy edit your job is to do you know come up with cool examples it seems to work better to specialize which is the industrial revolution I mean specialization is what kicked off a lot of what we have and so it's not surprising that technology trained to be act like humans behaves like humans when we get a couple of together they think better yeah it's an interesting point I'll be intrigued to see the as that becomes more and more popular how tools change cause I know I use all the time you know I'll plug in an article if I don't have time to read it and say you know chat GPT please just one paragraph 3 bullet points whatever it is but there have been times where I've gone back and read the article I'm like oh man that missed so much that was not accurate at all and I posted about it on Twitter you know like and you just feel so dumb um so I I am excited to see that more popularized cause I think there's a lot of value there and especially with a lot of these founders cause the biggest what seems to me now at this point a lot of people have accepted that AI is here to stay for the most part you have some lingering lingering doubters but now it's a lot of the concern with accuracy misinformation hallucination and I think this could be one of the routes to help decrease that concern yeah seems like I think the other one and this is where we'll get to talking about the company we've started is education of what they're good at and what they're not just like any tool you can misuse a computer it's not for hammering in a nail it is not very good at that but once we figure out where does AI apply well and where does it not and eventually maybe we'll figure out how to apply it there it's not the tool to just get a specific a right answer it's much more to co create and work together to generate something yeah and I think part of it is we need education to help people see where we're currently at so so people can get up to speed and know how to use it right I still find it shocking it how early we are still on all of this like it because it's consumed my entire world like you know every waking thought for the for the past two years pretty much has been about this but then I read the studies where it's like only a third of Americans have heard of Chad GPT or you know stuff like that and it just it's mind boggling to me cause once again like this is consumed by world and thus you know by extension it's consumed the world haha of a lot of people around me cause I'm like hey have you heard about this you need to you need to use this haha yeah I'm I'm scared with Thanksgiving in a couple days going to talk cause I start talking AI and everyone's like okay not again it becomes your world totally yeah I yeah we're all in the same boat so first word I'm curious you mention the company we started which is called skillabite right I want to make sure I'm saying it correctly skillabite is this what's the story behind identifying this cause I'm sure you had so many ideas with what you could do with AI so what was it that got you here yeah so this actually so Ernstine Young that IWY the huge accounting firm um they have a non profit called the IWY Foundation that they give money to and the foundation pays to do all sorts of humanitarian efforts one of the big things that they do is pay professors to produce new content they give out for free and I've worked for him for years to generate you know cutting edge you mentioned RPA and data analytics and all of these content and they came to me and said hey could we help you do stuff with AI and I said sure hire me a steam of a team of students and so they gave us a large grant here at BYU and we hired 12 students to work part time to generate new materials to teach this stuff cause faculty you know it's hard to stay caught up with so many things moving so fast well the first thing we did with this team of students who say we need a platform to present this material we couldn't find a good one out there so we decided to build our own so in seven months with 12 part time students because we use AI in everything we do we built an entire learning management platform and 17 case studies to get students started on this wow um we launched two weeks before the semester started and already had 35 hundred students use it and complete like 12,000 assignments and and I stress 12 part time students did that yeah which to me is remarkable so as I was building that and that's all non for profit I thought wow that's students everybody needs to learn about this we need to build something for professionals similar type training content they need to learn what is prompt engineering what is generative AI governance you know all of these topics and so he said we can build the same thing and so that's where the idea came from is there a huge need from students to say professionals needed as well so we built an entire platform and then we're starting to release case we're still new to to the CPE and providing that so we don't have a lot of content yet but we've now built the platform so we can ramp up and start producing it but then I noticed one more thing if you've done CPE training continuing professional education usually it's pretty boring I can vouch for that yeah and and a lot of people do it as a compliance exercise you know if you're an accountant you have to do 40 hours check the box and you just kind of check the box I thought why can't we turn it into a competitive advantage and so what we've done is we've taken the cutting edge best way to teach that we use in the universities and say can we apply that to the real world learning and so it isn't just reading about prompt engineering it's actually doing prompt engineering and then getting feedback on what you did well and what you didn't or one of the very first cases this is about auditing did either of you do auditing back in the day yeah yeah I did okay how did you learn how to interview people for an audit um a list yeah you you can list the questions yeah you read a list of questions and maybe they say we'll watch somebody you did never really get a practice it and because of that a lot of people are scared new auditors to go and talk to a client cause what am I supposed to do and we don't teach it we have them read a list because it's really hard to