Tax specialists typically put in long hours to meet client deadlines. After the COVID-19 pandemic, audit, accounting and consulting firm Grant Thornton Australia noticed its people were especially tired and introduced a “nine-day fortnight,” essentially giving employees a day back every two weeks to rest and recharge.
Sandie Boswell, chief managing partner for tax at Grant Thornton Australia based in Sydney, is a big advocate and takes an afternoon each week to refresh.
“It’s great for giving me some time back. I use it to do the grocery shopping, see my mum or pick my daughter up from school. I also go to the gym,” said Boswell. “Each week I know that I have some recharge time where I can refresh and I really look forward to it.”
The trouble was, not everyone on her team of 200 was claiming the extra time. So Boswell turned to Copilot in Microsoft Excel to analyze employee schedules. She looked at which areas of business and which grade they were in, then enlisted their managers to help their teams unlock the extra time.
Boswell also noticed something else. Employees who were using Microsoft 365 Copilot were also more likely to take the extra time off. The AI assistant has been rolled out to 500 people across Grant Thornton Australia and with 99 percent adoption, this is set to expand.
“It’s a virtuous cycle: more people are accessing their time off because Copilot helps them get their work done faster,” Boswell said. She saves two to three hours a week by using Copilot.
In Boswell’s tax team, 200 employees now use Copilot more than 8,000 times a month collectively for everything from drafting presentations to researching tax issues.
Boswell herself uses Copilot every day. On a recent day, she used it to check on a deadline for a piece of tax legislation. In the past, she would have logged on to a specialized online subscription for legal resources and used a search word, then hunted through search results for the answer. Using Copilot, she got her answer and verified it with the source in three minutes.
She’s honing her prompts. “The more detail I give of the scenario I want it to help me with, the better the result,” she said.
When using Copilot to draft presentations, for example, she specifies not just the topic but also who the audience is and the number of points she wants to drive home. In the past, Boswell said, she literally started with a blank piece of paper and a pen to map out her talk.
Recently, Boswell used Copilot to look up fellow attendees at an event. She put in each name and wrote a prompt asking about work and interests. She discovered that one person was in a choir, another was a member of a golf club — fodder for a conversation starter.
“It’s a connector,” she said.
Top image: Sandie Boswell, chief managing partner for tax, Grant Thornton, Australia. Photo: Grant Thornton. Image background generated with Microsoft Copilot.