Monday, September 21, 2026

Reasons not to come

I have spent three weeks asking people to register for a free week of AI training.

Today I want to do the opposite, because I have now watched enough of these to know who finishes and who quietly disappears on Wednesday, and I would rather say the unhelpful part out loud than have another forty people sign up for something that was never going to suit them.

So here is the honest list. If any of these is you, do not come. I mean it, and I will not think less of you for it.

Do not come if you want to watch.

There is no lecture. Steve puts a real piece of work in front of you and you build something with it while he is there. If you were planning to have it on in another tab while you clear your inbox, you will get precisely nothing from the hour and you will feel vaguely worse about AI at the end of the week than you did at the start.

Do not come if you do not have one specific job in mind.

This is the big one. "I want to learn AI" is not a goal, it is a mood. The people who finish the week arrive with one tedious, recurring, specific job that they privately resent, and they leave with the thing that does it. The people who drift off on Wednesday arrived to learn AI in general and discovered on Tuesday that general is not a thing you can build.

If you cannot finish the sentence "the job I am sick of doing by hand is ______", stay where you are until you can.

And if you are coming at this from the other direction, because you want to build an AI consulting business rather than fix your own back office, the sentence is different but the rule is the same. Finish this one instead: "the first person I would help with this is ______". Naming an actual human being, not a market.

Do not come if you cannot protect the hour.

Everybody is busy, so that is not what I mean. I mean that if you already know, today, that Wednesday and Thursday are going to get eaten, then you are registering for two days of a five day thing. Yes, it is recorded. I will also tell you plainly that most people do not watch the recording. I have the numbers and they are not flattering to any of us.

Do not come if you are trying to work out who you can let go.

You will be disappointed, and more importantly you will be wrong. Everything I have seen says the same thing: the typing compresses and the judgment does not. If you arrive looking for a headcount answer you will spend five hours getting an answer you did not want, from a room full of people who are using the same tools to take on more work rather than less.

Do not come if you want to be told AI is overhyped.

You will not get that. You also will not get the opposite. Both of those camps tend to leave unhappy, because the week is about a much less exciting middle position: these things are genuinely useful and they are confidently wrong often enough that someone competent has to stay in the chair.

And do not come if you are already doing this well.

If you have already got these tools handling your repetitive work, and you know from experience where they lie to you, then you do not need the week and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Go and show somebody who does not. That is a better use of your Tuesday than sitting through something you have already worked out.

Who it is actually for

What is left, after all that, is not one person. It is five, and they get very different things out of the same five hours.

The owner. Somebody running a practice or a business who does the same handful of jobs every month and has a nagging sense that the way they are doing them is about to look old.

The CEO. Somebody who is not going to do this work personally but has to decide what the organisation does about it, and who would rather form that view by building something once than by reading another vendor's deck.

The CFO. Somebody who has to put a number on it. You will not get a business case handed to you, but you will get the only thing a business case is actually made of, which is a realistic sense of what these tools do well and where they quietly fail.

The person who is not the boss. Somebody with a job who wants to be better at it, or who leads a team and wants to bring them with her. I want to be direct about this one, because nobody else will be: your employer is probably not going to train you in this. Most organisations are still deciding what their policy is, and while they decide, the people who get good at these tools are getting good on their own time. Being the person on the team who can do this, and who knows where it goes wrong, is a real advantage right now. In about two years it will be an ordinary expectation and worth nothing. That window is open and it is not going to stay open.

And if you lead a team, the same thing applies with a sharper edge. You cannot supervise work you have never done. If your people start using these tools and you have never built anything with one, you will not be able to tell their good output from their plausible output, which is the only part of the job that will still be yours.

And the person starting something. This is the one I did not expect and now see every week. People who want to build an AI consulting practice of their own, some of them between jobs, some of them still in one. The week is genuinely useful to them, possibly more than to anyone else, because you cannot sell this to somebody else until you have built one thing with your own hands and watched it be wrong.

What those five have in common is short. Willing to be a beginner in front of other people for an hour. And able to be irritated by a machine without concluding the machine is useless, because you will be irritated by it, probably on day two.

