In this episode of Accounting Technology Lab, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA, CITP, CGMA, welcome CPA and entrepreneur Eric Eager to explore the emerging concept of Decision Intelligence—the next evolution beyond AI. While AI delivers probabilistic, text-based outputs, Eager explains that Decision Intelligence is deterministic, proactive, and auditable, combining AI, data science, business intelligence, and human expertise to guide better decisions.
Key Takeaway
👉 Decision Intelligence is not replacing AI—it’s making AI usable, trustworthy, and actionable for advisory services.
The Accounting Tech Lab is an ongoing series that explores the intersection of public accounting and technology.
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Transcript
(Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)
SPEAKERS
Randy Johnston, Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA, Eric Eager
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:00
Ryan, welcome to the accounting Technology Lab sponsored by CPA practice advisor, with your hosts, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, hi everybody. It’s Brian, working hard at the lab today, but I thought I would let you know that do have a quick announcement? We have a giveaway. We’re going to be giving away one Rico, scan, snap IX, 2500 receipt edition. We’re going to draw. We’re going to make the drawing right after April 30. No purchase required. Suggested Retail value, $599 this is a one has one touch simplicity, and our friends at Rico graciously provided it to us with automatic invoice OCR, detachable receipt guide for small and curl documents and lightning fast, 45 page a minute, duplex scanning. It transforms paperwork into clean, searchable digital data in seconds. If you want to register, it’s CPA te.ch/scan snap. The rules are at CPA te.ch/rules and the privacy policy is at CPA, te.ch, forward, slash, scanner, dash, privacy. And for those of you attending the video, attending the video version of this, I’ve actually put on the screen now a QR code that you can capture and use to register for the for the again, for the scanner. Giveaway again. We’re giving one away. We’re going to give it away again right after April 30 and again. You must, you must be an accounting professional when all the rules again are at CPA te CH, CPA te.ch/rules so anyway, with that, thanks for joining us, and here we are back in the lab.
Randy Johnston 01:41
Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab. I’m your host, Randy Johnston, with co host Brian Tankersley, and we are so pleased to have a guest today, Eric eager. Now, I’ve known Eric for 20 plus years from his old days at a predecessor company which we’d recommended to you, biznet, but about seven or eight years ago, Eric reached out to me and said, You know, I’ve got a new idea. And I listened to him, and I said, you know, Eric, you could be playing golf. And he said, No, I want to make a difference. I want to help small businesses succeed, and I’ve got a great idea to do it. It turns out, I think he did, and over the last years, he’s been building a platform called for impact data, the number four impact data, Eric, welcome to our podcast today. Would you like to give a little bit of introduction on yourself now?
Eric Eager 02:30
Great, Ray, thank you for having me on the show again. I am a CPA, and I feel like we been working on this challenge of, how do we change the odds for business owners, and then at the same time, how do we elevate the profession and recognize the work and the impact that we have on businesses? And so we’ve been working really hard on this. How do we help the shift to advisory? And I think that we have broken the code, cracked the code, as they say, and we’ll talk more about it, but, man, we are super excited to tell people more about it and help the transformation in the profession.
Randy Johnston 03:12
Very good. Well, for our dedicated listeners, you may recognize that Brian and I have recorded a session on for impact data in the past, but oh my, it is so different.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 03:22
So, you know, Brian, it was like four years
Randy Johnston 03:25
ago, so different. So, as you may know, has probably reviewed more small accounting products than you have ever seen in the past. And just to give you a perspective on that, you know, we go back to the days of the peach trees. In fact, I was actually drawn into a recent interview from the Privacy Forum, and I couldn’t believe that I heard an old lotus, 123, name. I didn’t realize he had helped found the Privacy Forum. But again, we’re lucky enough to have had the long haul with the some of these very well known products of the past as well some of the new products of today, so the digits, which we’ve done podcasts on, and others. So we’re really shifting from transactional accounting and financial reporting into something that is quite different. And you know, the team at for impact data have landed on the term decision intelligence, but it really probably evolved from a bit of, I’ll say, observation by Gartner Group. So Eric, I might ask you to take a moment and just help our listeners understand what decision intelligence is.
Eric Eager 04:45
Well, it’s going to be, you know, here’s the thing is that it is the next evolution of AI, and it’s not replacing AI. It’s kind of the things that we’ve we’ve been working on. And as you guys pointed out for the last four or five years, and we didn’t realize we were building it. But what decision intelligence does is that it takes the combination of AI, data science, business intelligence and humans expertise, it literally gives you the ability to codify the experiences of others, but the differences here is that what AI is what they call probabilistic and text driven. Decision intelligence is deterministic. It will literally tell you statistically. Here are the best actions to take, taking all things considered, and it provides you an audit trail of how that decision was come to so it is really this ability to take from probabilities and what you think to literally what decisions are going to give you the highest probability of success.