simulate when I have 100 students to do one on one interviews so we built a case where the student interviews an AI that has a personality as a client and they interview them and then on the very next screen it gives them detailed feedback on how well their interview went what they could improve what they did well what they struggled and that sort of thing so it's a whole new way of teaching because of AI wow it's really interesting uh cause it it I've I've there there are a few other other people doing very similar things in different fields but like it's it's interesting to see how many of these approaches are are kinda you know proliferating and and appearing all from from different people um and that's that's another thing that's so exciting about AI to me is like you have so many different kind of like a Cambrian explosion of intelligence in a lot of ways right like you have you have so many people going in just slightly different but roughly parallel directions and and you just figure like it's gotta leave it somewhere exciting haha cause that's where knowledge creation goes haha yeah you have a great point it's early days you can see a lot of different people and eventually they'll be consolidation these similar ones come together and they're starting to see some definitive paths but right now it's the wild Wild West of everybody's exploring and seeing what is this new continent look like and just kind of figuring it out yeah yeah so I'm curious building skillabite cause obviously this is a company so how many team members are there with this or is it just you at this point right now it's me and one former student who were building it together um and then I've got others were starting to branch out we've got the platform working now we've got the first cases but now it'll be finding other content creators and and working with them to get their materials out there cause there's a lot of really bright minds especially academics who thought about teaching a lot who I think could offer a lot to the profession and professionals on how to teach them and we're doing another cool way so we created a full on video game for teaching inventory auditing for example so rather than just reading a boring book it's the same engines that you know do top of the line video games you actually going to a warehouse and opening up boxes and investigating and doing those types of things that make it engaging and that where you really learn rather than just kind of Charlie Brown's teacher wah wah wah wah wah wah wah haha yep totally that's very exciting cause I feel like there's been a huge particularly early on either very early on in college or early on in your career there's so much knowledge thrown at you like memorize this know this and there's always been a huge disconnect I know it was for me of the knowledge you have and the real world application and I feel like AI being able to build these AI personas things like this it feels like it's finally marrying the two of those which I think is incredibly exciting that I just think of what time could be saved for me and my career if I had been able to you know an inventory account for example I had one that just I was so stressed I had no idea what I was doing it was painful but if I had actually been able to run through an example I would have been so helpful well in the best education you sit with NBA programs you graduate with your undergraduate you go out and get real world experience and you come back and get education again because that scaffolding really helps and if we can simulate that so that a student learns something then they can see it in the real world or a simulated real world they can come back and learn better and then back and forth and and they think it will be mutually reinforcing so that then they come out really knowing and feeling confident that they know what they're doing yeah another really exciting thing to be about AI in this field specifically is the eventual collision of AI and like VR or XR right so you know you can imagine like the the warehouse example you brought up like could be even further enhanced with it excuse me with VR right like just like as you said it's it you know it's the wild wild west out here were mapping out the new continent and there's there's some really exciting landmarks out there I wonder if you've been reading my emails we've been experimenting with that we haven't gone too far down the VR route because you have to have the headset yeah so there's just limitations from an educational perspective of everybody has to have some cool you know new gizmo and it makes it harder to get to but but we have started playing around with that um researching it in an early stages of testing but I think you're exactly right how do we how do we build real world simulations and experiences so people can learn better and faster yeah yeah I love that I'm curious okay so there's skill about which you're addressing this need of knowledge right this anyway this need of knowledge and you said you were just thinking so much of what you could address what other needs I know you're working on another project yeah I'm curious the background there yeah so you invited me to talk about one company and just this morning we got our LLC back for a second company so another one the Wild Wild West exactly well and they're just cool things to explore that's the thing I like so the second idea is we started looking at the accounting process and started to say eventually a lot of this is gonna be automated um I don't think you can see maybe I'll move my camera up up here this big huge book up in the back is a general Ledger from 1898 and you open it up in this big beautiful book and there's this detailed handwriting and and we've automated almost all of that accounting away nobody sits and adds up the columns and rows and does the same stuff we're on this journey of automation so we sat down and said let's look at the the auditing process from end to end and we started research projects in different places and we're testing a lot of that and that's probably more boring than you want to talk in the podcast but one place we saw there's a huge amount of inefficiency where we think AI could help is in work paper reviews so so think about the process a staff auditor