That is the whole bar. It is not a technical one, and the people who clear it come out of the week with something working and a much better sense of when to argue with it.

AI does the typing. You make the judgment calls. Five hours will not make you an expert at the first half. It gives you enough practice at the second half to stop accepting the first answer, which is the only part that has ever mattered.

The part with a date on it

Monday 28 September to Friday 2 October. One hour a day, live at 3 PM Central, every session recorded.

Registration closes Friday 25 September, which is four days from today.

There was going to be a week in October. There is not any more, so this is the last one, and I would rather say that plainly than dress it up.

No card, nothing renews, and nothing is sold to you during it.

Register here: https://humansplusagents.ai/legacy-sbc-aia

You do not need to own anything, run anything, or have anyone's permission to come.

If you read the list above and recognised yourself in it, close this and get on with your Monday. Genuinely. I would rather have thirty people who finish than a hundred who register out of a vague feeling that they ought to.

And if you read the list and thought "none of those is me, I know exactly what I would build" or "I know exactly who I would help first", then you are the person I wrote the other three weeks of posts for, and you have got four days.

Yvonne Razo is the founder of Legacy Small Business Consulting, CFO of Simple Academy, and co-founder of AI for Accounting. If a whole week is not realistic, claim a free agent instead and keep it either way. The community is free and open, and will stay that way long after the last free week has gone.

Friday, September 18, 2026

Things I have said out loud to my computer this week

I work alone a lot of the day, which means nobody is around to hear me talking to a machine.

I have decided this is fine. I have also decided to write some of it down, because looking at the list I realised it was not a list of complaints. It was a transcript of someone doing their job.

Here is the week, more or less in order.

"That is not what I asked."

Said at least daily. Usually about something that was, in fairness, quite good. Just not the thing.

"Where did you get that number?"

The single most important sentence in this whole business. I say it to AI. I say it to staff. I have said it to a bank. It is the question that separates a professional from an audience.

"I did not ask you to be confident."

This one I say with real feeling. The tone is always so certain. The certainty is not attached to anything.

"Yes, but which client."

Because it will happily give you a beautiful, general, entirely useless answer about all clients everywhere.

"No."

Just that. No elaboration. It is surprisingly effective and deeply satisfying.

"Show me the source or take it out."

This is the one I would tattoo on the inside of my eyelids if I could. If it cannot tell you where something came from, it does not go in a file with your name on it.

"Nobody talks like that."

Said about a client email it drafted for me, which used the word "leverage" twice and "synergies" once. I do not employ people who write like that and I am not going to start now.

"You made that up, didn't you."

It had. It was very sorry about it. Being sorry does not unfile a return.

"Stop apologising and just fix it."

See above.

"Okay. That one was actually good."

Said quietly. Grudgingly. Once, possibly twice.

And finally, the one I will defend to my last breath:

"Thank you."

I have said thank you to it more than once this week. I am aware of how that sounds. I do not wish to discuss it.

One more confession, and then I will stop

I call it Claudette when I am happy with it.

I call it Claude when I am not.

I did not decide to do this. I noticed I was doing it, somewhere around Wednesday, and then I could not stop noticing. Claudette gets the good work, the draft that came back better than I had any right to expect, the thing I actually used. Claude gets the made-up figure and the email full of synergies.

I am not going to defend this either. But I will say that if you have ever caught yourself using a different tone of voice with a machine depending on whether it just helped you or just wasted twenty minutes of your life, you already understand the entire relationship. It is the same voice you use with a talented junior who is having an off week.

Here is what I noticed when I read the list back

Not one of those sentences is about typing.

Every single one is a judgment call. Is that the right number. Is that the right client. Does that sound like a human being wrote it. Where did that come from. Is that good enough to go out with my name on it.

That is not a list of things going wrong. That is a transcript of supervision, which happens to be the actual job now.

I have watched a lot of people meet these tools for the first time, and the ones who struggle are almost never the ones who cannot write a clever prompt. They are the ones who accept the first answer. They read something confident and well-formatted and they assume confident and well-formatted means correct, because for their whole working life those two things have travelled together.