Randy Johnston 05:58
And for those of you who have attended a lot of our k2 events. You might recall that over a decade ago, it was 2015, and 16, we were presenting heavily on data science, and for those of you where I actually did your on site tech assessments, I frequently recommended that you had a data scientist in that window. Now, a lot of this AI that we’re dealing with as you are, probably also where it’s been around since the late 50s. 1958 is when AI started. But many people think AI started when chat GPT was released in November of 22 you know, his granddaughter from New York says, grandpa, that not be the plan. That is not the plan. That’s not how it happened. But in about 2010 we started seeing a lot of these pattern recognition and pattern matching and machine learning and this evolution into the reporting tools that Eric and his team used because they took as their basis Power BI and wanted to have drillable dashboards in some of the earliest models. That was interesting, but it’s now a combination of for decision intelligence, all of these things, of AI and data science and behavioral and so forth. So you know, Eric, I know you’ve been looking at the Gartner content on this. What’s Gartner have to say
Eric Eager 07:16
on this? Well, Gartner says that, literally, if you haven’t heard of decision intelligence, you’re going to hear quite a bit about it in the coming years. And here’s what it is, the reason being, and the thing that I’m trying to help elevate is that while you’re hearing all this AI decisions, the challenge is that it is incredibly powerful, but it’s changed. The answers are changing. Every time you ask a question, it is a black box. And what’s happening is that more and more as we move into advisory in these other pieces, it is going to cause, unbeknownst, what we call false confidence and advisory, and they are projecting it’s going to cause financial and reputational loss simply from the fact of human bias, ability of critical thinking and aos AI sycophancy, it is still as much as they’re trying it is going to please you. And 2030 Yeah, I’m sorry, go ahead.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 08:23
So effectively, we’re going to be lemmings running off a cliff. Because AI said, Hey, wouldn’t it be a great idea if you ran off a cliff Exactly?
Eric Eager 08:30
Now, here’s the thing, though, AI, if managed correctly and you compliment it, it will unleash capabilities that all the positives and the excitement, and why I’m excited about it, and these models, by 2030 it will be five times more trusted. It will be faster in governing decisions than ungoverned decisions. And this is why you’re going to hear these things, because, and I’ll talk a little bit about, you know, why is this happening?
Randy Johnston 09:04
Well, but you know, on that point, Eric, I think the good and bad we’ve talked about that with past all technology can be used for good or bad. But the bad number that we didn’t quote for you is that by 2027, 25% of the decisions will actually have financial impact in a negative way. That’s a big deal, because 2027 is a lot closer than you might think
Eric Eager 09:31
well, and I’m glad you pointed that, Alex, that sometimes I forget we have audio listeners and not video listeners. So yeah, thank you for pointing it out, because that and I’ve heard and I’ve talked to, you know, profession and AI leaders throughout the world, and they say that number may be low, that it can be significantly higher if we don’t watch it. So I’m glad you point that out and in. So why is this in? Important. Well, you know what’s happening is, AI, is the world and velocity of business is accelerating way before it’s happening so fast that we’re all having to react and do things well. Ai, you know, the way that we make decisions today is that before you know, we have these analysts that would bring reports to us, and as leaders, we would take all this information and have to prioritize and risk and see what’s short term and long term, and then you had to make the call, and then you go hand it down to your operational team. Well, what AI? And the excitement about AI, it is surfacing so many options now that you’re turbo charging your analyst? Well, what that’s doing is that now it is accelerating all these options to leaders, and it still doesn’t tell you. It doesn’t give you the well, all these options for my company, which one takes precedence? What time do we need to implement? What’s the trade offs, if we do this versus this, I still have to make those calls, and that’s myself and my advisor. Because we’re always going to have the need for advisors. No matter what the technology does, we’re still going to need that human advisor, and it’s going to cause decision fatigue. And so all of a sudden, we’re going to make the call. And now, if you add in AI agents to that, the speed of exit, the beauty of what Randy said, the beauty of it is we can execute with such speed and precision. But the challenge is that you may be heading towards a brick wall, except now we’re just going to do it 100 miles an hour.
Randy Johnston 11:40
Yeah. Yeah, so the question is, bugger windshield, huh?
