AI Is NOT Replacing You — It’s Making You Richer (If You Use It Right)

AI is not replacing self-employed professionals — it is creating one of the greatest opportunities in business history.

In this episode, Joe DiChiara explains why fear around AI is misplaced and how professionals who embrace new technology consistently come out ahead.

Using real examples from the introduction of personal computers and QuickBooks, Joe shows how every major technological shift has created MORE opportunity for those willing to adapt.

Learn how AI can help you:
 • Increase productivity dramatically
 • Create new services for clients
 • Scale your business without hiring more staff
 • Build digital products faster than ever
 • Position yourself ahead of competitors

If you are a consultant, accountant, freelancer, coach, or independent professional, this episode will help you see AI as a powerful tool rather than a threat.

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If you’re a self-employed professional trying to build a real business, this podcast was created for you.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Are you wondering about AI and how it's going to affect your career, your job, your business? Are you afraid of the impact it's going to have on your revenue and your life? Or are you just confused and and you have no idea what you can do about this? And you're just waiting, you're just waiting for the shoe to drop and you're done. Hi, my name is Joe DeCara. I am a CPA and lifelong entrepreneur, and I'm very proud to say that. Anyway, if you're new to this podcast, this is all about helping the self-employed professional. Now, you may not even be a self-employed professional yet, but because of what I'm talking about, you might be contemplating it. Let's say you're a coder, probably at the top of the list, or a graphic designer, another, you know, so-called uh niche or category that's going to be eliminated by AI. Well, I have some really good news for you. Because here's the deal, folks. This isn't the first watershed event in history. Think about it. What happened to the people that were in the horse and buggy business when Henry Ford started blanketing the United States with horseless carriages? What if you were a kerosene lamp manufacturer? What did you do when Thomas Edison introduced a light bulb? I mean, come on. This this has happened before. Now, in my lifetime, when I started an accounting, which was over 40 years ago, we didn't even use personal computers. They were just coming on the scene and they were expensive, and nobody really knew how to use them. But the mystery was in the accounting profession, anyway, was oh my god, are these PCs going to replace us? What are we going to do for jobs? I mean, people are going to be, you know, having their own computers and they're going to be able to do their own stuff. And how is this going to lay out for us? Now imagine me, I just graduate, and and I'm saying, wow, what did I get myself into? Technology at that point was an adding machine. If you had an adding machine, and you know, that was one of the first skills I had to learn, like how to how to type on the adding machine, and it actually had you know a paper tape brawl. And and it was it was valuable because then you can check your numbers against the machine, and that saved time. Now, before the adding machine, think about this, people had to add numbers manually through their head. I remember I was working with this gentleman, uh and he was about probably 70, 75, and and we had a race one time. He so we had literally paper spreadsheets, 13 column spreadsheets, and we had to add literally add the numbers down. So I added them on my adding machine, and he did it the way he learned breakdown. And to be honest with you, I don't even remember who won, but it didn't matter because adding machines were the new technology, and I was determined to learn it and master it. So the PC comes on board, and and guess what happened? It didn't replace any accountants, it actually created more opportunities, there were more jobs for people, there were more categories. In fact, it affected the accounting profession in a different way. Talent-wise, it started sucking potential accountants away into the computer industry. So there was a whole new slew of job availability for people that knew how to create the computers, fix the computers, set up the computers, and then we started getting into the software. Because let's face it, if you're if you remember MS DOS and hitting the the slash key and typing in manual commands, there weren't that many software programs out there. So I remember a program called Lotus 123, and it had a spreadsheet and a document program. And again, wow, this is this is amazing. This is going to replace the adding machine. Well, guess what? I still use a it's on my computer, but I'm still adding the same way that I did before. The only difference is I don't have the paper roll anymore. And and so not too long after that. So we're talking what 1987 is when I actually