AI Innovation with YBL

AI can do more than just save time. In this episode, Partner and COO of YBL, Mike Libbey, pulls back the curtain on how he created an army of vibe coders, leveraging AI to drive greater value to clients. Discover the playbook from the 2025 Karbon Excellence Award winner for AI Innovation.

Creators and Guests

Host

Twyla Verhelst

Twyla is a CPA with a passion for transforming the accounting profession. She co-founded an advisory-led accounting firm and a technology startup, emphasizing innovation and community engagement. She has built accountant channels and accounting partnerships at leading fintech companies, driving initiatives that empower accountants to embrace technology and AI to modernize their practices.

Guest

Mike Libbey

Mike Libbey is the Partner & COO of YBL, a modern virtual accounting firm he took over from his father after working in the business since age 17. With deep roots in entrepreneurship and a passion for strategy, Mike helps ambitious entrepreneurs grow, scale, and take control of their financial future.

What is Karbon Excellence Awards Podcast?

Hear from the winners of the Karbon Excellence Awards as they unpack their accounting firms' playbooks for innovation, culture, tech, and sustainability.

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Episode 2 - AI Innovation with YBL (Final audio + transcript)
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Mike Libbey: Something you want to be consciously aware of is still keeping that human connection.

Twyla Verhelst: The Karbon Excellence Awards recognize the accounting firms that are raising the bar for the industry. On this podcast, we ask leaders of the winning firms a series of questions about how they're taking their firm's culture, client experience, technology, and leadership.

To the next level, I'm your host, Twyla Verhelst, and this is the 2025 Karbon Excellence Awards podcast. According to The State of AI in Accounting Report, accounting professionals have noticed an increase in AI functionality in their existing software. As the accounting industry continues to adapt to AI, AI tools also need to adapt to the evolving needs of our industry.

One of this year's 2025 Karbon Excellence Award winners for AI innovation is YBL. They're a Canadian accounting firm that transitioned from the traditional model to a virtual CFO focused, advisory driven offering, and according to them, their AI tools have been foundational to their success. Today I'm joined by Partner and COO, Mike Libbey, to hear their strategy.

Mike, welcome to the podcast. Let's dive right in 'cause I know that you and your team Mike, are using AI tools like Microsoft Copilot, HubSpot, Notion, AI and Karbon AI inside of your workflows. Where have you found AI to be consistently strong across your tech stack?

Mike Libbey: So the good news is a lot of apps are consistently strong these days.

The bad news is it's tough to tell what's moving too fast and kind of where you should end up and where you should land. And so one thing you mentioned there was Copilot. We're now officially all in on ChatGPT. It's just far superior in our eyes for a few different reasons that I'm sure most people would agree with, quite frankly.

And that being said, we are certainly in the Office 365 ecosystem. I mean, ultimately if you're looking at the different apps and the different systems we use, from Karbon, to Notion, to MailChimp, and kind of everything in between. The third point is really something from a summarization tasks action item, right?

I mean, a lot of apps are influenced by AI in today's world and ultimately not all of them will do things, the same or do it very well. And so kind of sifting through that to make sure that you're using the right tech stack is imperative, ultimately. And so keeping all your systems in sync. It's certainly one of the biggest ones, for us as well, so...

Twyla Verhelst: It is such an exciting time and I openly share that. I'm team ChatGPT. So welcome to this chat GPT team. Mike, we're glad you're here. I know you've mentioned before that through AI you've seen a 30% reduction in time to close for monthly books and a 25% decrease in follow-up emails, as well as even some reduced onboarding time for new team members.

And I know people often talk about the time saving benefits of AI. What are some of the other practical use cases and benefits of AI that aren't talked about as much as this time savings benefit.

Mike Libbey: As we kinda mentioned, it's really elevating consistency and I think that's really imperative here, right?

Is because if you're looking at it from the perspective of whether you've got a team of 1 or 2 or at 35, where we're at today, you wanna make sure that everybody's doing it in the same way, and following the proper structure, proper procedures and doing it efficiently. And so we've built some different apps and some different tools, or even just utilized some custom GPTs and projects,

where we can ensure that the team is doing things in the same way, whether we're talking about an email coach that we have as a custom GPT. So everybody's kind of natural language has ended up saying the same, that not only will it recraft that email for you, but it will coach you along the way and tell you, Hey, we think it should be more like this,

or, Hey, that one's accidentally passive aggressive, and you might not have realized. Consistency is a really big theme for us. We're thinking about speaking to clients or the onboarding process from a new hire or even just a new client experience. You've got things automatically running in the background where transcript are gold in today's world. A lot of people know that, but a lot of people don't know that, right?

So everything that you can record, everything that you can have, that can automatically be pushed through either a GPT or pushed to your workflow management system like Karbon, summarize action items, et cetera, even just kind of paragraphs for your engagements that can automatically happen, and so on and so forth.

It's really just keeping it consistent, but also something you wanna be consciously aware of is still keeping that human connection. And I think that that's certainly extremely important here. And frankly, that's a big theme. We wanna make sure that we're speaking to them like humans, interestingly, with the influence of AI.

