#81 The Expert and the Machine Rod Burkert on AI in Business Valuation

TRANSCRIPT: THE bizval PODCAST
Guest: Rod Burkert, Founder — Burkert Valuation Advisors | rbCOACHING | AI for BV
Host: Graham Stephen, CEO and Co-Founder, bizval
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rodburkert/
Company: https://rodburkert.com

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[00:00:08] Graham Stephen: Welcome to the bizval Podcast. At bizval, we are passionate about empowering entrepreneurs the world over to understand and unlock the value in their business. We work with advisers and entrepreneurs to demystify the value creation process when building a business. At bizval, we know how tough it is to grow and run a business, which is exactly why we’ve made valuation simple to understand, accurate, and affordable. Our unique blend of tech and touch ensures that you always receive the best service, authentic human engagement, and data insights to ensure that you build a business that provides you with freedom and choice. In the bizval Podcast, we showcase stories of real entrepreneurs and advisers, sharing lessons and inspiration from their journeys to make your journey just that little bit easier.

[00:00:56] Graham Stephen: Welcome to the bizval Podcast. This is a show where we talk to the people shaping how businesses are built, bought, sold, and valued. I’m Graham Stephen, the CEO of bizvalglobal.com. And today I’m delighted to be joined by somebody with nearly — he doesn’t look it at all — but nearly four decades of experience in and around business valuations, and he’s one of the most active voices globally on what AI means for the profession. Rod Burkert, welcome to the show.

[00:01:23] Rod Burkert: Glad to be here. Thanks for having me, Graham.

[00:01:26] Graham Stephen: So, for anyone who doesn’t know you yet — and anyone on LinkedIn who has anything in the M&A advisory valuation space, I’m sure they do already — could you just give us the two-line version of who you are and what you do today?

[00:01:43] Rod Burkert: Sure. So, today I run a firm called Burkert Valuation Advisors and I focus primarily on practice management consulting. I’m a big believer in specialisation. So I only do this for the BVFLS profession. And really, the goal of my firm is to help colleagues turn — as I say — the practice you have into the practice you want, whatever that means for them. Do they want more time, more money, more freedom? And since the start of 2025, that work has been really focused on one thing: doing all of that with an assist from AI. So using my traditional coaching, augmenting it with AI to help practitioners use AI to better market, sell, and deliver their services. I do that through a newsletter, I run monthly group workshops, and I do one-to-one coaching. And as a side note, a colleague and I founded another practice called BVLS Transitions, which is a firm designed to matchmake baby boomer business valuers who want to sell their practices to the next generation who want to grow and scale a firm.

[00:03:11] Graham Stephen: Fantastic. And I can’t wait to dive into what that means for our profession. I just want to touch on something you mentioned there, Rod — we as business valuation professionals, one of the first things we tell our clients is, if you want to create value, make sure the business isn’t dependent on yourself. And it’s a bit like the dentist with rotten teeth, right? I’m sure you come across it all the time where we don’t take our own medicine. So hopefully there’s a lot of insight today. We’re going to be focusing a lot on AI and what that means for the profession. But before we get into that, let’s rewind a little bit.

[00:03:48] Graham Stephen: You started at Price Waterhouse — I think it was still called Price Waterhouse then. When I joined them, it was already PricewaterhouseCoopers. You were doing tax work in Philadelphia and then Brussels. But how did a young tax accountant like you end up in valuation?

[00:04:12] Rod Burkert: Well, like you said, I started out at Price Waterhouse. I graduated from college in 1978. I started working with Price Waterhouse in Philadelphia that summer. And as you point out, way back then it was still the Big Eight, not the Big Six, certainly not the Big Four. I was doing individual tax work — that’s where I started. I actually did spend one busy season in audit and absolutely hated it. Went downstairs to a tax partner and said, “I don’t know why, but I think I would really like doing tax work better.” This was January, about six months after I started in July of 1978. At that time, they were looking for any warm body with a 98.6 degree temperature to staff the tax department. So I was lucky — I immediately got absorbed into tax. And one of the cool things that came out of that is I did an overseas stint in Brussels, Belgium for 18 months. That was a pretty eye-opening experience for a kid right out of college who had never really travelled anywhere outside of the country.