Eric Eager 11:50
Well, we’re going to make sure that here’s the thing, and this is the missing piece. I want to give people hope that this unbridled power, I, like, you know, like spider man, with great power, comes right, great responsibility. Here’s the thing, that there is some excitement and that you add the layer of decision intelligence. This is why you see Gartner and everybody. You add that as a layer to complement your AI. And it does is it continuously monitors. It helps you see the emerging risk. It sees the opportunities. And now it’s an augmentation of decision confidence. It helps the advisors and leaders prioritize actions, what timing, and it doesn’t replace it. Now turbo charges the advisor and oh, by the way, it raises the confidence level of the decisions, and now the agents can execute. So this can really have the impact that I think we’ve all been wanting to help businesses with. And we will, we really do have a chance to change the profession.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 12:56
So effectively, this is the human in the loop, the advisor that is serving as those Spartans at Thermopylae that are preventing the hordes of bad ideas from coming to reality bingo.
Eric Eager 13:08
And this is where I think the this we have always been business advisors that the CPA profession has always we’ve been what I want to call invisible advisors. And this is our opportunity to really showcase where we have been. Always. A lot of people get in the profession because we really want to help businesses, but we got so bogged down into in my history, you know, I’m a tax guy, I got so bogged down that by the time I got everything finished, I didn’t have any time left to really help people. And now I really think this is elevating. It’s the grand promotion for everybody. Now, a lot of people listening are probably going, I still don’t understand what’s the difference between AI and decision intelligence. So there’s a lot of things. AI is reactive. It only reacts when you ask it a question, and it will answer questions. It’s really text oriented. But here’s the thing, it’s probabilistic. So what that means is, every time you ask it a question, you’ll get a different answer. But the things, the most important thing that everybody needs to listen and I think everybody gets it operates in a black box. You don’t know. So if you’re growing an advisory firm and you’re going AI first, the challenge you’ve got is that you may have 10 advisors ask the same question and get 10 different answers and oh, by the way, here’s the other thing your clients can punch in the same queue and same prompt into AI is your advisors, inner decision intelligence, it is now proactive. It’s constantly probing and seeing the emerging risk. But it’s what we call deterministic. So what that means is that, depending on the same input, you will get the same output, and it continuously learns, we call this code. Five wisdom. So it’s continuously learning, but that’s that human advisor in the loop. It literally tracks, hey, what worked, what didn’t, and it keeps the advisor in the loop for a point of context. And last but not least, it gives you a complete audit trail. It’s transparent of how those decisions and literally we can get in, it literally creates decision tokens. So at any point in the you know, things go by, you can see how the decisions were made. This is why I think the accounting profession will be so excited about this possibility, because it fits within our audit ability and tracing, but also increases confidence of what advice we’re giving the client.
Randy Johnston 15:45
Yeah, in fact, Eric, when you first showed this to me and the audit trails and how you could track how the AI was making decisions in the platform, and how it was showing things over a longer period of time and so on. It’s like, this is really smart, and, more importantly, it is reproducible. So you know, your whole codified wisdom is, I’ve watched your journey on this, Eric, over the last few years, because it was some years ago that you came up with this business GPS idea and use the cockpit in the aircraft system, which, again, makes great sense. If you’ve ever flown an airplane in particular, it makes all the difference in the world and the way the GPS is work. But this decision intelligence engine has several different tricks, as I would see it to it, it’s, can you explain that to our listeners?
Eric Eager 16:42
Sure. So the difference between, like I said, the difference between AI and decision intelligence is it is continuously monitoring so it has your financial operational data, and what it does is it looks for signals and trends. And it’s not just on one plane. And literally looks across multiple planes for signals, so it can see things happening months at a time, so it begins to uncover these emerging risk and opportunities. Because, just to kind of backtrack a little bit, even while we started doing all this, is that we were wondering we took on this gigantic challenge of why businesses are failing at 50% you know, 50% are going to fail in the first five years. We hear this over and over again. So we, I went to Randy and said, this has got to change. How in this world does this continue to happen? Well, that sent off a journey of why businesses were failing. Well, they were failing, you know. And I’m sure that a lot of listeners can think, well, it’s cash flow. It really came down to and I’m glad everybody’s sitting down or driving your car. It was because we don’t know what we don’t know. And what happens is that we have to see and the primary reason is that business owners, we see the risk too late, and we make decisions after the fact, and then we point on the wrong things. So what decision, intelligence, or this codified wisdom, is to monitor where you’re at, see what the road ahead looks like, and reroute you to the destination so see what signals are coming, see the emerging risk. Have the GPS kind of thing is recommend the best routes to take. But here’s the magic, you always have an advisor in the loop. You have an advisor going, let me measure these things and make a recommendation. You know, work with the business leader, but now you got confidence of how you came to those things. And then you begin to track what actions were executed. Because the other thing Gartner pointed out is that 80% of decisions that are executed never get measured. So you get this teams you execute and you don’t measure it. So you have this closed loop of working with your advisor, measuring what you know, basically dead, documenting what actions were taken in the system, and continuously measure those outcomes, and then you learn what worked best, and then it creates this closed loop, and think about that at scale. So now, as entrepreneurs and this, you know, guardians, we all don’t have to make the same dumb mistakes over and over again. I am a I have a PhD in dumb things to do in business, and so this helps elevate everybody across the board, and it continuously gets smarter, and it continuously helps us, guide us and our clients of what’s working and What works best, if that makes sense to everybody, yeah.
