Hello fellow keepers of numbers,
Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate! This week we cover Intuit’s deal with OpenAI to embed their apps within ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 launch. Anthropic also left a few fun nuggets for us in the announcement, such as a rollout of Claude for Excel and automatic context management.
THE LATEST
Intuit strikes deal with OpenAI to embed QBO and TurboTax in ChatGPT
Source: Gemini Nano Banana Pro / The AI Accountant
Intuit announced a multi-year partnership with OpenAI worth over $100 million to integrate TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma, and Mailchimp directly into ChatGPT. Users can connect their Intuit accounts to get personalized financial insights and take actions through secure, permissioned connectors without leaving the chat interface.
The integration lets ChatGPT users ask tax questions, estimate refunds, schedule time with tax experts, get business insights based on real-time QuickBooks data, and create marketing campaigns through Mailchimp. For businesses, the system can generate invoice reminders, improve cash flow analysis, and surface revenue opportunities using actual financial data.
Intuit will also deepen its use of OpenAI models across its platform with AI agents that can forecast cash flow, prepare taxes, and manage payroll through natural conversation.
Why it’s important for us:
I honestly can’t tell if this is a hedge on their new Intuit Accountant Suite or if they’re doubling down. They’re paying a large amount of money to use ChatGPT in their platforms’ AI agents, but weren’t they already doing that? And won’t this integration defeat the purpose of many of their Intuit AI agents and features? Maybe I’m overthinking it. It’s certainly not a bad idea for Intuit to partner with an AI expert.
Beyond that, this is an interesting development on several levels.
1) Intuit will be advertised by ChatGPT
OpenAI recently announced their Apps SDK, which allows ChatGPT users to use an app directly within the chat window. This means ChatGPT would surface QBO directly within a window inside the chat for users to take actions and summarize and explain data.
ChatGPT will advertise approved apps to users when it finds it relevant. QBO already owns the majority of the market share, but this could be another tool for Intuit to capture solopreneurs who don’t currently keep books or other businesses that find more value in the combined experience within ChatGPT compared to their current GL software.
2) CAS practices will benefit
Current state AI models are still extremely hit or miss when performing actions in other software. Despite the intelligence level of AI models, they’re still pretty bad bookkeepers. Barring some shocking advancement or state of the art software, it’ll be a while before AI takes the job of bookkeepers.
That being said, AI can still be extremely useful in a number of bookkeeping tasks in the right hands. Which is why I actually think this could be a good development for accounting firms providing CAS services.
ChatGPT users need QBO data to get insights from the model, so they may be more inclined to search for a firm to set up their QBO GL and assist with their bookkeeping. I also think this new integration will expose bad bookkeeping. Plenty of solopreneurs and small businesses that keep their own books will quickly realize they need better data to get the results they want. Good bookkeeping firms may also get work from businesses who realize their current bookkeeper sucks.
3) CAS practices must be AI-forward and this is a major opportunity
I think this could be a huge opportunity for CAS practices to transition from accounting advisors to AI and accounting advisors.
As many firms push to offer more advisory, this news might seem like a slight blow to the firms trending in that direction. After all, if ChatGPT can see the QBO GL and generate insights, reports, and plans, isn’t the accounting firm a little less valuable?
In reality, most business owners still won’t understand the accounting, which means they’ll also struggle to get the most out of their ChatGPT integration with QBO. This leads to an opportunity for CAS practices to teach business owners how to best utilize AI to interact with their data and inform business decisions.
It’s scary to shift some of the “advising” from us to AI, but it’s going to start happening at some point. We’re obviously not hiding the data from our clients, so shouldn’t we help teach them how to get the most out of it?
Maybe this comes in the form of training, a library of prompts to utilize, creating custom projects for clients, or shared AI. And maybe we’re there to help confirm and validate the AI-generated information. I’m sure there are plenty of other opportunities.
This could also be a new line of revenue for firms working with businesses who don’t want to pay for bookkeeping services, but would like support better utilizing AI to work with their QBO data.
Anthropic launches Opus 4.5 and expands availability of Claude for Excel
Source: Gemini Nano Banana Pro / The AI Accountant
Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.5 on November 24, setting new performance benchmarks across coding, document creation, and multi-step reasoning tasks. The model achieved 80.9% accuracy on SWE-bench Verified, outperforming recent releases from OpenAI and Google on real-world software engineering tasks. Pricing dropped to $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, making frontier AI capabilities accessible at one-third the cost of the previous Opus model. The model is available now.