They do not travel together any more. That is the entire adjustment.

AI does the typing. You make the judgment calls.

And the uncomfortable truth is you cannot learn to make those calls by reading about them. You learn it the way you learned to review a junior's work, which is by looking at a great deal of work that is nearly right and developing a nose for the nearly.

Which brings me to the thing with a date on it

We run a free week of live AI training with Steve Cunningham, and it is the last one.

Monday 28 September to Friday 2 October. One hour a day, live at 3 PM Central, every session recorded.

There was going to be a week in October. There is not any more. So this is genuinely it, and I would rather say that plainly than dress it up.

The good news, and the reason I am writing this on a Friday instead of panicking: we have had so much coming in this week that registration stays open right through to Friday 25 September. You have a full week. Nobody is being hustled.

What actually happens in it: Steve puts a real piece of work in front of you and you build something. Not a webinar about AI. Not forty slides on the future of the profession. You bring one job you are tired of doing by hand and you leave with the thing that does it, and more to the point, with some idea of when to argue with it.

No card, nothing renews, and nothing is sold to you during it.

Register here: https://humansplusagents.ai/legacy-sbc-aia

One suggestion, since I have been on both sides of this. Do not come to learn AI. Come with one specific, tedious, recurring job that you privately resent. That is the difference between the people who finish the week and the people who drift off on Wednesday.

And if anyone catches you saying thank you to it, send them this.

Thursday, September 17, 2026

The quiet ones registered. The enthusiastic ones did not.

I have been keeping score this week, and the result is not what I expected.

Three people told me they were signing up for the free week. Not vaguely. One wrote "I am going to sign up, thank you." Another said "will do." A third said "sure." All three meant it at the moment they typed it. I have no doubt about that.

None of them has registered.

Two other people registered. Neither of them said a word to me about it first. One of them signed up four hours after she heard the week existed, and I only found out because the confirmation landed in my inbox. She never told me she was thinking about it. She just did it and got on with her day.

That is a small sample and I am not going to pretend it is a study. But I have watched this shape often enough now to stop treating it as a coincidence.

Saying you will do a thing is not the first step toward doing it. For a lot of us, it is the thing we do instead.

Why announcing it makes it less likely

There is a decent body of work on this, and the uncomfortable version goes like this: telling someone your intention gives you some of the satisfaction of having acted on it. The social credit arrives early. You have already been seen as the sort of person who is going to learn this, fix this, start this. The part of you that wanted to be seen that way is now fed.

And the actual task, which is still sitting there untouched, has quietly become less urgent.

I am not above this. I have a list of things I have told people I was going to do this year, out loud, with enthusiasm, and a shorter list of things I have actually done. The two lists barely overlap. The things I finished are almost all things I never mentioned to anyone until they were finished.

If that describes you too, then the useful thing is not to feel bad about it. The useful thing is to notice that the moment you feel like replying "I'll sign up" is precisely the moment to sign up instead, because the reply is going to cost you the doing.

Now the part where I have to eat my own argument

On Monday I published a piece arguing that a thing with no cost has no deadline, and that free offers collect people who are never going to turn up because nothing forces the issue.

That same evening, we cancelled the October week.

Which meant that a few hours after publishing that argument, I had sent nearly four thousand people an email telling them there were two free weeks left and that they had until the second of October to register for the second one. That is now wrong. It was wrong before the day was out.

I am sending a correction today, and I want to be straight about why, because the easy thing would have been to let it go and hope nobody had picked October.

Some of you did pick October. You read that email, decided the later date suited you better, and put it out of your mind. On the twenty-fifth of September you would have gone looking for a week that does not exist, and you would have found a closed door and no explanation.

I made the exact mistake I had spent that morning writing about. I gave people a date far enough away to be comfortable, and comfortable dates are the ones nobody acts on.

So the correction is not just housekeeping. It is the argument, demonstrated on myself, in public, four hours after I made it.

What is actually true now

There is one free week left.

Monday 28 September to Friday 2 October. Registration closes Friday 25 September.

There is nothing behind it. No October week, no November week, no quiet relaunch in the new year under a different name. We are ending them because they have done their job, and because a free thing that never ends stops being an offer and becomes furniture.