Randy Johnston 19:43
So this whole strategy of trying to help business proactively decide, and I was reflecting on your mention of KPIs, because I’ve been a fan of KPIs since Harvard introduced those back in 1992 but the KPIs were often in. Correctly selected, not measured, not really the right things. It took me better part of 10 years to get the right KPIs for my own nmgi business, and now I’m thinking about it, saying, I wonder if I’ve still got the right KPIs. But in effect, this is not automatically, but it is surfacing the right KPIs, the right actions, and then monitoring those after the fact, which is all a pretty big deal. So in effect, then you said, scale. So can you explain how this allows advisory to scale?
Eric Eager 20:31
Well, that’s a great question, because the other thing too is, you guys, you pointed it out. We’ve been after this, solving this problem for about, you know, going on about five years now. Well, what we discovered in this process and journey, because we were just dogmatic, we were going to fix this problem, we were going to solve this problem, how to help our profession. What we realized is that the the whole profession, the reason that we’re struggling with moving to advisory. It’s what we call a confidence gap. And it’s really and it makes sense, when you look at it, is that you’ve got, you know, we, most people, realize this is 75% of the partners in the profession right now are retirement age. There is going to be a massive brain drain knowledge walking out the door at the same time, you’ve got this next generation of people with advisors. Here’s the confidence gap problem. I’m a young advisor, and I want to start doing advisory Well, I’ve got a major client, a major tax or audit client, a lot of revenue to the firm. I’m afraid to make the wrong decision. I don’t know if I have the confidence to make that call. At the same time, the senior partners are going, I man, we can’t risk this. And so you have the partners that all the knowledge is tight, and so everything’s going to go through them. The younger staff are going, I don’t want to make the call. So this, I’m going to get this documented and all over the place, so it creates this huge gap of I can’t move forward and enter now, the bigger risk is that now, all of a sudden, you know, I don’t have confidence. I don’t wanna do this. Here’s the bigger issue, is false confidence. Now the younger staff and everybody’s relying on AI to give me decisions, and it’s got different answers. Doesn’t prioritize operating black box. This is a huge risk, because now I’d rather have low confidence than false confidence. Enter the world of decision intelligence and ran. I’m sure you have some thoughts on that. What do you think in the profession?
Randy Johnston 22:36
You’ve got me headed down all sorts of different paths with you here, Eric, because I’ve said on this podcast before that for advisory to work, I used to think it took gray hair. And fact, the matter is, it’s the right tools that really make the difference. Kind of number one, observation number two, the risk of the firm, as you pointed out, is very high when I see CPA and accountants who have great advisory skills. It’s a beautiful thing, but there’s so many that have been so focused on tax and audit because that’s where they were making the money. Didn’t really have time to do these other tasks. Now, if we can do this at scale, that’s also another huge opportunity. Then third, it Brian and I will continue to talk to you about different advisory approaches that are out there. In my mind right now, for impact data has the most scalable, logical, repeatable advisory offering in the market. And you know, things are changing quickly, but I can tell you, there’s a lot of discussion around advisory, of which I have labeled fake advisory, where people are doing client accounting services and financial reporting and thinking it’s advisory, and it’s not that at all, or the opposite end of the spectrum, They’re doing CFO services, and it’s not really advisory, either. So you know, this whole tipping point is upon us. And you know, Eric, you’ve just toned it again with the shift in labor that’s going to happen and all this loss of so much knowledge. I’m really concerned about that as well. Now I think you’ve written a paper on this topic as well, and I might encourage our listeners to try to pick up that paper. It’s called Why decision intelligence will power the next generation of Cavs. And you know, it’s almost like, I wish I could have you take CAS out of the title, Eric, but I do that. You know, many of our firms have just been building these client accounting services operations, and they’re trying to extend it with advisory. And CAS and advisory are getting all mixed up in the terminology. We’re almost gonna have to invent a new term. But you know, for the moment, I’m going to go with decision Intel. Budgets for advisory.