got my CPA certificate. So I'm already in this for a couple of years, and and by 1992, a new program comes on the scene called QuickBook, and and they were ingenious marketers. I mean, they did stuff in marketing that that basically changed how uh products were sold. And they they perpetrated, I believe, the biggest lie uh to business owners in history. And what they told people was you could save money by doing your own bookkeeping. Again, accountants were a guess. Oh my god, QuickBooks is gonna replace us. And most accountants, the the reaction was, if I just ignore it, maybe it'll go away. So they didn't adopt it. And me, being the entrepreneur that I am, saw the opportunity and I put a little ad in the newspaper, said QuickBooks setup and training. My phone was ringing off the hook because people that had accountants were calling me and saying, you know, my accountant doesn't do QuickBooks, so maybe you could help me set this up and show me how to use it. And and yeah, no problem. What resulted was something that I didn't expect. A lot of those clients became accounting clients because what they what they said was, hey, if you're gonna be doing my QuickBooks, why don't you just do my taxes too? Oh my God, what what a fine, what a fine. So, you know, in marketing and business, what you want to do is you want to find those gaps. Where is the need and and where is the the lack of of solutions? So I was a major solution and I made a lot of money setting up QuickBooks, getting clients, until I realized that you know, business owners doing their own bookkeeping is is not really a good idea. So I went into another direction. But the point is that in the short time that I had been in business from I graduated in 1984, and by less than eight years later, I already experienced two watershed events in technology that it changed the industry. But I could tell you right now, not one accountant lost their job, and then so now AI comes on the scene, and I'm listening to all this all this garbage, all these predictions, and I said, here we go again. This is QuickBooks all over again. So I I engulfed myself in the technology, just like I did with QuickBooks, and and I learned how to utilize it and and how to streamline my operations. And I went to my my team and I said, listen, I could replace you right now, Aaron, because I can learn how to use AI to do graphics, and I could even learn how to do web pages with with the AI. And Lawrence, guess what? I don't think I need a video editor anymore because I can replace you with AI. And I told them that would be the one of the biggest mistakes I ever made. Because here's here's my strategy. My strategy was to tell them, listen, your job is to learn how to leverage this technology. I want you to go out and learn how to do graphics using the best AI graphics programs. I want you to learn how to use video uh tools in AI. And guess what happened? Not even six months later, the the amount of time it takes us to launch a brand new sales funnel from scratch. I mean, I could wake up tomorrow and say, you know what? I want to do a campaign on Shopify. I want to teach, I want to get uh accounting students that want to add Shopify as a service. And within two days, I will have a landing page, all the content, the all the webinar content, the slideshow, the the prompts for the graphics, uh, I will have the the video ads, and and I'm not exaggerating. Less than two days, we will have everything ready to go and ready to start marketing. So who is who is AI replacing? Who is AI replacing? Nobody on my team, nobody on my team. Now, accountants are also listed as one of the top professions that are in danger of of losing, you know, what they what we do. And I look at that and I laugh. I'm like, that's what they said with QuickBook. That's what they said with QuickBooks. So here's what happens in reality. Forget about what you're hearing, okay? Because what you're hearing is is designed to get your attention. There's an old saying, if it bleeds, it reads. You ever wonder why all you see on the front pages of newspapers is bad news? Because and I'll I don't want to get into the whole long science history of this, but back in the day when when we were still cavemen, we had something in our brain called the amygdala, and the amygdala was a defense mechanism to alert us about danger. So we needed the amygdala because if there was you know a crocodile coming after us, it'll hey danger, run, go, you know, climb a tree, get away. Well, we still have that stupid amygdala. So when you see bad news, you're automatically drawn to it. Think about it. Think about it. Okay. Uh, you may not even realize it, but but that's the truth. So when I hear all these uh prediction specialists, these uh these fortune tellers saying, oh, AI is gonna replace 50% of the entry-level jobs available, or oh, you know, Amazon is laying off 50,000 workers because of AI and automation. Well, that might be true. That might be true, but the other side of the coin that you don't hear about is the people that