An hour a day, five days, live at 3 PM Central. Every session recorded, so if you are in India or the Philippines or the UK and 3 PM Central is the middle of your night, register anyway — registering is what gets you the replay. That is the actual reason to register, not attendance. I have watched too many people in other time zones quietly decide it was not for them because they could not make the live hour.

No card, nothing renews, and nothing is sold to you during it.

Who it is for, and it is broader than it looks

I specialise in accounting, so most people assume this is a bookkeepers' week. It is not.

It is for the business owner who is the finance department after everyone goes home. The CEO who wants to understand what these tools actually do before someone sells her a platform. The operations person who has sixteen spreadsheets and a recurring headache. The staff member whose job involves a great deal of typing that a machine could do while she checks it.

If your work contains a repetitive layer that you have privately accepted as the cost of the job, the week is for you.

The one thing I would ask

Do not reply to this to tell me you are coming.

I mean that kindly. I like hearing from people and I read everything. But the reply is the trap. It will feel like progress, it will feel like a decision, and then the twenty-fifth will arrive and the decision will turn out to have been a feeling.

If you want the week, take the thirty seconds now and register. Then tell me, if you like, and I will be glad to hear it, because at that point the telling costs you nothing.

Register here: https://humansplusagents.ai/legacy-sbc-aia

Registration closes Friday 25 September. The week runs 28 September to 2 October. It is the last one.

Yvonne Razo is the founder of Legacy Small Business Consulting, CFO of Simple Academy, and co-founder of AI for Accounting. If a whole week is genuinely not realistic, claim a free agent instead — it is yours to keep either way. The community stays free and open long after the last free week has gone.

Wednesday, September 16, 2026

Twenty years of never being wrong, and he is right not to trust this

I wrote to a bookkeeper yesterday whose profile leads with two things: twenty years in the work, and zero-error accuracy.

He is the hardest person I could possibly try to sell AI training to.

He is also right.

Before any of that, the practical bit, because it has a date on it. The final free week of live AI training runs 28 September to 2 October, registration closes Friday 25 September, and there is nothing after it.

I am not going to open with a story about how he came round. He has not replied, and he might not. What I want to write about is why his suspicion is correct, because almost everyone selling this pretends it is not, and that is the reason so many capable people have quietly decided this whole category is nonsense.

Start with the part nobody wants to say

These tools will confidently tell you something untrue.

Not occasionally. Not in edge cases. A language model will produce a number, a date, a citation or a flat statement about a rule with exactly the same fluent certainty whether it is right or invented. There is no tremor in its voice when it is wrong. That is the single most important thing to understand about it, and it is the thing most demos are carefully built to avoid showing you.

So when somebody whose whole working identity is built on not making mistakes looks at this and says no thank you, they are not being a dinosaur. They have identified the failure mode in about four seconds, which is faster than most of the people selling it.

Why the usual pitch fails on exactly the wrong people

The standard argument is that it saves time.

Think about who that lands on. It lands on the person for whom speed is the product. It does not land at all on the person whose product is being right, because to them "faster" is not an improvement, it is a risk. Everyone I know who has been burned was burned by something that went out quickly.

You cannot sell speed to somebody who sells accuracy. You have to make a different argument, and the different argument happens to be the true one.

The tools are bad at one job and very good at a completely different one

Here is the distinction that took me four months to say plainly.

These tools are unreliable at being correct. They are excellent at doing the typing.

Those are not the same job, and almost all of the confusion about AI right now comes from treating them as one thing.

Doing the typing means pulling a figure out of a document that was formatted to be hard to read. Turning a messy export into a table. Drafting the same email you have written four hundred times. Producing the first version of a proposal, a policy, a job description, a client update, a month-end narrative. Reading forty pages and finding the six paragraphs that actually matter.

Being correct means deciding whether the figure belongs there. Whether the claim holds up. Whether the explanation is plausible. Whether the answer that came back looks like something you have seen before, or something that should not exist.

The first list is mechanical and enormous and it is eating the evenings of almost everyone I speak to. The second list is judgment, and it is yours.

