The Challenge
A mid-sized CPA firm with dozens of mid-to-senior professionals faced mounting pressure from manual, repetitive workflows — internal reporting, policy drafting, stakeholder communications, and meeting documentation consuming significant staff hours weekly. Working 50–60 hour weeks, the team had no bandwidth to evaluate AI tools. Leadership sensed opportunity but lacked a structured, safe path to adoption given strict obligations around client data confidentiality and compliance.
What They Built
Anna Tiomina ran a 30-person AI awareness session, facilitated a corporate ChatGPT rollout with data guardrails, and deployed Custom GPTs for internal policy drafting and repetitive weekly performance reporting — each built in under one week.
Anna Tiomina began with a 30-person AI awareness session tailored specifically to the firm's operations, demonstrating real applications from her own fractional CFO practice rather than generic examples. The session surfaced both enthusiasm and the firm's primary constraint: compliance sensitivity around client data required a clear policy before any experimentation. The firm secured a corporate ChatGPT subscription, configured access controls with IT, and established a simple policy restricting sensitive client data during the experimentation phase. With guardrails in place, advanced users were given structured time to surface use cases. Anna applied a complexity-vs-impact matrix to evaluate candidates and prioritized two Custom GPT builds: one for drafting internal policies and one for generating the firm's repetitive weekly performance reports. Each was deployed in under one week. Thirty mid-to-senior professionals went from zero AI usage to active, structured experimentation within a single month. The firm's evaluation team formally declared the rollout a success, with ROI calculated against billable hours recovered.
AI Role
At least two production-ready Custom GPTs shipped — one for internal policies, one for weekly performance reporting — each built and iterated in less than one week.
Infrastructure
• ChatGPT (corporate subscription with enterprise access controls) • Custom GPTs (for policy drafting and weekly reporting) • Google Suite (existing workflow integration) • QuickBooks and SAP (referenced in firm operations)
Integration Points
• ChatGPT corporate subscription configured with IT access controls and data policy • Custom GPTs trained on firm-specific policy formats and report templates • Google Suite used for document handoff from GPT output to team workflows
Managing partners, COOs, or CFOs at professional services firms — CPA, legal, consulting — held back by client data compliance concerns who don't know where to start safely; operations leaders wanting a low-cost, low-risk AI pilot before committing to custom development.