And so we've actually been able to personalize things considerably more because of the AI. So it's an interesting kind of situation we find ourselves in right now. And I mean, when, when you talk about some other practical benefits, you see the Intuit platform, there are new AI agents that they have there.

The introduction of AI agents where you're talking about ChatGPT, a different system or the Intuit platform, is, it's not only gonna streamline things, make things happen kind of quicker. It's gonna do things you might not have thought of originally, and you're gonna see the logic and the way that it's kinda working behind the scenes.

So we're excited about the shift in all of that, and again, we all know how tough it is deepen up, but we're doing our best here.

Twyla Verhelst: Yeah, that's great. And you know, that consistency while also bringing the human element and ensuring that it's personalized is a tricky balance, but, certainly a great way to be leveraging AI across your entire org.

So you, Mike, I know you have been credited as having been instrumental in evolving YBL into a tech-driven firm. So tell us what do you think's really possible when you harness AI intentionally, and how do you train and educate your team so that they can harness it too?

Mike Libbey: So I do think that it is extremely important in today's kinda landscape to train your team and equip your team, right, whether that's just having everybody on a ChatGPT plan to ensure security and encryption and all that fun stuff, all the way to having regular AI trainings. So we're absolutely training our team on a regular basis. and we're also very excited about all the tools we're building, internal tools as well as external tools. That's really just kind of helping the client experience, or even just lead generation and things of that nature.

If we used to do something in disconnected tools that it's not possible to Zapier or Make, or n8n or something of that nature, we're building tools to streamline that, whether it's helping with our insight analysis or it's helping have prospects or people utilize our incorporation calculator.

I joke that after one of our very first kind of AI trainings that we had with the team, I was showing them some of the tools that I was building, and we created a little bit of an army of vibe coders overnight because they just saw what was possible.

One of the biggest issues for a lot of people is just not knowing where to start, and so that's why we felt obligated to really train them and kinda leverage their time and energy and efforts to be able to work as efficiently as we were, the people who just really love, live and breathe this stuff, right?

And so to be able to do that and see what's possible, that was really the unlock. And I mean big kudos to Chad Davis and the AutomationTown, that's really pushing me and certainly YBL forward to be able to see again what's possible and have that resource as well. That's really it for me is once you get a taste of what you can see there, I see it's kind of fun and a little bit addicting to be able to kind of go into these things and just play around, and so it's been an exciting time to be able to kind of do that.

Twyla Verhelst: Well great shoutout to AutomationTown and the work that Chad Davis is doing and the other peers inside of that group, 'cause as you were talking about some of the tools that you were using and that you were showcasing to your team, Mike, I was really thinking about how you are have probably surrounded yourself with a group of peers that is also doing these fun things with things like Make and tools beyond ChatGPT, and then you are infusing that down into your team, because not everyone is able to create an army of vibe coders overnight inside of their accounting firm.

So clearly, you know, what you're bringing back to your team is really infectious and, and it's getting them excited too.

Mike Libbey: That's it.

Twyla Verhelst: Let's talk a little bit about YBL Connect. I'm really curious for you to tell us a bit more. So for the, our audience who probably doesn't know or maybe isn't familiar, YBL Connect is an intelligent tax portal that you've developed and in the past 12 months, you've started to beta test AI driven insights in your client dashboards.

So tell us a bit more about YBL Connect and from your perspective as someone who uses AI and offers AI solutions, are there any concerns that you have? Or on the flip side, what is it that's exciting you the most?

Mike Libbey: So you're absolutely right. It is an intelligent kind of client tax portal where it's, think of a central hub for our clients from a tax perspective,

so they're able to organize conditional information that provides them AI insights and summaries, filing track the status of the returns. It's really built to kind of simplify the client journey. And well, it's also given them those insights, but it really excites me to be able to give this level of insights to smaller businesses as well as high-end businesses.

And so once that data is really unlocked and you're able to provide that information to them, and they can go in and, and we can explain that to them in a nuanced way that's specific to their situation, but also in a jargon-free way where they, really say, I actually understand that, and that's very exciting to me, that's one of the most, the best compliments we can possibly receive is when somebody finally says, I actually understand that no other accountant has been able to really explain it that way.

So, it is very exciting having all these tools, certainly at our fingertips. But you're absolutely right, there is certainly a risk of firms kind of leaning too heavily into automation, too heavily into AI.

Some people would certainly argue that's impossible. But it also depends on who your clientele is, right? And so you really have to read the room and understand who that ideal client is. And I was actually talking to another accountant recently and funny enough, there was a discussion about where AI is headed in 5 years, 10 years, and what an accounting firm is gonna look like.

And we joke, but it might be the reality that part of the client experience really having a human that isn't automating every single part of that might quite frankly be a differentiator that makes it a little bit more unique than a lot of firms that might kind of be leaning into the AI piece.

It'll be interesting to, again, kind of see how it all unfolds, but there certainly are some concerns, and you wanna make sure you've got kind of ethical handling of sensitive client data and you've done as much due diligence as you possibly could. I think that's extremely important to be overly cautious when you're unsure and you're seeing a lot of apps out there that are regularly kind of in position, and then they're gone, right? You wanna make sure you've got the right people behind the scenes kind of vetting these apps and projects for you.