[00:05:27] Rod Burkert: And then it was just a succession of — I get bored with the status quo. From there I moved out of public accounting and into industry. I worked for a Fortune 500 specialty steel manufacturer. Don’t get excited — we were like 490-something. Seriously. So we just made the Fortune 500. And I had various positions in there that allowed me to look at the manufacture of steel from different perspectives. And then in the 1980s, the steel tariffs were a big thing and the company was in a lot of trouble. So I pivoted out of manufacturing and went into the banking industry, and I worked in something called corporate development — which was my initial exposure to business valuation. By this time, Graham, we’re in the merger mania days of the 1980s, and banks were just starting to be allowed to acquire cross-state banks. We were also looking at acquiring mortgage banking companies, title insurance companies, equipment leasing companies. And so I got to see how valuations were done at that level. That’s what really triggered my interest in valuation.

[00:07:05] Rod Burkert: Somewhere along the way, I got an MBA, and at the end of the day, I started wanting to do business valuations full-time because it brought together the elements of accounting, tax, finance, and economics. And at the time, I just thought it was the most interesting discipline around, and I really fell in love with it.

[00:07:27] Graham Stephen: I mean, you touch on some points — I often have this discussion with people. At the heart of business valuation, it’s actually a triangulation exercise of finance, operations, and business. It’s really getting to grips with the business model that underpins the business and then playing that back. A lot of people think it’s just running a DCF or running a spreadsheet — that’s only a tiny portion of it. And having had that experience across domains, from tax through to manufacturing through to banking, you were in that sort of unique position where you can pull all that stuff together. Fortunately, you ran away from audit early on. That was probably your saving grace.

[00:08:11] Graham Stephen: So Rod, for listeners coming in today — from that early career and doing your MBA back in the 80s and those early M&A lessons, is there anything from the heyday of the 1980s Wall Street that still stuck with you today and is still relevant to the profession?

[00:08:36] Rod Burkert: Well, there’s a book called Bright Lights, Big City, and that’s exactly how I felt. I was still pretty young and still learning a lot. And when I was working for this banking company — a publicly traded company — I was just smitten, bowled over by these guys coming down from Wall Street and showcasing their valuation models when we were trying to acquire other companies. And that’s where I say in my LinkedIn profile, one of the funny takeaways I have is: if you’re a publicly traded company and you’re looking at buying a business, it’s not about increasing value. It’s about not diluting your earnings. And every valuation model that I studied from those Wall Street investment bankers started with an anti-earnings dilution model, because you didn’t want to go to the Street with a story that said, “We’re acquiring another bank and it’s going to dilute our earnings by 3% for the next two years.” So one of the things that really triggered my interest in doing the valuation was reverse engineering these valuation models that they gave us to look at and study for different acquisition targets.

[00:10:02] Graham Stephen: Fantastic. So let’s fast forward a little bit — you went solo in July 2000 with Burkert Valuation Advisors, and for two decades you ran your own valuation practice. What made you decide to take that leap into running your own practice, and what did those 20 years in the game teach you?

[00:10:34] Rod Burkert: Well, yes, I do have some interesting stories. I will tell you that the reason I started my own valuation practice is I just finally got the confidence to do it on my own. My father — growing up, we were probably lower middle class. I saw what my father went through working for somebody all the time and how he complained when he came home, to be quite frank. And I didn’t want that kind of life for me. I learned something early on that there are very few things that you can’t recover from. So when I was thinking about going out on my own, I thought, well, the worst that can happen is this fails and I go back into industry or back into a public accounting firm. So at the time, I really felt like there was nothing to lose.

[00:11:28] Rod Burkert: My very first valuation engagement happened to be for a manufacturing company. We’re doing a site visit, walking through the plant, and I’m talking to this business owner about the manufacturing lineup and supply chain logistics, and he stops me in the middle of the floor and says, “You know, Rod, you really get this.” And I kind of shrugged it off, but it was a light bulb moment that led to specialisation. I had spent roughly four years working for a very large manufacturing and distribution company. And so from that point on, I thought, this is a niche for me. I understand the lingo, I know how this works. And so almost from the very beginning when I went out on my own, I specialised in tax purpose valuations. In the United States — gift tax, estate tax, charitable contributions, S corporation elections. So tax purpose valuations, and probably 90% of my practice was only around manufacturing and distribution. Specialisation is something that helped me gain expertise and positioning and traction early on.

[00:12:50] Graham Stephen: Yeah, I think specialisation is something — I’m sitting in another part of the world, yes, we have a practice in the US, and we see that big differentiation between the US and maybe some of the other countries. That need for niche specialisation is absolutely key. It’s a big market, right? So you can build a successful business with that specialisation. It’s not always possible in other markets where maybe they’re smaller and more diversified. But that’s a key learning, and I think it’s something we also look at when we’re looking at businesses — how niche are they, how specialised are they, what sort of moat exists from your business to others.