This is not really about bookkeeping

I should say plainly that I specialise in accounting and the training is not only for accountants.

The week is built for anyone whose work is part typing and part judgment, which is nearly everyone who runs or works in a business. Business owners. Chief executives. Operations people. Office managers. Whoever ends up writing the thing, chasing the thing, formatting the thing and checking the thing, usually all four.

The argument above does not change by role. The owner who knows instantly that a supplier quote is wrong. The ops manager who can tell from the tone of an email that a project is slipping. The long-serving staff member who spots that a number is out by a factor of ten because they have seen the real one a thousand times. Every one of those is the same skill the twenty-year bookkeeper has, and every one of them becomes more valuable in exactly the same way.

If you have been reading AI advice aimed at accountants and thinking it does not apply to you, the advice was narrow. The tool is not.

Which means the sceptic gets more valuable, not less

This is the part I would actually like the twenty-year bookkeeper to hear, and the owner, and the person on their team.

If you take the mechanical half off somebody's desk, the volume of work that can move through them goes up. And the moment volume goes up, the bottleneck moves. It stops being how fast the typing happens and becomes how good the checking is.

Checking is the scarce skill. It always was, but it was hidden underneath hours of keystrokes that disguised it as productivity. Anyone who has spent years building an instinct for what does not look right is holding the exact capability that becomes the constraint. The keystrokes were never the moat. The eye was.

AI does the typing. You make the judgment calls. I have been saying that for months and I mean it far more literally than it sounds.

And the uncomfortable half, because a one-sided argument is not worth reading

If your value genuinely is the typing, this is not good news and I am not going to dress it up.

Whoever is fast and accurate at producing documents and nothing else is in a harder position this year than last year. That is true, it is not nice, and pretending otherwise would insult everyone reading. The honest response is not reassurance. It is that the way out is upward, into the judgment, and that the door is open right now in a way it will not stay open forever.

So here is the invitation, and it is a strange one

This is the FINAL FREE WEEK. Not the last one for now, and not the last before a break. We are stopping the free weeks entirely and there is nothing after this.

September 28 to October 2. Registration closes Friday 25 September. One hour a day, live at 3 PM Central, every session recorded. Hands on, on your own real work, not a demo. No cost, no card, nothing renews. Complete it, live or on the replays with the work done, and you choose any five AI agents to keep.

Come and try to break it.

I mean that as a genuine invitation rather than a rhetorical flourish. Bring the file you think it will get wrong. Bring the job nobody else wants. Bring the thing you are certain a machine cannot handle, and find out precisely where the edge is.

You will get more out of that week than the people who arrive already convinced. The enthusiasts find out what it can do. The sceptics find out what it cannot, which is the more useful half, and the half almost nobody is teaching.

Years of refusing to be wrong is not an obstacle to this. It is the qualification.

Take the final free week

If a whole week is genuinely not realistic, claim one free agent instead. Yours to keep either way.

And the community stays free and stays open after the final free week has gone, including for the people who turn up purely to argue.

Yvonne Razo. Founder and CEO, Legacy Small Business Consulting. CFO, Simple Academy. Co-founder, AI for Accounting.

Tuesday, September 15, 2026

The last one is for the people who missed the others and those who still need it

One of the five people on our final free week registered on the 24th of August.

She has not completed a week yet.

Not because she did not want to. Not because she is disorganised, and not because she is the sort of person who signs up for things and never does them. She runs her own bookkeeping practice. She is the opposite of that person.

Twice she meant to be there and the day got away from her. Once it was entirely our fault.

She is on the last one now. There is no fifth.

And if you have never signed up at all, this is for you in exactly the same way. Missing three is not a requirement. Most of the people who need this most have not registered once.

The week nobody got into

I should tell you about the time that was on us, because it is the reason I am writing this instead of an advert.

We ran a free week in early September where not one registered person got into the room on day one. Zero out of eight. The link did not reach them. One of them asked us for it sixty two minutes before the session started, and we did not answer her for over a day.

That is not a story about busy people. Eight people cleared an hour in their afternoon, turned up ready, and we were not there.

