An accounting firm wanted ChatGPT. What they needed was a working memory.

A mid-sized accounting firm in the GTA reached out late last year. Twelve staff, mostly bookkeeping and tax for owner-operated businesses. The partner who called had been to a conference where someone said firms that didn't adopt ChatGPT for accounting would be gone in five years, and now he was trying to figure out what that meant for him.

His specific ask: a paid ChatGPT Team plan for everyone, plus a custom GPT trained on their tax knowledge. Quoted price from another shop, somewhere north of $30k.

I asked what he wanted his staff to actually do with it. He went quiet for a minute, then said something I think about a lot: "Honestly, I want them to stop asking me the same five questions every March."

That is not a ChatGPT problem.

We spent the first call mapping the five questions. Four of them had answers that lived in the firm's internal SOP doc, which nobody read because it was 90 pages and the search was bad. The fifth was about a recurring CRA filing edge case that the senior partner was the only one who knew, and he'd been answering it by email for fifteen years.

What we built was small. A staff-facing chat tool that searched their actual SOP doc and email archive (with the senior partner's permission), returned cited answers with the source paragraph, and flagged anything it wasn't confident about for human review. We seeded it with the senior partner's old answers to that recurring question so the institutional knowledge stopped living in his head.

Build time was about three weeks. Cost was a fraction of the original quote. The "AI" part is genuinely the smallest interesting part of it — most of the work was cleaning the SOP doc, structuring the email export, and writing the system prompt that made it admit when it didn't know something.

A month in, the partner sent a note saying his March was quieter than any in a decade. The staff weren't using it for anything fancy. They were using it as a search engine for things they should have been able to find anyway.

The lesson, again — and I keep writing variations of it — is that the AI label is a magnet for the wrong kind of project. Most professional services firms don't need ChatGPT. They need their own knowledge to be findable. AI is just the cheapest way to make that happen now.

If you're a partner at a firm thinking about this, the framing question isn't "how do we adopt AI." It's "what does my team ask me that I shouldn't have to answer twice." For more on how I tend to scope this kind of work, the work page is a decent overview, and a deeper read on a related dynamic is Ben Thompson at Stratechery on how integration changes the value of knowledge work.

The boring answer is usually the right one.