I'm with MindBridge Ai

As of last week, I’m Director of Sales Australia & New Zealand for MindBridge Ai. Whoa.

I already miss my colleagues at BDO - they're actually amazing. An incredibly large firm that I believe holds the keys to the mothership of the mid-tier market when they turn them in the ignition. I'm really grateful for the permission to impact meaningful change in the business and am proud of the inroads I was allowed to make in shattering the traditional mid-tier accounting practice stereotype.

The jump from brave (maybe a bit cray-cray) practice intrapreneur to Ai business development is pretty terrifying, to be honest. For a number of years, I’ve made career moves into logical and safe spaces. Contrary to the big game I talk in the boardroom or on stage, in my personal life I’m incredibly risk and change averse (yep, just call me Mike Ross).

My passion for evolution and optimisation of professional services businesses stems wholly and solely from needing to have better outcomes for all the humans involved – the team and the clients. So in a sense, a move into AI might seem weird. The way I see Mindbridge is as an organisation that ultimately exists to amplify human awesomeness:

• creating stronger trust relationships between auditors and clients through Ai optimised audit quality
• enabling data-backed insights for business to operate better
• creating a real and commercially-accessible way for advisers to provide insights and support to their clients

I don’t actually believe that automation in any form, (be it client tech driven or ATO digital strategy), will replace the role of accountants (or humans for that matter). BUT – it is my strongly held belief and prediction that those accountants/advisers embracing a tech-enabled world, delivering game-changing client advisory experiences leveraging the plethora of data around them WILL quickly replace those who continue to cling to putting numbers in boxes, burning out talent with tasks devoid of any value (think re-keying data from client system to redundant internal reporting package, just as one small example). There's no wizardry in this really - its already happening at speed.

We can argue til the cows come home about whether compliance is dead or not. But nonetheless, no-one really argues that the landscape is changing. Proactive compliance risk mitigation is where the real value is in the compliance bucket. A value that is not delivered economically at scale nor effectively without machine learning and Ai in your toolkit.

I’m eternally grateful to the fabulous Guy Pearson for making the pivotal introductions at Mindbridge, recognising a near-on-perfect cultural fit and alignment of values and opportunity for me to really grow. Dead. Set. Legend.

This is going to be fun.