Eric Eager 25:01
I think I like that. So I like that. I may have to modify the title there.
Randy Johnston 25:05
So final, parting thoughts you might have for our listeners today, Eric,
Eric Eager 25:09
you know, here’s the thing. There’s a couple things, and there is an approach where there is a lot of nervousness in the profession that our traditional, you know, service line offerings are becoming much more automated. The margins we’re starting to see shrink. We’re starting to have, you know, it’s beginning to commoditize. And I know that people have said, I’ve heard that storm. We’ve weathered that storm years before and everything, but I’ve had the chance to work with Randy and Brian and, you know, Barry, Milan song and Gary, a lot of the leading professions, and they are all saying the storm is coming, and it can be gloom and doom or excitement. And I’m on the abundant side and saying this is an exciting time for us. There is now we can unleash the power of our advisory capabilities, our impact. And I’m going to say boldly that you know that the accounting profession is going to change the world, and I want to believe that. And so for those who want to join the movement and join the bandwagon of this is an exciting time. You know, download the white paper. I’d love to continue having conversations, because I’m excited about the opportunities that lie ahead for the profession, because I really think there’s no other profession globally that can change the odds and have such an impact on so many businesses globally, we just had to wait for the technology to catch up, to shine a spotlight on the true work that we’ve been doing for decades. Yeah, and so I appreciate your time, and thanks for letting me have a conversation today. So Brian,
Randy Johnston 26:56
you’ve been awful quiet today. Any other parting thoughts from either side?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 26:59
Well, I think it’s very important to, you know, to address this confidence gap that we have between the experienced partners that have taken risks and have learned from them, and the junior staff that are just trying to keep their, you know, trying to figure out what their career looks like. Okay? And the thing I would say here is that, first off, I think you’re absolutely right, Eric, that validating the data that comes out of AI and having that human in the loop is an essential part here. And I think that is a significant definition of what advisory looks like to me, you know, because there is some measurement here, you know, as this goes back, I mean, I think about, I think I was fortunate enough to watch my great uncle coach my father in entrepreneurship when I was a kid. And one of the things I remember my great uncle saying to my dad was, my great uncle was a very successful entrepreneur and engineer, and has, you know, founded a business that now has sales in the hundreds of millions of dollars. I will say that the thing that was so cool about what he said was that he said that, you know, if you make a mistake, for God’s sake, tell everybody about it, because we don’t want to make the same old mistakes. We want to make new and interesting ones. And that’s the thing. I think that’s critical for this, because, you know, you don’t your part, your partners are very quiet, and they don’t share where they took risks and explain that, and explain the thinking and explain the calculus that’s happening in the background. And these staff are sitting out here, and it looks like, you know, the partner is some Harry Potter here. No, he’s taken a lot of small chances over the years, increasingly bigger, and then they, he or she’s figured out that this is how we make, this is how we do here. And the things is that we’ve all been taught that accounting is black and white, but the reality of it is that there are gambles that we have to take, just like when you’re playing chess, when you’re playing any kind of game with anybody. You know there is a risk associated with every move you make, and the bet the easiest way to lose is to stop going forward altogether. So very cool, Eric. I love what you’re doing, and I think it’s I agree with you. I think the accounting profession is going to change the world. I think it’s going to be different than we all think it is. But at the end of the day, somebody’s got to be like I said earlier, those 300 Spartans at Thermopylae that keep the hallucinations from going through and turning into worse decisions than we could ever dream
Randy Johnston 29:27
up as humans. So Brian and Eric, such a pleasure to spend time with you. So one parting thought from my side today, we recognize how much is going to change on the compliance side, and I can tell you that this season just completed on AI tax has been a pretty significant move. We’re going to see transactions of all kinds automated in client accounting services, in audit and in tax. And what that will do for us is give us time for these other. Activities, and to me, that’s a really big deal. So you’re going to see me continue throughout the year to record my recommend advisory platforms, and you’ll start hearing me talk more about the interstitium, because I think that’s what the accountants are to the profession. A delight having you here today, join us again for another accounting Technology Lab. Good day.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 30:31
Thank you for sharing your time with us. We’ll be back next Saturday with a new episode of the technology lab from CPA practice advisor. Have a great week.
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