She rebooked. So did several of the others. And when I look at who has signed up for this final week, a good number of them are people who already tried once and did not get through — sometimes because of us, more often because Tuesday happened the way Tuesdays do.

Most people do not fail at the thing

Here is what I have learned watching this over four months, and it has very little to do with AI.

Most people do not fail at the thing. They fail at the showing up. And then, quietly, they decide the failure was about them.

You meant to do the CPE. You meant to open the software you pay for every month. You meant to sit down with the process documentation after the last busy season nearly broke you. You have not, and somewhere in the back of your mind that has become a small piece of evidence about what sort of person you are.

It is not evidence of anything. It is a scheduling problem wearing a character costume.

Nothing in your week made it happen on a particular day, so it happened on no day. That is all. The same brain that cannot find an hour for the thing you chose has never once missed a client deadline, because a client deadline has a date and a consequence attached and the other thing does not.

So here is a date, and here is a consequence

September 28 to October 2. Register by Friday the 25th.

It is the last free week we will ever run. Not the last before a break, and not the last for now. The last one.

One hour a day, live at 3 PM Central, every session recorded. It is hands on, so you build on your own client work rather than watching somebody demo theirs. Complete it, live or on the recordings with the work actually done, and you keep any five AI agents from our library. No cost, no card, nothing renews.

I am not going to dress that up. If you have been circling this since August, the circling stops on Friday the 25th because there is nothing left to circle.

Two things that decide how it goes for you

I have watched enough people through these weeks now to know exactly which two things separate the ones who finish from the ones who mean to.

Put the five sessions in your calendar as appointments, not reminders. Right now, before you close this. A reminder is a suggestion your future self is free to decline. An appointment is a thing that is already happening at three o'clock. That is ninety seconds of work and it is the single biggest predictor I have.

And bring one job. Not a topic. One piece of work you are tired of doing by hand.

The onboarding packet you rebuild from scratch every single time. The report one client keeps asking for that takes you two hours and tells them nothing new. The document chase that never ends. The month-end checklist that lives in your head and nowhere else.

Everyone who has finished one of these weeks arrived with a named job. Everyone who signed up to learn AI, in general, at some point, always meant to catch up tomorrow. A category will wait for you forever. A job has an end.

And if you know someone

This is the part I would ask you to do even if you never come yourself.

You know who this is for. You have a colleague who has been saying they really need to get their head around this. A friend with their own practice who mentions it every time you speak and has not done anything about it. Someone on your team who is already using AI on their own phone, unsupervised, because nobody ever trained them.

Send it to them. Today.

Not because we need the numbers. Because the thing that stops people is never the price, and after Friday the 25th the option is gone and "I was meaning to" is what is left.

It is time. If you have been putting this off, stop putting it off. If you have never got round to starting, start here. And if you know someone who has been meaning to, go and tell them.

The last free week: September 28 to October 2. Register by Friday 25 September.

https://humansplusagents.ai/legacy-sbc-aia

If a whole week is genuinely not realistic, take one agent free instead and keep it. Yours either way:

https://aiaccounting.legacysbc.com/claim-agent

And the community stays free and stays open whatever happens to the weeks:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1024923770013348

AI does the typing. You make the judgment calls.

Yvonne Razo Founder and CEO, Legacy Small Business Consulting CFO, Simple Academy · Co-founder, AI for Accounting

Monday, September 14, 2026

Free Has No Forcing Function

A few weeks ago we ran a free week of live AI training. Eight people registered. Not one of them walked through the door on day one.

I want to be careful about how I tell this, because the easy version is wrong. The easy version is that people are busy, or flaky, or that they never really wanted it. That is not what happened, and believing it would have cost us the actual lesson.

Here is the actual lesson. A thing with no cost has no deadline, and a thing with no deadline never happens.

That is not a statement about our training. It is a statement about how work gets scheduled, and once you see it you will see it everywhere in your own practice.

You already know this. You have just never named it.

Think about the free consultation you offer. You block thirty minutes, you show up, and roughly half the time the other person does not. Now think about the last time a client failed to turn up to a meeting they were being billed for. It happens, but it is rare, and when it does happen they apologise.