[00:13:30] Graham Stephen: Rod, you’re also a bit ahead of your time. And I think a lot of people know you probably as the travelling — I use an Australian term — what is it, wayward valuator? So you and your wife, from 2010 to 2022 — even before COVID and before remote working was a thing — you basically ran your business full-time from an RV. So, you, your dogs, and your army. Tell us a bit about that.

[00:13:55] Rod Burkert: Well, when COVID did break out, Graham, my wife and I joke that we’d been practising social distancing for 10 years. So when it finally happened, it wasn’t a big deal. But you know, people — especially CPA types — are really afraid of trying something different. And frankly, I am too. But the fear of trying something new was outweighed by how bored I get with the status quo. And if I’ve been doing something for a while, I’m looking for another challenge. That’s part of what contributed to it.

[00:14:35] Rod Burkert: Another thing I learned while we were travelling is that at that time, geography was becoming really irrelevant. Back when we started, you always needed to think, hey, I need to be in the town in which these businesses are located. And I won’t argue with that, but as time went on, geography became less and less of a barrier. When I would get a referral or a potential client call me, one of the first things I would tell them is, “Hey, look, I’m qualified and I’d love to help you, but there’s something you need to know. I travel full-time in an RV, and I might be in Texas this week, but next week I could be in Arizona or California or anywhere else in the United States or Canada.” And nobody — to the best of my knowledge, Graham — I do not remember anybody hanging up the phone on me.

[00:15:55] Rod Burkert: And if I can, Graham, I want to share one more thing about what contributed to the RV travel. I had a really good friend — I considered him an older brother — who also happened to be a business valuation professional. And one day he called me and said, “I’ve stopped renewing my magazine subscriptions.” And I’m like, “What are you talking about?” He had been diagnosed with cancer. He lived with it for several years, and he’s no longer with us. But at the time, that had a big impact. You know, we all remember our college days where we were praying to God, please make this better, and I promise never to do it again. I had a similar come-to-Jesus moment. My wife and I looked at each other and looked around at all the stuff that we had, and we realised that if our health became an issue, we would give it all up to have our health back. And so how important is all of this stuff that we’re accumulating? What are we postponing?

[00:17:03] Rod Burkert: That probably more than anything else is what pushed me over the edge to give this whole travelling-from-an-RV a try. And I will tell you, Graham, back in 2010, getting the internet from an RV relied on the Verizon jetpack — you know, standing on one leg holding up the antenna as you walked. That’s how it worked back in 2010. But as time went on, at the end we had a really sophisticated setup to guarantee great Wi-Fi signal with two different carriers just for the redundancy.

[00:17:55] Graham Stephen: I love it. And nowadays, you don’t even have to be in the same country. There are guys like Mike Blake out of Portugal and what have you. Our business runs across borders — the UK, the US, EMEA. You can literally be anywhere in the world nowadays. So you were really a pioneer in that sense, Rod, and an inspiration to a lot of people down the line.

[00:18:26] Graham Stephen: So I want to move on a little bit. Before we get into the AI discussion — you’ve been doing this for a good 20 years, travelling the United States — and then you decided to pivot. At this point you decided you wanted to start coaching others and making AI the focus. Why the shift, and what did you see in the profession that drove that change?

[00:18:50] Rod Burkert: Yeah, I mean, ultimately — when the first ChatGPT model came out in November of 2022, I was kind of enthralled by it. And I immediately saw, even back then, what this could do for our profession. Because having done so many business valuations, I think there is so much of what we do that is very necessary, but it is total busy work that adds little or no value to the client. Yes, we need to spread historical financial statements — that provides no value to the client. Yes, we need to do our industry research and our economic overview. But that research in and of itself provides no value to the client. What it really does is give us the background information that we need to start accumulating so that we can exercise professional judgment. So the long and short of it is, I really saw AI as a way to remove some of the drudgery of doing valuation work.

[00:20:03] Rod Burkert: The end result is great — what we produce is great — but the messy middle is the problem, where we’re doing all of this busy work that doesn’t really add a lot of value to the clients. And so as time went on from November 2022, I started studying this more and more, doing self-learning and a lot of experimentation. And in January of 2025, I launched my AI for BV newsletter. I specifically wanted people to know that this was only going to be for the BV profession, hence the name, because at the time nobody else was doing it. And again — niche. Not AI for everyone, AI for BV.

