Meet Chad

Post 2 of 5 — How our team is learning to work differently

In the last post I told you that the work itself is changing — that AI is quietly redefining what an accountant actually does in 2026. This post is about what we did inside our firm to help our team handle that change.

And it starts with a custom GPT my team has nicknamed Chad.

Why Chad exists

When we started seriously deploying AI tools at the firm, I knew the hardest part was not going to be picking the software. It was going to be helping a team of experienced accountants — people who are excellent at what they do — let go of habits they had spent ten or fifteen or twenty years building.

Habits like opening Excel and and creating a pivotal table when the AI could have done that better (and faster). Habits like Googling a formula when a five-second conversation would have written and explained the formula and built the spreadsheet too (and then suggested further changes you may also be thinking about). Habits like staring at a blank page for an hour when an AI-assisted first draft would let you start the actual thinking sooner.

Breaking those habits takes practice, and practice requires a safe place. So we built one. Inside ChatGPT for Business, we created a custom GPT we call the AI Learning Lab. Somewhere along the way the team started calling him Chad. The name stuck.

What working with Chad actually looks like

Chad is not magic. He is, essentially, a structured space inside our enterprise ChatGPT account where the team can practice. Practice writing better prompts. Practice asking AI to draft a memo. Practice having it produce a first-pass analysis they can then improve. Practice asking it to flag where it is uncertain so they can pay closer attention to those parts.

The point of Chad is not that he produces work product that goes to you. He does not. The point of Chad is that the people on my team who do produce your work product spend time with him every week, getting fluent in a new way of working. By the time their fingers are on your file, the AI assistance is happening at a higher level of skill than it would otherwise.

I will be honest about something: this is slow. A change of this magnitude inside a team takes us about eight to twelve months to fully work through, because every person on a team comes along at their own pace. Some of my team adopted Chad enthusiastically in the first weeks. Others have taken longer to trust him. That is fine. It is the same way human change has always worked, and pretending otherwise would just produce a different kind of failure.

What this means for you

You should never see Chad. He is not a client-facing tool, and the work he helps with is internal. But you should feel his effects. You should feel him in the speed at which we get back to you on routine questions. You should feel them in the depth of analysis you get on your monthly package, because the senior on your file did not spend her morning formatting tables. You should feel them in the second-order observations we share — the “by the way, we noticed this trend across your last six months” comments — that come from a team with cognitive room to actually look.

We’re not totally there yet, but Chad is going to help us get there. You hired our firm to think on your behalf. You did not hire us to type. Chad does some of the typing now, so we can do more of the thinking — for you.

If you want to talk about what any of this means for your engagement with us, send us a note and we will set up a time.