The customer
A mid-sized Indian CA firm — 12 partners, ~75 staff, ~400 active clients ranging from family-owned manufacturers to listed-co subsidiaries. The practice spans direct tax, indirect tax, statutory audit, and compliance advisory. Two offices, primary in Mumbai.
The problem
The firm's senior partners were spending 1.5–2 hours every working day answering compliance questions from articled assistants and juniors. "What's the TDS rate on a payment to a UK-resident for management fees under the new DTAA?" — that question, in some variant, came in eight times last quarter. From eight different juniors. To three different partners. None of whom had time to write it down.
Meanwhile, the juniors were Googling. Half the time they found a stale CTC article from 2019. The other half they found nothing and copy-pasted into ChatGPT, which confidently invented a "Section 195AA" that does not exist. The firm caught two near-misses in client filings during an internal review.
The solution
The firm onboarded onto the Growth tier with 5 seats — one per practice line (DT, IT, audit, compliance, transfer-pricing). Each seat is a shared WhatsApp number that juniors in that practice can message. Senior partners get the weekly digest.
The trace UI was a sleeper feature. The audit partner discovered that flagging "this answer is fine but I'd phrase it differently" let the firm steer the copilot toward house style — citation density on certain topics, formality of register on advisory replies. Over 6 weeks the answers started reading like a junior associate at the firm, not a generic AI.
The results
- • The DT seat handles ~150 questions / week; the audit seat ~60.
- • Senior partners now spend their reclaimed time on client work, not on FAQ duty.
- • The internal-audit review now spot-checks Sahayak traces alongside file working — same governance, less effort.
- • The "I don't know" route to a human is used 6–8% of the time — exactly the right escalation rate.
In their words
[Customer quote pending — managing partner, approved verbatim text once firm name is cleared.]
— Managing Partner, anonymised; attribution will be added when permission lands.
What we'd do differently
We underestimated how much the firm would care about house style. The trace-UI tagging feature was originally framed as "bad-answer flagging"; in practice it became "style-coaching" inside three weeks. The product now exposes a separate "house style notes" pane so the steering is explicit, not buried in flag-tags.