[00:20:46] Graham Stephen: So it seems to be a theme that you’ve carried. I mean, if I remember correctly, there’s about 4,000 BV professionals in the United States, maybe even more. So there’s a substantial number of people and practices that we’re talking to, but it’s not 400,000 — not like accountants, right?

[00:21:22] Graham Stephen: So let’s get into the heart of it. I want to start a little bit with why AI matters. You’re a genuine advocate for AI in valuation, and you’ve been through the learning yourself. You’ve learned the hard lessons. You’ve been in the room — you’ve been in the steel manufacturer, you know. You’ve learned to think for yourself. But let’s talk about AI — why does it matter, and why does it matter now? Can a modern valuation practice actually operate without AI today?

[00:21:58] Rod Burkert: So I’m a big reader, and I want to start by saying — why AI in valuation? What I just talked about earlier was really looking at AI from our perspective, a professional practitioner perspective. But let’s look at it from the client perspective for just a minute. So the anecdote that I want to relate is a story about a gentleman named Peter Hurley. Peter Hurley is widely considered to be one of the world’s best portrait photographers. He’s done all of the celebrities, all of the industry titans, and he teaches thousands of students across the world how to do portrait photography. And here’s what he’s saying to his students: if you can’t beat AI in portrait photography, you won’t get hired. And he’s right. Portrait photography apps for your phone are already good enough for most people, but there will always be a subset of people who will pay a premium for that last mile that only a top photographer can deliver.

[00:23:17] Rod Burkert: And I think there’s a really close parallel to BVFLS work. So back when I started coaching before AI, there was a lot of grumbling in our profession about all these DIY valuation websites and garbage in, garbage out. But we were looking at it from our perspective. Some or many business owners believe that today, AI-assisted valuation apps are good enough. And that might be because they don’t know or understand what the last mile of the human-in-the-loop difference or differentiation would mean to them. And that’s not a business owner problem. That’s not an AI problem. What it is, is a BVFLS practitioner education problem. And so if we can’t demonstrably explain and beat AI-assisted valuation apps by that last mile, we’re going to lose ground to practitioners who can — many of whom are probably supplementing their work or augmenting their work with AI tools anyway. And they’re not just going to survive, they’re going to thrive.

[00:24:35] Rod Burkert: Because I believe the top one to five percent of BVFLS practitioners in their respective fields of expertise will see a huge demand for their services while the rest get displaced by AI. And there are a couple of reasons for that. Very few business owners want a business valuation, but they’re told that they need one for this or that compliance purpose. So they’re being told that they need to spend money on something that they don’t really want. And that shifts the focus from value consciousness to price sensitivity — hey, if I’ve got to get this done, I don’t want to pay a lot of money for it, I’m going to go with the cheapest person. As the pool of business owners paying for more human contact shrinks, all of their demand is going to be concentrated towards that top one to five percent of BVFLS providers.

[00:25:47] Rod Burkert: And one more thing driving this is that we’re all hearing the terms AEO — answer engine optimisation — and GEO — generative AI engine optimisation. In the past, if somebody Googled “business valuation in Philadelphia” and I came up tenth on the list, I was probably going to get some work because I’m at least on the list. But the way people are asking questions of AI now — “Hey, Perplexity or ChatGPT or Claude, who is the best valuation expert specialising in manufacturers and distributors in Center City, Philadelphia?” — only one answer is going to come up. You’re not getting ten, fifteen, twenty blue links of practitioners in Philadelphia. You’re getting one.

[00:26:47] Rod Burkert: And so I think all of this is really driving us to strongly consider the use of AI in our practices. And the other reason that really drives this is that the talent pool is shrinking in business valuations. I hear from so many small firms how difficult it is to hire, at a reasonable salary, someone that they can train to do business valuation. And especially for solo practitioners, AI can be that junior analyst — if you let it.

[00:27:24] Graham Stephen: Yeah. And I think Rod, there are so many things you’ve touched on there that I can even relate to in our business. What AI can’t do is, when a business owner wants to sell and get a sensible number, it can’t consult the business owner and say, “Look, your value is lower than what you think it is because you haven’t done the following — but it’s okay. If you take the time over the next two years to make these changes in your business, you can get there.” AI can’t read the room. It can’t do those things. But the other point is that the genie is out of the bottle. It’s here, it’s here to stay. And as a practitioner, unless you figure out how to use that well and become one of the top five percent, you are going to be disintermediated.