goes and prepare some documentation of something that happened and then they pass it up the line and someone else reviews it and someone else reviews that and somebody else reviews that and they send it back and they fix it and you just go through this iterative process again and again and again in a lot of time and I started thinking about Japanese manufacturing you know back in the day when when the US they try to fix the promo let's you kind of like this review process and the Japanese said well let's go back and fix it at the beginning and let's actually make this product right so we don't have to do all of these continual review process and we said what if we did AI did the same thing and so we take a work paper when the staff finishes it they click one button and it automatically performs a review and gives them the feedback that they can then fix before they ever send it up the chain so the idea is a staff person hopefully can fix most of the heirs before the manager reviews it we'll still have a manager look at it but what if we could save 20 to 50% of their time on every single work paper managers are not inexpensive they build a very high rate if you could save that amount of time and redeploy it you've suddenly made a huge difference in the economies of scale of an audit wow I was curious and you answered it but cause I know a lot of the yes the review is to catch mistakes but it's also right to coach the those who are the associates things like that so the AI you said doesn't they don't just hit submit it reviews it before it goes to the manager it gives the associate feedback is that right and says hey these things are wrong okay yeah for for our our viewers that are gonna watch this on YouTube I'll I'll share my screen to show just a little bit of what it looks like um and I'll try to describe it for those who are just gonna be listening in can you see the screen okay yep so you have a traditional work paper in Excel there's multiple different sheets or tabs that are crossed so here's a lead sheet there's a testing table that has the actual testing that goes on and this is just a dummy work paper once the staff is done that work what we created is an Excel add in that they just click run and you can say what do you want to review you wanna look for accountability you wanna look for professional skepticism look at the formulas the the language and tone I'll just select one of these I'll say formulas and now the AI goes in and it examines every single formula in the entire workbook and says here's some feedback and you probably can't see the screens a little bit small but it gives you a time stamp and says hey here's where you you list inflation and labor cost twice with different values that doesn't make sense and it kind of tells you here's where it is over on your testing and C5 and C7 and sure enough we should have labeled it something different it was we labeled it wrong so now the this the staff gets the feedback of here's where I made my mistakes low stakes area cause it's not the manager writing back and say hey you know dumb dumb don't fix this but they see it themselves they can categorize how what they did to fix it and in another iteration what will eventually do is collect these and give them detailed feedback on consistent airs we see across work so you can say hey Jacob here is your plan of what you have to do to improve in the future so a kind of a customized training platform maybe these two different ideas will will melt so we'll have customized training on skill a bite and then this tool um so yeah yeah and you can write it as many times as you want so even a manager when they're done doing a work paper click a quick button and see if there's an error and just have a second set of eyes really quickly look at it and it's really pretty good I mean it picks up that you have hard coded values in that weren't justified that the conclusions don't match up a number of those types of things to to really bring it to life and and help improve quality and efficiency so it's not an either or and that's the cool thing of AI you can be both higher quality and faster so I have a couple questions um first and this one I think I know the answer already but I think it's I think questions like this are are really good to ask cause it illustrates kind of the the product development process for AI what was the decision behind making it like an Excel extension rather than its own application good two things here so first off many many work papers in accounting are done in Excel and so take it back to where you're actually doing the work rather than add another step in the process of now you have to upload it now you're worried about all these other things and and that process put it back where the users using it um and second training people are comfortable with Excel the professionals who use this they're used to running things like this and so it becomes very easy I mean training is gonna be click this button click this button and then just do your normal work it's just an AI giving you feedback rather than you know your Spencer my manager is telling me what I need to fix so I think those were the two biggest one and well actually I'll see a third one a third one is the speed with which we can build and try it and if it works great and if it doesn't okay we're back to the drawing board we can try something else yeah I just I I love asking questions like that just because I love hearing answers like that I think that these little product development questions are so much more important than people give them credit for as we move into the world of AI enabled software um one of my biggest gripes with with the current you know kind of way of technology smart TVs hate smart TVs um because I think that embedding you know a whole UI framework into a TV processor is just just a bad product decision uh and I've seen a lot of bad AI product decisions so I love when I see good ones um the second question is uh have you ever had any concerns with this tool in regards to like um abuse by managers essentially so either managers using it as an excuse to not you know not give proper attention to their their associate and and I'm speaking from not too much knowledge of the accounting industry just basically what Jacobs told