Amazon and all these other companies are gonna need. They're gonna need people that know how to work the AI. AI at this point isn't self-sufficient, it's not like the Terminator. There's big problems with AI. You can't just rely on AI to do to do tax research. There were a couple of cases where attorneys used AIs to submit documents to courts, and and AI, there's something called hallucinating. They AI will make up facts, and so the attorneys weren't too bright, they weren't too swift, they just submitted it without verifying, and they got in a lot of trouble. They got in a lot of trouble. I've done my own tax research using AI, and a couple of times I said this is obviously wrong because you know it's 2025 tax laws, and you're giving me 2024 tax laws. So, you know, what I have to do, I I I have a method, I I don't use just one AI to do research, I'll use two, sometimes three, and then I'll verify it. The other thing is, I know people, I know my client. Nobody, no human being is gonna want to be told what to do by a computer. They might, you know, want to get the guidance, but when it comes to their own personal tax returns, even if the whole thing is done by AI, which is is definitely gonna happen. I mean, AI will be able to take your statements, analyze them, reconcile them, categorize everything. But in the end, they're gonna want a human being to explain this to them and to make sure that everything is right. So if I'm saying, oh yeah, AI is gonna be doing all of this stuff, well, what happens to my team? Who's gonna well, maybe I could get rid of half of my team because I'm not gonna need them to do bookkeeping, you know, even entering the data into the tax returns. Well, guess what? If I want to stay small, I can do that. But if I want to scale my business and get more clients, which is the way it's gonna work with my business, we're gonna scale. We're gonna be able to handle 10 times as many clients as before, because now my team will be able to focus on the human side of business. I hope this makes sense to you. Machines are not going to replace us, they're gonna augment us, they're gonna help us, just like computers help us, just like programs like QuickBooks help streamline a lot of the manual stuff that we used to do. So, what I've been telling people since I embraced AI about a year and a half ago, I said, listen, if you don't embrace AI, AI is gonna eat you alive, just like it did with QuickBooks, an accountant. You know, it took accountants really about five years to say, all right, I give up. You know, I'm gonna become a QuickBooks pro. And that's a big deal now. There's people that there's accountants out there, bookkeepers, accountants, tax repairs that have made a career out of providing QuickBooks services to clients. Now, here's here's the gist of it. Right now, in my profession, in accounting, there are way more businesses than there are accountants that can handle them. There's a shortage of good accountants. So if you're an accountant out there, listen to me. Adopt AI, learn it, and then you could even make that another service. You can offer your clients AI setup and training, just like I did with QuickBook. If you're a coder, okay, probably at the top of the list of professions, jobs that are in danger. Well, if I was a coder, I would be learning how to use AI to make all kinds of cool programs. Okay, so if you're sitting there paralyzed by fear, go back to history. You know, history repeats itself. With all of these predictions being made by all of these experts, let me let me reference it this way. How many financial professionals are there out there? How many stock market analysts are out there? How many of them predicted the 2008 financial crash? There was only a few. There was only a few that saw this coming. To most people, it was like, oh my god, I can make all this money and it's always gonna last. Well, guess what? It didn't, it came crumbling down. If all of these people that are experts were always right, we would all be billionaires because it would be easy. Hey, let's listen to this guy because he's always right. Well, nobody's always right when it comes to predictions. That's when they're called, that's why they're called predictions. If you're a sports fan, like I am, you know, it it doesn't pay to to start looking at all of these people's, oh, this is the prediction, this is the you know, these are the odds. I mean, it could be interesting, but when you look at those predictions compared to the results, they hardly ever come out right. People with that smart, if if all the naysayers and even all the optimists were right, what fun would life be? We would already know what the outcome is gonna be. So forget about worrying about what's gonna happen. What you need to do is is focus on what's happening right now and how can you take advantage of it. Because when the dust settles, folks, we're gonna be looking back 10 years from now and saying, Oh my god, everybody predicted, you know, AI was gonna replace me, and now I have more clients and more money than