Accounting and the cash register.

Every business is different! Yes. But it’s better when all businesses follow the same rules.

Even though someone selling candles on Etsy has a vastly different business than someone building micro-gravity factories in space, we can all agree that they should look at accounting the same way.

The inventions of GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) and, earlier still, double-entry bookkeeping had profound effects on how our entire society functions.

Similarly, the lowly cash register was nothing short of a revolution in how small businesses operated, solving several long-standing problems at the same time.

So while AI will not make us more creative or more human, it can help all businesses be the same where it matters: in customer service standards, in efficiency, in preventing dropped balls.

Much of the discourse today is about AI replacing human creativity (bad).

Instead, it should be on AI being like the new accounting (good).

We don’t need to be creative everywhere…