me haha um so is there ever a test to that yeah yeah haha so yeah so are there concerns about you know managers misusing this um or using it to abuse their uh reports or anything like that good and now I'm a professor so I'm not gonna actually answer your question I'm gonna answer answer your question I think we see oftentimes people holding AI to a higher level of higher requirements than humans so you think of driverless cars oh humans crash at x percent well AI has to be perfect before we're gonna let people use driverless cars and and that's a fallacy because if it's better than a human we should use it so coming back to your question will managers shirk their work and just you know click through and say okay AI did it so I don't have to look at it yes some will absolutely um do managers do that right now yes absolutely and they're like it's busy it's busy season I've got too much work I'm tired I'm just gonna pass it on so I don't think the question is will they do it it's will they do it more because there's an AI tool than they would have without the AI tool that's a great question I'd love if someone a lister wants to test that one out contact me and David would at BYU dot edu and I'd be happy to share it with you and and and we could explore that but but I I think human nature is we're gonna have to fight that whether it's done with AI or it's not it's the same basic principle that that's exactly what I was hoping to hear haha um cause I think neither you didn't tell me before so that is my no it's true it's true I I sprung that one hoping to hoping to trap you into something like that cause this is exactly why we have this podcast is like we want to talk about how exactly what you touched on that people hold AI to a higher standard like for example when it comes to hallucinations hallucinations are obviously a problem to solve but also at the same time like it's problem solving humans as well I can't I can't tell you how many times I've thought I replied to a text Jake sent me and then an hour later I look back and like oh no I never I never you know two days later I look back and I never replied right um and so I I I love when when guests touch on that point um because it's just a it's one of those uh soap boxes that I've climbed on and I and I'm gonna keep shouting until people hear me that that um AI is essentially a mirror to to humanity um like a really weird digital mirror right um and with this specific one I'm gonna interject here a little bit yeah the reason we pick this process is because it was a human process and we're not taking all of the human out we're just taking some of it out and leaving human there and I think yeah exactly I don't think generative AI I haven't seen many situations yet where full automation works but exactly co working relationship as we still figure out how to get these models to behave you know how we want them to so this this setting works really really well for that and it's not just auditing its tax we've got that almost built out we'll have that built out this week but then also just a general review of Excel workbooks we've done some initial testing and so imagine whatever workbook you're doing you click a button it says hey take a second look at this that doesn't look normal fix this consider this um and I think that's the real power of AI right now is it's just a second set of really really smart eyes to save you from really looking stupid it's all of that totally totally agree I need I need it like in my ear so then I'm talking to my kids my wife and others and it's like no don't say that yet think first yeah exactly someday someday yeah yeah I think get hub and Microsoft nailed it with the co pilot name I think that really doesn't body so much of where AI really thrives right now in the world um someday maybe we'll have human aid humanoid robots doing things but I think we're we're ways away from that still um so as you've I'm really curious cause you have all this experience both with students and now professionals what's the biggest area that people are lacking related as far as knowledge let me back up what AI knowledge is most lacking okay you've observed well there are four courses on Skillabite com will drop the link everybody should 9 99 just this weekend now I think there's a couple things AI is different than other learning in the sense that it it is more experiential and experience based I I can't do a training where you say hey Jacob and Spencer do a B and C and here's your output it's not just teaching teaching arithmetic because it changes that's the genius and the drawback of it so No. 1 I think people need just practice and experience they need to learn the basics that's why we built the company another plug but once you learn those those basics I tell people when I go out and do consulting and talking to companies the very best thing you can do is get five people to agree every week we're gonna do one thing with AI and on Friday we'll go to lunch and we'll all share and then the next week we'll do five more things and five more things after one or two months you will have a list of used cases of things that work and things that don't and you will be very very good at it and it is that it's that basic of getting in and trying it and then people seem to to get it real quick once they've spent a week on it they're like oh yeah how did I live without this you're preaching the choir we test say this all the time like just like this week is every single something like have it make you tell her what's in your fridge and it'll create a recipe for you know like just anything just try it and it becomes very intuitive and and and so so part of it we need to motivate people and it just to get in and try it and so you can do you know off sites where you take a group of people and you have them try it or bringing people to speak and I've done that to get them to try it the second piece I'd say in addition to motivation is start following the thought leaders so they're listening to your podcast there's other people on LinkedIn start following some of those people to see how they're using it um cause there's this big fallacy of oh let me sit on AI and I'm gonna wait until the hype dies down and we'll see the real products in you know one three five years and