I ever dreamed possible. Or you can be one of the other kinds of people worrying and sitting there in fear and paralyzed and looking back and saying, Oh my god, I passed up on one of the greatest opportunities in history. Imagine you're a horse and buggy mechanic. Okay, maybe you you know bang the horseshoes on the horse, maybe you fix the wheels on the horse and buggy, and then all of a sudden cars are all over the place. Well, what do you what did you do? Did you try to get more horse and buggy business? Or maybe you took advantage of the new industry, the automobile industry. Maybe you could learn how to fix autos, maybe you could learn how to sell auto, maybe you can get a job with an auto. So all these new jobs were created. Yeah, people were displaced, they had to find new ways of making money, but if they embraced the new technology, the new whatever, and and immersed themselves in it and and saw the opportunities, a lot of them could have become millionaires. And I'll bet a lot of them did. But you see, you don't hear about that. And on the other end, you have people like Elon Musk. Okay, I love Elon Musk, big fan, but you know, what his idea is hey, AI is gonna make working a thing of the past, like nobody's even gonna have to work anymore. Working is gonna be optional. So, what are you gonna do with your time? Oh, you can you can decide to you know plant you know watermelons or create a garden or play with your dogs, everything's gonna be optional and everybody's gonna be rich. Well, you know, that would be great, but that's probably not gonna happen either. But for me, rather than worrying about all These things that may happen is a waste of time. What I know right now is I have so many opportunities because of AI. I could create, I've been creating courses that used to take me a month in two days now from start to finish, using all kinds of AI tools, from you know creating a video just like this, running it through a transcript program, and taking that transcript and running it through AI, creating a syllabus from it, creating you know the glossary of times, all the things that I used to have to do manually that's created a whole nother revenue stream for me that wouldn't have been there. I was stuck doing live classes. Now, not really stuck, but limited. I mean, how many live classes can I do? So three years ago, we decided to, hey, let's take these live classes and take the recordings, put them online, and we'll sell them as Evergreen, self-paced courses. Well, that worked, but think about it. How many could I produce? How many of those can I produce when I'm coming up with the idea, writing all the content, getting it edited, formatted, then uploaded. It's time consuming. Well, I figured out a series of processes, you like they said, using several different AI tools to produce numerous courses. I have right now probably 20 courses. I've lost count, 20 courses that are actually published and generating revenue. I have another 30 courses that are in the production phase. They're all pretty much done. They just got to go through the process. Edit, you know, review, format, upload. So it's still ours. I've created it. They're not, you know, courses just solely created by AI. And that's basically what I'm saying. AI is a tool, it's not a replacement. Computers are a tool. There's no computer that replaced a human being. There's no software program that has actually replaced a human being. If there is, let me know. Let me know how that happened, and I'll be able to show you. It didn't actually replace the human being. That human being that was doing whatever that task was was put into another, either another job, another task, or whatever. But we still need the human beings to do the work to communicate to each other. So that's my story on AI. It's not doom and gloom. It's probably one of the greatest opportunities that have ever been out there for people. So, you know, the good news is you don't need a college degree to do it. All you need is the desire, and you still got to do the work. You got to learn it. You got to figure out what niche do you want to follow? What's your expertise? So, like I said, if if I was a coder, I would be in heaven right now. I'd be creating all kinds of apps, all kinds of agents. AI isn't going to replace me, it's going to give me more opportunities. So that's my story, folks. I'm sticking with it. If you like the content, you know, subscribe to my channel, follow me, you know, connect with me on Facebook. I'm not on LinkedIn. LinkedIn damn me. Okay. Uh, they won't even tell me why, but I'm on Facebook, I'm on Twitter, I'm on Threads, I'm on Instagram. You can find me, just you know, search me, and I'm looking forward to uh giving you more great advice. This is episode number 15 of hopefully hundreds, maybe thousands of podcasts just like this. So stay tuned, folks. If you're a self employed professional or you want to be a self employed professional, this is where you want to be. Thank you, God bless, and I'll see you in the next episode. Thank you.