Twyla Verhelst: That's great. Thanks for sharing all of that and certainly it's this evolution that we're all going through and to have that look forward to think of where we're going next.

I think it's so fuzzy, but yet also starting to get some clarity to just where this could really head with AI and accounting. it like, like you're saying, it's such an exciting time. So I understand that inside of YBL, as a result of using AI, the perceived value of your monthly check-ins with your clients has increased by 14 NPS points.

So as AI continues to reduce manual work and lead to faster follow up with clients, and also increase accountability within your team, how do you think the perceived value of accounting services will evolve over time?

Mike Libbey: I think it's gonna have a major impact on the value of accounting services, quite frankly.

On the one hand, I think it makes the backend more efficient and streamlined more than ever before. On the other hand, the client's perception of value might be completely different than what you might perceive as efficient. And so you really have to make sure you're kind of keeping in conversations with your clients, with your prospects, with your colleagues to really understand that, right?

I mean, one of the things I've done is I've been fortunate enough to delegate all of my work to be able to kind of focus on a level and not actually kind of deal with clients on a regular day-to-day basis. But I always wanna make sure that I am understanding kind of their needs and having those regular touch ins completely optionally, to make sure they're really understanding our clients and the experience and what they're really looking for, so that we're not just building stuff and realizing that was useless, they don't actually care, they don't want to use that, or they don't wanna do that, and they're just not perceiving value there.

So, I mean, ultimately a lot of this does lean towards advisory and clarity and confidence, and every client will value this completely differently. Some understand intimately what they need and what they want, and that's fantastic.

Others really aren't able to really see what they need or what's required to be able to help them with that next step. They see there's not enough money in the bank, but why and how do we fix that and how do we plan, forecast, budget, all of those fun things. And so, to be blunt, I do think AI will end up replacing some accounting jobs depending on really how this goes.

I do think that is inevitable, but I also wanna be very, very clear that not only do I intend to keep every employee at YBL and expand and focus on high leverage touch points, I believe that this is about kind of every industry, not really just about the accounting industry, right? So it's going to be, I think, far bigger than anybody, quite frankly, is anticipating.

But it's really about unlocking time, focusing on those client relationships, honing in on what clients really think is valuable. Because again, I can't sense it's enough that a lot of people will think something is valuable and then find out the hard way that it really isn't, and so at least to be able to pivot in real time and understand that is also a big unlock, quite frankly.

So, you gotta be careful.

Twyla Verhelst: Yeah, for sure. I, as you were talking, I'm gonna throw a curve ball, please. What would you do if you were meeting with a prospective client and they showed up to your call and openly said, I'm using ChatGPT. During our call to, whether that's fact check or to challenge or to run it through there to see like does ChatGPT agree?

How do you react to something like that if that were to happen to you?

Mike Libbey: It's an interesting, and it's a great question, and frankly, even though that hasn't happened yet, I genuinely expect that it's going to happen at some point. I would say it very much depends on their approach to it. If they're coming in from an aggressive standpoint and constantly saying, this is wrong or this is that, different situation, but if they're embracing it, fact checking, just making sure, and they're extremely polite about it, I would absolutely embrace that, because ultimately what will end up happening is now I've realized this client embraces technology, embraces AI, embraces innovation, is moving with the times, and we are too.

So that's absolutely probably more of an ideal client for us than somebody who's not necessarily using ChatGPT. And so we are working on GEO to make sure that we kind of show up in ChatGPT in different places of that nature as well. So I'd embrace that. I would happily be fine with that as long as they approach that from a respectable standpoint.

And we're basically saying, see, you're wrong. I mean, ultimately we wanna be right all the time and it's our job to be professional and ensure that we're giving them proper advice. But let's be honest, single less. Most of us, all of us are utilizing ChatGPT to double check some of this information anyways, so I think it's perfectly fine.

Twyla Verhelst: I completely agree with you that essentially it's happening anyways and even, you know, on a Zoom call, perhaps it's actually already happening and people just haven't disclosed it, but they can do it discreetly, and you know, rest assured when you know, hear something from your doctor or your lawyer or your real estate agent, we're probably doing the same to those service providers on the back end too.

Maybe not as bluntly as I suggested in that scenario, but is, you know, the way of working now and, and kind of the, the access that everyone has at their fingertips to kind of do that fact check or to do some more exploratory research on a particular topic around accounting in our scenario. Well, Mike, thank you so much for joining today.

It's been such a pleasure to chat with you as always.

Mike Libbey: Thank you, Twyla. I appreciate you having me. Thank you guys so much, and again, it's just, it's an honor to have won that award for sure. We really wouldn't be where we are without Karbon, so thank you guys.

Twyla Verhelst: Well, thanks to you and for our audience.

You've been listening to the 2025 Karbon Excellence Award podcast. Every episode, we ask Karbon Excellence Award winners, a series of questions on how they raise the bar for the accounting profession. For more advice and strategies on how to grow your firm, visit Karbon Magazine at https://karbonhq.com/resources.

That's it for today, folks. Bye for now.