Accountancy and legal firms are excited about AI. Sometimes, it’s not front of mind to consider whether this content is fit to be surfaced by it.
AI tools are improving at a fast pace, with new developments and emerging technologies almost weekly. But AI is only ever as good as the data it can reach. Point it at a messy, overshared, out-of-date document estate and it will surface that mess faster and more confidently than any person could.
That’s why we think rushing AI can border on dangerous for firms. The information architecture underneath it (classification, metadata, permissions and retention) has to come before AI adoption, not alongside it. In other words: get your house in order first.
What will AI find when you switch it on?
When a firm tells us they want AI, that’s the first question we ask back. Most clients come ready to talk about Copilot licences and use cases. We start with their documents: where they live, who can see them and whether anyone would stand behind them today.
The most common answer from a first audit is chaos, above all permissions chaos. Over the years, content has spread across a legacy DMS, network drives and personal folders. Much of it was never properly secured. It felt secure because it was so hard to find.
We call that pseudo-security. It works right up until something makes finding things easy – which is exactly what AI does.
Copilot pulls together everything you have access to, in seconds. If those permissions are wrong, it surfaces the wrong things: partner remuneration, HR files, another client’s records. This is often the moment a firm discovers it has had a data exposure problem all along. AI shines that light that exposes it.
AI exposes data that’s confidently out of date
The second risk is quieter. Tax law changes. Templates get superseded. But the old versions rarely leave the building, and AI can’t tell the current version from the 2014 one. It will surface ten-year-old tax guidance with full confidence.
Our recommendation is to treat content by temperature:
- Hot: current, live work. This is what AI should work against.
- Cool: recent but inactive. Kept and accessible, but out of AI’s day-to-day reach.
- Cold: historic records kept for compliance, not for daily use.
- Archive: content past its retention period, archived or disposed of under a clear policy.
Point AI at hot, current data and it becomes far more useful, and far less risky.
What the research says
A 2025 field study by researchers at Stanford and MIT Sloan tracked 79 small and midsize accounting firms and surveyed 277 accountants. Those using AI shifted around 8.5% of their time from data entry to higher-value work, produced ledgers with 12% more detail and closed the monthly books 7.5 days faster.
But 62% worried about errors in AI-generated reporting. And when AI suggested an unusual category for an uncertain transaction, accountants tended to follow it anyway. AI amplifies what’s already there. Good data gets better. Bad data gets trusted.
“Which AI tool will win?”
Nobody knows. The market is changing week by week, with Copilot, Claude and emerging tools such as Jev all moving fast. In a transitional period like this, the smartest move is to build a foundation that any of them can sit on.
That’s why we believe “we’re all in on Microsoft” is a really safe position right now. No firm will regret having its data well structured, classified and secured in Microsoft 365. Whatever tool wins, a clean 365 estate only helps.
Where Forge fits
Forge helps accountancy and legal firms put control and governance around their data before AI goes anywhere near it. We replace legacy DMS, move content into Microsoft 365 and put the right classification, permissions and retention in place, so your AI works against current, trusted content.
If you fix one thing this year
Fix retention. It’s the thing firms think about least. Most have never decided what should be live, what should be stored and what should be archived, so everything stays in play forever. Get that right and your AI gets more useful while your risk shrinks.
AI is coming to every firm. The ones who get the most from it will be the ones who got their house in order first.
Want to know what AI would find in your firm? Get a demo and we’ll show you.