[00:28:28] Graham Stephen: And then the last point I guess is — can AI basically be an equaliser for the small practices? We’re not talking the Big Four, the Big Five, the Krolls of the world. We’re talking about the two-, three-, four-person practices. Is it a threat or is it an opportunity? How do you see that?

[00:29:12] Rod Burkert: I am probably an unabashed optimist for AI. I know that there are concerns, but as you pointed out, the genie’s out of the bottle. There’s no putting AI aside or putting it on hold, because it’s a worldwide phenomenon. And there are small firms that are practising today without the benefit or use of AI — the poll questions that I ask in my workshops bear that out.

[00:29:43] Rod Burkert: But for all of the pearl clutching about AI, and the admonition of “well, AI can’t replace our professional judgment” — first, I’m not saying it should ever replace our professional judgment. But I don’t understand, if professional judgment is your thing, why you wouldn’t embrace AI to free you up from the busy work that doesn’t provide value, and give you more time to exercise the professional judgment that you’re clinging to so precariously.

[00:30:19] Graham Stephen: Well, I guess to interrupt you — back in 1978, you didn’t have Excel. If you were talking to a practitioner in 2000 and saying, “Hey, you’re going to do this with a notepad and an abacus” — I’m joking — but it would be a similar discussion in many ways, right?

[00:30:38] Rod Burkert: Right. The first electronic spreadsheet I used was VisiCalc — and I feel like your audience is going, “Okay, boomer” — but that came out in the early 80s. Then we went to Lotus 123, and then finally Excel came out. The other thing about small firms is — even though we may be reluctant, our end users are not. And if we don’t start using AI, and we get questions about how we’re using AI in our practice and we say, “Oh, we’re not using it,” we do run the risk of being seen as not tech-savvy or not cost-conscious, or both.

[00:31:29] Rod Burkert: And so I do think, to some extent, it’s inevitable. The BV people are generally really good at their job. They have all these processes and procedures that they follow, and why do I need AI? I’m already good at this. But it’s a throughput kind of thing. Not just to get more work out the door faster — although that’s certainly part of it — it is getting more time to exercise the professional judgment that we hold so near and dear to our hearts.

[00:32:03] Rod Burkert: Just a quick story. Back when I had my valuation practice in Center City, Philadelphia, I would deliver a valuation report to a client and honestly, I didn’t want to hang around, because my thought was, I’ve got five or six more projects back on my desk that I’ve got to get to. So, sir or madam, here’s your valuation report. Good luck. Let me know if you have any questions, but please don’t call because I’ve got this other work that I’ve got to do. And those are the kinds of things that I’ll say because I’ve lived that. And I know that there were times, Graham, that I wished I would have had more time to spend on a valuation because I was thinking there was so much more I could have done. AI facilitates that now. If I’m still going to spend 40 hours on a project, maybe 20 of it was busy work and 20 of it was professional judgment. Now maybe 10 hours is busy work and I gain an extra 10 hours to really think more about the project and deliver more value.

[00:33:15] Rod Burkert: And so I absolutely do believe that this is an equaliser for small firms.

[00:33:20] Graham Stephen: Absolutely. And I just want to touch on a point you made a little earlier. The reality — and we see it in our practice — is when we send out a valuation report or discuss it with a client, the first thing they do invariably is go and put it into Claude or ChatGPT, and 20 minutes later you get a list back: “Hey, what about this question, and what about that?” So if you’re not using it, your clients are going to use it. They’re going to use it to test your judgment, your work. And you better be able to actually answer those questions with a degree of confidence, or else all your credibility is gone. Clients are going to use it — in most instances, to check your work and sense-check it and question you.

[00:34:16] Rod Burkert: Well, the other thing I just want to say about it being an equaliser is this: I want small firms to think about something. The Big Four spent two years in committees and a fortune in time and money deciding how to use AI. And this is something that a small firm can switch on for $20 a month this afternoon. So the AI technology isn’t a moat anymore. It’s table stakes. A Big Four partner and a small firm practitioner can basically be using the same playbook. So is it an equaliser? Absolutely.

[00:35:04] Graham Stephen: Fantastic. So let’s move on — I want to get a little bit specific here. I want to understand what AI does really well, where it genuinely shines in a valuation workflow today. And on the other side of the coin, where does the human expert stay irreplaceable? How do these work together to create a better outcome?

[00:35:44] Rod Burkert: Yeah, sure. So, where does it shine in the workflow? I basically think any kind of research that we’re doing — competitor research, industry research, economic overviews — and in the process, you could use it to save literally thousands of dollars in subscriptions to third-party services. Perplexity is a great research source, even with the free account. There is one source — I won’t mention the third party — but you get their industry data and it’s a $4,000 subscription. So not only do you save time, but you can also save a lot of money with AI.