The release includes improved handling of Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, and PowerPoint presentations. Opus 4.5 can build financial models with working formulas, create pivot tables and charts, and generate professional documents through natural conversation. Claude Opus 4.5 users reported 20% better accuracy and 15% efficiency gains on financial modeling tasks in their internal evaluations. Claude for Excel became generally available to Max, Team, and Enterprise users with new features including pivot table creation, chart generation, and file uploads.
The Claude app also gained automatic context management. When conversations approach the context limit, Claude now automatically summarizes earlier messages in the background to keep chats going without interruption. Users maintain access to full conversation history while Claude continues working seamlessly.
Why it’s important for us:
Gemini 3 Pro’s reign at the top of benchmarks lasted approximately 6 days. In all seriousness though, I said this last week, but I place little to no weight on benchmarks.
Claude has been my go-to for a while now, and they continue to ship really great features. Claude Opus 4.5 is likely an extremely smart model. Maybe the smartest in the world right now. But I actually want to spend a minute focusing on Claude for Excel and Claude’s abilities to work with Excel, Word, and PowerPoint files.
Take a look a this 1.5 minute YouTube video below. I think it does a good job of highlighting some interesting use cases.
Claude has somewhat quietly shipped several really cool features in the last two months that could add a lot of real-world value for firms.
Because Anthropic apparently hates losers who only pay for the Pro plan, I haven’t had a chance yet to play around with Claude for Excel. I’m eager to test it and compare with Copilot in Excel. On the surface, it looks like Anthropic is actually having more success developing useful tools that sit within Microsoft products than Microsoft is.
PUT IT TO WORK
Tip or Trick of the Week
In this spirit of the holiday season, my tip this week is to spend a couple fewer minutes in your AI tool of choice or on your phone and tell a loved one you’re thankful for them. I’m taking my own advice this week. Mostly because my wife told me to.
WEEKLY RANDOM
Karbon recently released The Future of Accounting, which offers predictions for 2036. This is a great indicator of how the forward-thinkers of the industry anticipate their firm and services changing due to AI and automation.
There are a few predictions and takeaways I’d like to note. And it’s important to keep in mind that these are predictions by 2036.
Typical routine tasks will be 100% automated. Coding transactions, chasing data, reconciling accounts, prepping returns. These are the routine tasks with relatively small variability that an AI can handle. We’re already seeing pieces of these tasks automated by AI agents, automations, and software.
Flattened, horizontal firm structure. Junior and senior roles will no longer exist. Rather, a horizontal firm structure that rewards skill-based environments and promotes innovation and learning will emerge. This goes hand-in-hand with the automation of routine tasks.
Data quality will determine firm success. Firms with robust and accessible data will thrive. Firms that have been successful in the past should have a large amount of invaluable data. But if that data remains in the minds of the people who run the firm, or it’s stored away in many different systems or software without easy access, the data might as well be useless. This is typically my #1 recommendation for firms: understand where your data lives and make efforts to consolidate it into easily accessible systems - both for humans and AI.
The tech stack disappears. I disagree with this one to a certain extent. The tech stack may not be as noticeable by clients as it is today, which is obviously a good thing. But the tech stack will be more important than ever. Firms will need their data to seamlessly connect between software tools. It seems unlikely to me at this point that one software will emerge that’s best-in-class across the board. It’s important to pick software for your tech stack that’s forward-thinking and open (closed APIs and limited integrations should be a major red flag).
Firms will have a new identity. The words ‘accountant’ and ‘accounting firm’ probably won’t mean what they do today, if they’re even used. While we’re not expected to be a business’ software expert, accountants do play an important role in shaping their clients’ tech stack and software adoption in many ways. Accounting firms have access to the most important data for their clients. Firms that position themselves well can transition from being a standard accountant to helping clients adopt tools and shape their business in the new age of AI. In a world where routine accounting tasks have been automated, there’s likely still an extreme amount of value in being an advisor that’s always ahead of the game.
We’re still a long way away from the world laid out above. It’s important to take a step back and realize that we all have time to take a breath and make important and well-planned decisions today. But it’s also important to understand everything laid out above and begin making efforts to move in that direction.
Until next week, keep protecting those numbers.
Preston