then I'll start working on it that's not how this works if you get in early and figure it out then you'll be able to be brought along otherwise I think there's gonna be a big chasm that you don't understand and suddenly it's moved so far it's gonna take a lot of time to catch up so starting the race and just keeping up with everybody else is gonna be a lot easier than saying okay everybody's on mile 13 and I'm gonna start the Marathon now but that's very very true cause I find even if I like you know cause I I don't pay as much attention to like the image generation space for example and so even now like I'm I'm pretty hopeless to be hopelessly behind on a lot of like the you know the latest even just basic prompting techniques um for a lot of the image models um and I keep I keep yelling at people you know not literally obviously but in my personal life and online like yo you guys need to be you need to be trying this stuff out right now um this is this is learning to Google back in you know 2002 or whatever right like this is these are fundamental skills that you're building that will continue to serve you for years and and these skills will only appreciate value as as these models get better and better um and that's something I think people under appreciate I was training a bunch of um heads of companies and so they were talking okay so we're excited about doing this who do we who do we train should we start with the C suite I said no go down to the very bottom grassroots level and train them first because you'll get a lot of smart people who see the real problems and then it will build up and you'll you'll you'll hear here's all the ways we're improving things and I think it's the same thing it's the same thing with professors don't train the professors get it in the students hands and have them teach the professors because it's so easy to use and once you start trying it you'll be like oh I can do this oh I can try that let me try this let me try that um so you just have to free the innovation and let people have a space to try it rather than okay we're gonna treat this like traditional it and it's gonna be a top down approach right right oh there's just so many directions I wanna go so many questions I have right now um maybe a slight pivot okay so actually first to summarize their skill by education Hidden Hawk AI yep um we don't even have the website for that one but if you have interest in that one send me an email I'm happy to to share more but but yeah we're still working on on building this out as fast as we possibly can hopefully by the end of the year we have something ready for people to start using perfect and we'll drop links when they become available we can drop skill a bite for sure um so professor I'm curious if we back up to academia at large I'm curious the effect you've seen of AI on particularly professors as far as research and publishing papers you know I'm kind of surprised there's two reacts so I I've done trainings now throughout the world this last year given a ton of presentations academics are the most interesting group cause I would have expected them to be you know embracing this this is the future how do we do it but there's a lot of hesitancy a lot of people saying well wait I didn't do it that way everybody has to learn it this way so I see a few people that are sprinting out going as fast as they can but a lot of academics are kind of taking a more cautious approach let's stand back and watch what happens um so so I I gave a presentation very early here at BYU and it was kind of funny all the fact that it came back up to the 5th floor all the senior faculty went and check their retirement portfolios and all the young faculty went subscribe to chat GPT but but I do think it's it's it's getting past that it's not scary you need to try it um it's warming up so I'm starting to do more trainings of faculty of how they can use this and once they see oh wait I can do that I didn't want to spend all that time preparing that material or customizing it or coming up with those questions then they're like oh I'm all on board because it makes my life a lot easier and better interesting it's interesting how often that pattern repeats itself to um the number of people I've seen even online like slowly become not all of them have become complete AI enthusiast but they become less skeptical as they've seen you know the material results well Spencer let me just brings up something you might find interesting yeah one of the big things people are hesitant faculty especially as they feel it's quote unquote cheating yeah but it's too easy and yeah and I think once we get people beyond that to say okay proof reading now is too easy but the thought of what I should say is harder and so it's not shifting the amount of work I do it's just changing I have to spend really time good time thinking of what's important and less time in polishing up to write it and and I think that's the key we have to get people beyond this idea that AI is somehow cheating it's just a new way of doing things in a better way of doing a lot of things I love that yeah it just increases higher level thinking it really does it allows you to think at a higher level it can now there are groups and I wanna make sure I bring this out there's a lot of people who use it in bad ways you know let me just put in the essay and click and be done so it's not if you're using it to avoid work that's bad if you're using it to improve your work and to do new and better things that's the right way and that's where I'm struggling as a teacher is trying to motivate students to wanna use it the right way and not just use it for work minimization and and and using it in dumb ways hmm oh I was gonna ask a question I'm good with with students what you've how do you deal with that how do you I mean what is cheating look like like how do you how do you confront those issues from students at this point so I use very clear expectations up front I tell them kind of like a stoplight you should use red or green this assignment you cannot use it and I'd like I explained I tell them why you need to memorize this cause we're gonna do a close note exam cause this is stuff you have to have memorized to be a professional but then what I'm doing on the other projects