[00:36:35] Rod Burkert: I also think it’s being used for data wrangling. I’ve done workshops on how to extract financial data from bank statements, tax returns, financial statements, QuickBooks files. All of that tedious work — whether it was done by you or a junior analyst — I remember getting financial statements and sitting down and having to manually retype all the numbers into my valuation spreadsheet so that all the downstream tabs would run, the common size analysis, the ratio analysis, and so on. One of my best-attended monthly workshops was on data extraction. I ran a bunch of very simple prompts — this was before Claude Code and the newer tools — this was just basic ChatGPT and basic Claude, and it worked pretty flawlessly in terms of taking those PDFs, bank statements, credit card statements and extracting that data out into Excel as our starting point. There’s a lot of time associated with doing that, and AI can literally do it in minutes. It doesn’t take away the need to do a review and double-check and fact-check it, but it does 80% of the heavy lifting quickly, so you can sense-check it.

[00:38:28] Rod Burkert: And to me, the big unlock has been when AI came out, we all talked about it as if it were another tool in our toolkit, like Excel. But the models have progressed to a point now where they are collaborators. You don’t need a huge complicated multi-step prompt to get what you want. You can simply type — with today’s models — “Hey, I want to accomplish this task. Give me step-by-step instructions on how to do it.” So it’s becoming more of a collaborator and less of a tool.

[00:39:14] Rod Burkert: But I think where humans will be irreplaceable — to me there are three core activities that we do in any professional service practice. We do marketing to spread the word about who we are and what we do. We sell — we want to convert interested prospects into paying clients. And we deliver — we deliver our report to those paying clients. And I would say anywhere in that marketing, selling, delivery chain of processes, anywhere where the human touch is necessary, particularly in marketing and selling, and professional judgment, which you mostly see in delivery, is necessarily a less likely candidate for AI intervention. So I don’t really tell people that they can use AI to write a report. It can be used for drafting. It can be used for reviewing. But now you have AI detection software which is raising an ugly cloud — your report will probably be run through an AI detection service.

[00:40:28] Rod Burkert: And I’ve always been a really good writer, Graham. I don’t use AI to write my LinkedIn posts or my newsletter. I would consider it for drafting a valuation report if I were a terrible writer — which most BV people are. One of the things I do in my coaching practice is I review draft valuation reports before they get sent out as finals. And so often I see that the authors are struggling to string together a subject, a verb, and an object in a coherent sentence. For them, AI would really be a benefit.

[00:41:12] Graham Stephen: Yeah, I think it levels the playing field in that sense. But as I said, there’s no replacement for knowing how to write well. And something else I just want to touch on very quickly — if you’re using these tools in small practices, you need to be intentional about training junior members of your team. I’m a Gen X, not a boomer, but we still grew up in that era where you had to learn, you had to do the heavy lifting. And the one thing we see as a real risk is that junior people have AI replace their thinking. So you have to be really intentional now about building capability in junior team members. Have them write reports. Have them do the heavy lifting. Use AI as the review tool. Because otherwise we’re going to have a big gap in the profession in five, six, seven, eight years — all the experts are gone and the youngsters haven’t learned the skills.

[00:42:14] Rod Burkert: Well, Graham, as a boomer, it never occurs to me to use AI because I’m lazy about thinking. I’m still using it primarily as a productivity collaborator. Going back to that industry research example — so many of us rely on one third-party source, and we look at that one source, and our professional judgment is limited to that one source. But with a tool like Perplexity, or even ChatGPT or Claude, having it go out and get so much more information about the industry than you’re getting from that one report — that allows me to think more. There’s no thought in entering a prompt that says “Get me all of the industry information for 3D printing.” It’s what I do with that afterwards that I’m not abdicating to artificial intelligence.

[00:43:18] Graham Stephen: Absolutely. So I want to move on a little bit — and I’m conscious of the time, we’ve got about another 10 minutes left. I want to talk firstly just about the toolkits: what you see, what you’re using and why, which tools you reach for first. And then I want to close off around what the guardrails, the perils, and the defensibility are. We didn’t touch on that, but what’s the dark side to this and what makes people nervous? But let’s start with the toolkit first. What are the tools that you’re using, and what are the things that you perhaps avoid?