Same person. Same calendar. Different forcing function.

Think about the client who has not sent you their bank statements. You have asked four times. They are not avoiding you and they are not disorganised in the rest of their life. Nothing in their week makes Tuesday the day it has to happen, so it keeps being next Tuesday, and it has been next Tuesday since June.

Think about the software your firm pays for and nobody opens. Think about the CPE you buy in January and watch on the thirtieth of December. Think about the process documentation you have been meaning to write since the last busy season nearly broke you.

None of that is a motivation problem. It is a structure problem. There is no external event that makes the thing happen on a particular day, so it happens on no day.

What the people who finished had in common

We have run these weeks for a while now, and the pattern among the people who actually completed them is not what I expected.

It was not seniority. It was not how technical they were. It was not even how much time they had, and some of the people who finished were in the middle of an extension deadline.

The people who finished arrived with one specific piece of their own work in mind. Not "learn AI." Not "see what this is about." Something closer to: I am going to stop rebuilding the same client onboarding packet from scratch every time. Or: I want the job costing report my construction client keeps asking for. Or: I am done writing the same three emails chasing documents.

They had named the job before they arrived. So each session had a thing it was for, and missing a session cost them something concrete rather than something vague.

The people who did not finish had signed up for a category. A category will wait for you indefinitely.

Three things you can do with this tomorrow

This is the part that is worth more to you than anything else in this post, and it has nothing to do with AI.

Put a date on the free things. If you offer a free review, a free consultation, a free cleanup assessment, give it an expiry that is real and hold it. Not to be pushy. To give the other person the forcing function they do not have.

Make the first step require something from them. Not payment. Effort. Ask for the three questions they want answered, or the one report that never balances. A person who has done five minutes of work before the meeting shows up to the meeting.

Name the job, not the category. "Let's talk about your bookkeeping" is a category and it will drift for months. "Let's get your March and April reconciled before the extension" is a job and it has a shape and an end.

We are taking our own advice on all three.

Which brings me to the part I have to tell you plainly

We are stopping the free weeks. The week of October 5 to 9 is the last one we will run.

Not because it failed. Hundreds of people have come through them and a good number walked out with agents they still use every week. We learned more from running them than from anything else we have built.

We are stopping because a thing with no price collects a lot of people who are never going to come, and every one of those empty seats was a seat somebody else would have used. We would rather build the next thing with a forcing function inside it than keep running something that quietly depends on people being unusually disciplined.

There are two left.

September 28 to October 2. Register by Friday September 25 at 11:59 PM Eastern.

October 5 to 9. Register by Friday October 2 at 11:59 PM Eastern.

One hour a day, live at 3 PM Central, every session recorded. It is hands on, so you build on your own client work instead of watching a demo. Complete the week, live or on the recordings with the work done, and you keep any five AI agents from our library. No cost, no card, nothing that renews.

https://humansplusagents.ai/legacy-sbc-aia

Before you register, do the thing I just described. Name the job. Write down one piece of work you are tired of doing by hand, and bring that. Do not come to learn AI. Come to kill one specific task and walk out with the thing that kills it.

If a whole week is not realistic, take one agent free instead and keep it. Runway, pricing, job costing, reasonable comp, chasing documents. Pick the one that matches the job you just named.

https://aiaccounting.legacysbc.com/claim-agent

And the community is here either way, free, for as long as it is useful to you.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1024923770013348

One last thing

I have thought about that empty room more than any of the good weeks. Eight people wanted the thing enough to put their name down, and the structure around it was not strong enough to get them into the seat.

That is on us, not on them. It is also the single most useful thing anyone has taught me about running a practice this year, and it did not come from a conference.

AI does the typing. You make the judgment calls. But neither of those happens on a day that nothing forces.

Two weeks left.

Thursday, September 10, 2026

Your Team Is Already Using AI. Nobody Trained Them.

There is a question I ask firm owners that makes the room go quiet. It is not "are you using AI." Everybody says yes to that now.

The question is: who on your team is using it, on what, and who taught them?