is I'm saying now this is stuff you need to be able to do not just no but do I expect really amazing things use AI you know work as teams do everything you can but I better expect to see something that I never would have expected a student perform before because now you can use it to program you can use it to design websites you can create your images you can create cool text you can write it in unique ways you can be creative and brainstorm so I knowing and doing I separated into two buckets and and I teach them differently and I I require the students to do them differently interesting and have you seen a higher level of higher quality deliverables from oh absolutely the knowing is kind of the same it's hard to learn and people have to work on that that's about the same test exam averages but on the doing things I mean I mentioned the whole building a whole new website and I can give you a whole bunch of other examples of students doing projects where they're like hey I want to design this it's like you can prototype it out you don't just have to write you know two pages about it give me a deliverable that actually shows it working and they can't so that's the cool thing I think we're gonna see an explosion of entrepreneurship because there's so many things you can try and build as like well that didn't work this one did let me run with it and and develop that out I was gonna I went into want want want I've silenced you both of those I just have too too many questions um when you I'm curious what you are afraid of with AI what what are some things you're nervous about or things you would caution people about um either now or in the future where you see it going so I'm a big enthusiast but one of the second or third research projects we did was a governance framework around all the risks so if you go to Gen AI dot Global there's a free framework you can download that organizations can look through and say here's all the potential problems in an easy digestible manner and and build a frame and and do that so there are a lot of risks um I think a couple of the biggest risks are one people using it to just not do anything of value they're using it to work minimize and we've talked a little bit about that I think nefarious purposes people are gonna use it there's some really evil bad things that are done in the world with generative AI and and it's enabled that to be done at a scale in a speed that that nobody in society wants so we do have some definite problems there we need to rethink some serious regulations I don't know how we do how you apply copyright law and all of those sticky issues there needs to be some way to reward original creators but what was envisioned never even thought of AI in this world of generative AI so I think we need some real serious thought and given the political climate of division it's gonna be real hard to come together to think of how do we do some of these really important big things to to prevent some of those problems the copyright one is is one that I've been another one that I've been beating the Drummond and and standing on my soapbox about for ever since Chatty BT came out like the second I started using it like this means it's immediately occurred to me like this means like copyright law is effectively dead already um and and everybody's just catching up to that now um it's it's gonna be really interesting to see how it all shakes out cause obviously there there are some there are some cases of of you know AI training that that I think are pretty clear copyright violations yeah um I won't name any names but uh there are you know there's some certain platforms out there haha um but then you look at something like Chatty BT or Claude and it's just like first how how would you determine you know that a copyright violation has occurred second how would you assign damages third like how do you argue that it's not fair use like there's just so many so many levels to it that it's it's we need a new new regime and yeah to your point I'm I'm I'm pretty uh pessimistic about that happening haha um hopeful but haha we'll see and I think we're at this really interesting point it's like when the internet first came out it was this new thing we didn't have the laws and regulations and the thinking all around it was emerging and growing we're at the same point with AI we'll look back in a couple years and be like all those questions we figured them out um but but right now it's in this messy middle stage of what do we do what do we not do what should we do and all that and I think it it I'm I'm like you said I'm confidence that it will be worked out but it's gonna be a bit painful and they'll be some people that are hurt along that way um so how we can best get to some type of agreement of what's appropriate not I think it would be awesome more minds more people sharing and figuring that out together totally I think one really encouraging development on that front to me has been a lot of the deals that open AI is is striking with you know um major journalist organization etc um cause even if like you know you can't really necessarily apply copyright law and and that's still unsettled right like maybe you know maybe the courts will disagree with me but so far it's you know it's been determined that you can't really apply copyright law to these cases but I still think that it's incredibly important for these companies to at least make good faith efforts toward paying organizations and you know artists etc that are you know significant contributors um and that's an unpopular view among among many of my fellow and AI enthusiasts when I when I express that view there's a lot of them that get mad at me but one that I stand by well there needs to be balance in the history of the world you can see it balance between labor and then balance between the thinking class and the working class and you know all of these different groups this is just shifted and and we haven't settled on how do we do that how do we pay the people who come up with the creative unique ideas but then someone else who builds it and and and I think we'll get there and and there's lots of different ideas out there but but you're exactly right it we have to reward people for good work that that moves things forward but we can't