[00:43:57] Rod Burkert: Sure. So this one tool is going to roll in several things — the guardrails and the toolkit that I would reach for. I know that ChatGPT or Claude get the most headlines, but I think for BVFLS work, the number one most overlooked tool for our profession is NotebookLM, and NotebookLM is a Google product. But the real benefit of it is that it does not go out to the web and make up information. You load in your very specific sources, and if your source information is really good, then any query that you give NotebookLM should be grounded in that reality. It’s not going to hallucinate because it’s only going to your source documents that you handpicked and uploaded.

[00:44:57] Rod Burkert: There is a free version of NotebookLM — again, a Google product — and it does not matter for the output we would be wanting to generate from it. I think that is the number one tool that I would recommend to a practitioner. There’s no cost. It’s free. And if you scroll down into the NotebookLM homepage, it will tell you that right out of the box, they do not use your data to train the model. And I know that confidentiality is a big concern — are you loading proprietary information into this kind of model and compromising your client’s confidentiality? Are NDAs at risk?

[00:45:45] Graham Stephen: Just an interesting little anecdote there — one of our clients is actually in the AI space but they operate in the aeronautics and defence space, and they’ve been doing AI for 25 years. You know, if there’s a failure in a system on an airplane, you can’t rely on open source models. So I think what’s happened is AI has become popular now, but AI has been around for a long time — previously it was only the domain of closed-loop and very specialised things. And in the BVFLS space, a lot of it is a bit like — you’ve got to think about it like you would from an aeronautics perspective, where you can’t have a hallucination in terms of an airplane system. It’s got to be almost foolproof.

[00:46:43] Graham Stephen: So let’s move on to some of those guardrails and perils. I think that would be an interesting way to close out.

[00:46:49] Rod Burkert: Yeah. At the end of the day, I don’t want to push off anybody’s concerns about using AI, but I do think that all of the problems that people cite are solved or solvable. What do I mean by that? So for example, if you’re worried about data sharing — well, number one, every one of us is in the Microsoft ecosystem, right? I don’t know what assurance we have from Microsoft that all of the client confidential data that we’re uploading into Word and Excel and PowerPoint is not being used by them to shape the product offerings of those very products. So how do we know that Microsoft isn’t doing exactly what we’re afraid that AI labs are doing with our data?

[00:47:44] Rod Burkert: Number two is, if you are only going to go with the free plan, then yeah, your data might be shared to train that model, because if you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer — you’re the product. So my first piece of advice would be go out and pay at least the $20 a month. There’s a huge difference between the free tier and even the $20 a month paid tier. And once you get into the realm of a paid tier, there are settings that you can click on in Gemini, in Claude, in ChatGPT that say “don’t use my data to train the model.” And I’m not sure what more assurance than that we need, because again, I don’t know what we get from Microsoft as an example.

[00:48:36] Rod Burkert: And earlier when I mentioned that I did that data extraction workshop, I did that in front of a group of people on Zoom. I used my own QuickBooks file, I used my credit card statements, I used my bank account statements — to show how data could be extracted from them, just to show people that I’m not afraid of using my own personal information in an AI tool to get the outcome that I’m looking for.

[00:49:07] Graham Stephen: Yeah. You know, you need to take precautions, but you also need to be pragmatic about that. And you also need to know — and this is where professional judgment comes in — if you’re standing in front of a judge for a defensibility issue on a tax matter or IRS matter, you’ve got to make damn sure that everything’s been fact-checked. But you would do that irrespective of whether it was AI-generated or you had a research team putting the stuff together out of books in a library. So I don’t think the principles change. And it’s not a shortcut to abdicating from peer review and all of those sorts of things. Those things happen irrespective.

[00:49:55] Rod Burkert: Well, they should happen in any practice.

[00:49:58] Rod Burkert: And I think another really good thing to remember, Graham, is that the tasks that you and I and our audience would be using AI for are kind of on the mundane side. We’re not trying to launch rockets or solve decades-old maths problems or map genomes. Our questions are kind of routine. And all of the leading frontier models — Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT — are all converging, so there will always be some leapfrogging going on. ChatGPT 5 came out, which is now better than Opus 4.8, and in three weeks Claude’s going to be better, or whatever. Their capabilities, especially for what the average BV user needs, are — going back to what we said earlier — good enough. We don’t need the leading edge model. And that’s good to remember. So when it comes to picking a tool once you get beyond NotebookLM, I think the choice between ChatGPT and Claude could come down to how you feel about it personally. I know people think Claude is a better writer. I have not found that to be the case personally. ChatGPT writes in the style that I write in — abrupt short sentences, just the facts kind of thing. Claude is too verbose for me. But that’s my personal preference. Some of it’s preference, right? Do you prefer Ford or Chevrolet or Toyota? They’re all great cars.