The honest answer, nearly every time, is that three or four people are using it every single day, on their own accounts, on their own phones, and nobody taught them a thing. It arrived the way email arrived. It did not come with a policy, a rule, or an hour of training. It simply showed up in the pocket of every person who works for you.

So the decision in front of you is not whether AI comes into your practice. That happened months ago. The decision is whether it comes in trained or untrained.

Three responses, and two of them do not work

I have watched a lot of businesses meet this moment. There are really only three responses.

Waiting. Most people waiting are waiting for it to settle down, so they can learn the final version instead of chasing a moving target. I understand the instinct. But it is not going to settle down, and while you wait, your staff keep using it anyway, and your clients keep being sold it by someone else. Waiting is not neutral. It is just untrained use with a delay on top.

Buying. This one looks like action, which is what makes it dangerous. A subscription gets approved, or an "AI-powered" module gets switched on inside software you already pay for. Seats are assigned. Six weeks later nobody has opened it, and the line item quietly renews for a year. A tool you do not understand is a tool you do not trust, and a tool you do not trust sits there.

Teaching. Slower to start, and the only one that compounds.

Why education beats the tool, in three plain reasons

One: the risk lives in the judgment, not the software. The thing that should keep you up is not the AI. It is a junior pasting a client's trial balance somewhere nobody vetted, or a report going out with a number that nobody checked because it looked confident. You cannot fix that with a licence. You fix it by teaching people where the line sits, and prohibition will not do it either. Ban it and it moves to their phone, where you cannot see it at all.

Two: tools expire, skills compound. The specific product you buy this month will be different in a year, and something better will exist. That is fine. A person who understands what they are handing over and why does not go out of date. They carry it to the next tool, and the one after that.

Three: one trained person changes a team. Five licences change nothing. When somebody on your staff genuinely gets it, they start seeing the repetitive work everywhere, and they start fixing it without being asked. That is the return. It does not come from software. It comes from a person who has crossed over.

What educating on AI actually means

It is not a list of prompts. Prompts are the smallest and least durable part of this.

Real education on AI is three pieces of work, and they are all judgment:

Naming the repetitive work. Writing down the things your practice does the same way every week. The categorization, the reconciliation, the client report that is 80 percent identical every month, the same twenty questions arriving in the inbox.

Deciding the line. For each of those, what AI drafts and what a human signs. That line is different in every firm and it is yours to draw. Nobody can sell it to you.

Building one and running it on real work. Not a demo. Your file, your client, this week.

That is the whole curriculum. AI does the typing. You make the judgment calls. For us that sentence is not a slogan. It is the syllabus.

The uncomfortable part about most AI training

Most of it teaches nothing. An hour of somebody's screen, ten clever prompts, a link to a slide deck, and a folder of notes you will never open again. It feels productive and it changes nothing on Monday.

There is one honest test of whether AI education worked: did you leave with something running? Not something you understood. Something that is doing work for you right now.

If the answer is no, it was entertainment.

Which is exactly why our free week is built the way it is

Five days, one hour a day, 3 PM Central, and it is hands-on the whole way. You are not watching. You are building, on your own work, with people who have already done it on real client files.

September 14 to 18. Registration closes Friday 11 September at 11:59 PM ET — that is tomorrow.

Complete the week and you choose any five AI agents from our library to keep. And to be clear about what completing means, because we changed it and the new version is better: doing the week on the recordings with the work actually done counts exactly the same as being in the room live. A hard week at work should not cost you the training.

No cost. No card. Nothing that renews.

Claim your seat: https://humansplusagents.ai/legacy-sbc-aia

If you want to start smaller today, claim a free agent and see what one looks like from the inside: https://aiaccounting.legacysbc.com/claim-agent — and our community, where the replays and everything new live, is here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1024923770013348

One last thing

Every technology that has come through this profession has sorted firms the same way, and it has never sorted them by who bought the best software. It sorted them by whose people understood what they were doing.

Your team is already using AI. The only open question is whether anybody teaches them.

It takes a week.

Warmly,

Yvonne Razo Founder and CEO of Legacy Small Business Consulting CFO of Simple Academy Co-founder of AI for Accounting