A top-50 AFR-ranked accounting, audit and advisory firm of around a hundred people, taken from scattered experimentation to firm-wide, measured adoption in twelve months. Delivered in-house by the person who now leads Echelon One's builds.
The firm wanted to move beyond isolated AI experimentation and make AI a practical part of everyday work. Employees were already interested, but adoption was inconsistent: valuable use cases lived informally with individuals, knowledge was fragmented across teams, and repetitive work stayed embedded through accounting, audit, advisory and administration.
The goal was never just access to AI. It was an operating model: help people find the opportunities, use AI safely, measure the impact, and keep improving the tools.
Workflows were reviewed for activities that were repetitive, document-heavy, error-prone, standardisable, and common across service lines. The first use cases: financial statement pre-reviews, trust deed summaries, tax return checks, document conversion, audit questions, timesheet preparation and report consolidation.
Early prompts became durable AI skills, automations, templates and add-ins: automated financial statement and audit pre-reviews, audit mapping and lead-sheet indexing, compliance workpapers, tax and regulatory research tools, an R&D application workflow, a due diligence workflow run through Excel, and department-specific add-ins. When an early workpaper architecture proved too heavy, it was redesigned as a lighter skill: the process knowledge kept, the infrastructure cut.
No new systems to learn. AI capability arrived inside Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and the firm's existing accounting and workpaper platforms. That removed the adoption friction that kills most rollouts.
A structured enablement program ran alongside the build: AI champion meetings, firm-wide education, role-specific training for directors, starters and service teams, skill-share sessions, prompt and skill libraries, and training on hallucination reduction, source checking and responsible use. The champions became a network that drove adoption inside their own teams and surfaced the next opportunities.
More than 6,000 hours of employee time saved in the measured period, 98% staff adoption, and every single quarter beating its 500-hour efficiency target, with the savings accelerating as the program compounded.
Successful adoption does not come from giving employees a chatbot. It comes from redesigning real processes, building useful tools around them, training people to use them confidently, and measuring whether the work is actually improving.
The program treated AI implementation as an operational transformation rather than a software rollout. Every solution was connected to a real workflow, a measurable problem and an employee need, and every build was supported by training, documentation, champions and feedback. AI became part of how the organisation worked, not another tool people were expected to figure out alone.
This program was delivered in-house by Kieran Farrell, now Echelon One's AI Implementation & Automation Lead, and is published with approval. The firm's identity stays confidential by agreement. It is the playbook Echelon One clients get from day one.
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