[00:51:46] Graham Stephen: Yeah. So, right, we need to wrap up. And we do two things to wrap up. I want to leave our listeners — if there’s a valuation professional listening in — with one takeaway they can take from the conversation. And then we’re going to do a quick rapid fire: literally just five fun questions to hear a little bit more about you. But if you can leave one thought for our listeners, what would that be?

[00:52:12] Rod Burkert: I think it’s mostly for the people that are not using AI yet. The longer that you or they wait to become proficient, the harder it’s going to be to catch up with the peers who started even a month ago, and certainly a year ago. And if you really want to distinguish yourself via exercising professional judgment, I think AI creates more time for that. It’s a value add, not a value subtract. And if you’re going to hang your hat on professional judgment, AI clears more space for it.

[00:52:52] Graham Stephen: Fantastic. You know, it’s a bit like a Nike ad: just do it. Get started, start using, play around, experiment, and then join one of Rod’s workshops or sign up for his newsletter. But Rod, we’re going to do our quick rapid-fire questions. Five questions, one answer, whatever comes to mind as quickly as possible. So the first one — one book you think every BV practitioner or business owner should read.

[00:53:22] Rod Burkert: I think it’s The Business of Expertise by David Baker. I have not found a better book for assessing expertise and positioning your practice.

[00:53:34] Graham Stephen: Fantastic. Okay. The most overused word or cliche in a valuation report.

[00:53:43] Rod Burkert: “I assumed.”

[00:53:44] Graham Stephen: “I assumed.”

[00:53:44] Rod Burkert: Which I teach, you know — these people say “I assumed.” It’s like, hey, you’ve got access to the client. Pick up the phone or send an email. Don’t assume. Verify. Get the data.

[00:53:56] Graham Stephen: I’d love to hear that in front of a judge. If you’re an expert witness and you say “I assumed,” you’re going to be ripped to shreds. The one AI tool — I think you’ve answered this — that you would struggle to work without.

[00:54:08] Rod Burkert: Well, for my practice, the coaching and the newsletter, I’m really big into Claude Code now. But if someone’s just getting started, I think the number one tool is NotebookLM.

[00:54:21] Graham Stephen: NotebookLM. Okay, we’re going to put that in the notes — excuse the pun. The best place you discovered in 12 years on the road in your camper van.

[00:54:35] Rod Burkert: So I’m an outdoors person, and statewise I really liked Colorado and the Rocky Mountains. There’s nothing I found as breathtaking. The other one is the Pacific coast of the state of Oregon. When you drive along the beach road of Oregon, it’s all public land. So there’s nothing private, nothing closed. You could literally walk from the north end to the south end of the state — or vice versa — and not have to diverge. And the coastline is just beautiful. That being said, I’ve clearly landed in Bisbee, Arizona, basically because of the year-round climate that we have in this city.

[00:55:17] Graham Stephen: Clearly you haven’t been to Cape Town yet, because you might change your opinion when you drive along the Chapman’s Peak drive. I’d love to do the trip up the West Coast — that sounds incredible. Last question — finish the sentence. In five years’ time, the valuation expert who thrives is the one who…

[00:55:39] Rod Burkert: I think it’s the one who truly loves the work and learns how to value-price.

[00:55:46] Graham Stephen: Love that. Right. I mean, this chat has just been fantastic. Your authenticity, your passion for what you do — and I think it’s genuinely useful, whether you’re a BVFLS professional or whether you’re a business owner. It’s equally relevant. So where can people find you, your work, and how can they get hold of you if they need to reach out?

[00:56:09] Rod Burkert: Well, if you want to email me, it’s rodburkert.com. rodburkert.com is the domain where you can go to my website, sign up, see what I have to offer, subscribe to my newsletter. And as you pointed out at the top of the podcast, I’m really active on LinkedIn. I post almost every day. So if you want to DM me or reach out to me on LinkedIn, that would be another platform.

[00:56:37] Graham Stephen: Fantastic, Rod. It’s been an absolute pleasure. And that’s it for this episode of the bizval Podcast. If you found it valuable and you enjoyed it, please share it with as many people as possible. If you didn’t like it, don’t tell anyone. So that’s it for the bizval Podcast and hope to see you again soon.

[00:56:55] Rod Burkert: Thanks so much for having me again, Graham.

[00:56:57] Graham Stephen: Cheers, Rod. Thank you.

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