stifle the technology that's advancing as well yeah yeah excited I'm excited I'll tell you the one I wish I could invent with all this video stuff I can't imagine I think my grandkids will come home from from school and say I wanna watch a video about Darth Vader as a ROM com with this other actor and and all of that and it will create it for them and somehow we'll figure out the monetization that Disney gets you know 25 cents for this and someone else gets this and someone else gets this totally but when we get to that world will be just like digital photography digital photography didn't kill film it it killed film while making photography approachable to everyone yeah and I think that's the big point for for me as AI takes skills that were reserved for special group and everyone can be a computer programmer everyone can be a producer everyone can do all of these other things and we unlock that ability across humanity and we're gonna see explosions in all of these cool new things because people now can do it cause it's easier it's brought down to their level of just describing it and it makes it for you and it forces people with those skills to reach higher and higher so for me with with with programming I was mostly like a web developer by trade but now you know now that that a lot of web development has honestly been automated like I've I've been reaching further and further into you know machine learning and and you know systems engineer and stuff like that um and it's been a challenge and it's been rough at times but it's also been like it's been incredible and it's just it's enhanced my life enormously and and enormously enhance my earning potential so people love learning go look at little kids they love learning AI if used appropriately is the greatest learning tool that we've seen cause you can learn in so many cool ways and explore and invent yeah create and I think there's something human about that and to me that's what will be cool if we can unlock use AI to unlock that creative exciting learning potential rather than just turn us into soulless robots then will will have been successful yeah it really is like having this your life co pilot someone who can go through and Taylor teach you everything that you want to know and there's no longer a there's a time and a place right for sitting in a lecture hall but I think everyone agrees the real learning always takes place outside of the lecture it takes place in the homework where you're doing it yourself and you're figuring out you're looking things up for yourself and now all of it is just accelerated I think that's a big theme we're big theme we're seeing is just an acceleration of existing processes and the trimming of extraneous fat that nobody wants to do anyway education is going to increasingly become about motivating so you come to listen to me so I motivate you to want to learn and do and give you some structure and then you go figure out how to do it and teach yourself uh huh and to that and I that that excites me cause then you are going to be better I'm going to be better and and what we produce will be better so maybe we'll see that's the fun part it's a great experiment in the world I've seen some AI videos on on TikTok of they'll be like AI generated Joe Biden and Donald Trump discussing like you know Oilers stuff like that and it's you know it's all memes and jokes right now but also at the same time I think at the heart of it like there is actually you know a new kind of teaching method developing right where it's like why not learn calculus from Bugs Bunny you can do it now yeah that helps you learn it go learn it from Bugs Bunny yeah totally um well professor we're very grateful for you coming on with us today I'm as we wrap things up I'm curious what advice cause I'm sure you've given a lot of advice to a lot of people about AI but for someone who is nervous about AI they think it could take their job whatever it is what what advice would you give to these people well if you're nervous about it that's a good sign because that shows that you care and you want to improve and rather than taking that nervousness and letting it turn into fear and paralysis take it to motivate you to take a step to learn and improve um if you're learning and improving you'll evolve and there will be something on the other side just because you can't see what it is doesn't mean it's not there and so I'm a big man of faith I think that's the definition of faith is you believe that the future will be better and if you're learning and progressing and trying the future is going to be better if you stick your head in the sand and pretend this doesn't exist you're in trouble it is there is going to be a lot of change in the world and the pace of change is going to accelerate so if you can be comfortable with trying new things and the joy of learning then you'll be okay on the other side so that would be my biggest advice is is try it experiment with it see how it can make your life better and then how you can make other people's lives better because of all this cool new ability that you have I love that of it that's perfect it's yeah it's fascinating how often we hear basically that exact same thing like just go try it out and you can use it to enhance your own life you can use it to enhance your friends lives um I I've done both as well like it's it's it's been incredible um David uh before we before we let you go is there anywhere that if our followers are wanting to you know connect with you or learn more about you follow what you're up to what's the best place to do that good so No. 1 be LinkedIn so find me on LinkedIn there's a lot of David Woods I'm no David Wood I'm one of the David Woods at BYU I'm the accounting you can email me David wood at BYU dot edu I'm happy to reach out and share what I know um obviously you'll drop the links for the the companies that were we're trying to start and seeing if those can can make a difference in the world um but those are the best places to reach me awesome perfect thank you so much great thank you for coming on it's it's fun to to talk to people about this and just share opinions I think that's a big part of what we need to do is talk and learn together we agree completely yeah hundred percent agree thank Professor Wood