On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT. If you're a managing partner, office manager, or operations director at a professional services firm, you should care about this.

Not because ChatGPT itself will revolutionize your firm — it won't, at least not overnight. And not because I'm riding the hype cycle. But because ChatGPT is the first time a general-purpose AI tool has been both capable enough to solve real problems and simple enough that your team can actually use it today without special training.

I've spent the last week testing it in the context of professional services work. Email drafting, research summaries, FAQ responses, meeting notes, template generation. Here's what I'm seeing: this tool is pointing at something real.

What ChatGPT Actually Is

ChatGPT is a large language model built by OpenAI using something called GPT-3.5. In plain English: it's a system trained on vast amounts of text that can generate surprisingly coherent responses to questions and requests in natural language.

You don't need to understand how it works. You just need to know this: it's conversational, it's fast, and it's free to use (for now). You write a prompt, it generates text. You can iterate. You can ask follow-up questions. It feels less like software and more like talking to someone who's read everything but remembers it differently than you do.

Why This Matters for Your Team

Professional services is built on knowledge work. Your people spend their days writing emails, summarizing documents, drafting initial analyses, preparing meeting notes, and filling templates. These tasks are often the most repetitive and least interesting parts of their day.

ChatGPT can do a lot of this work faster than a person. More importantly, it can do it well enough that a person can edit it in half the time it took to draft from scratch.

For a mid-sized professional services firm, that means something concrete: if five people on your team spend three hours a week on email drafting and meeting summaries, and AI gets them to one hour, you've just created the equivalent of one full-time person's worth of billable hours per week.

The Reality Check

Here's what ChatGPT cannot do: it cannot replace your expertise. It cannot make strategic judgments that matter. It won't analyze a contract and tell you whether to sign. It won't diagnose a client's problem by reading one email. It hallucinates facts when it doesn't know the answer, which means you must verify everything.

If you hand it confidential client information, you're sending it to OpenAI's servers. If you're in healthcare, finance, or law, that's probably not acceptable without explicit client consent and a legal review.

And like all language models, it's not getting smarter from your corrections. It won't learn your firm's style or your client's preferences. It starts from scratch every conversation.

These are real constraints. But they're not blockers for the work that actually matters.

What You Should Do Right Now

Stop waiting for a consultant to tell you how to use AI. Go to chat.openai.com, create an account, and spend 30 minutes testing it on real work from your firm.

Try drafting an email to a prospective client. Try summarizing a recent project retrospective. Try taking meeting notes. See what it gets right and what it misses. Your instinct about whether this is useful for your team is probably accurate.

If your legal, compliance, or finance team has concerns about data security or regulatory fit, that's legitimate. Have that conversation now with your leadership, not six months from now when the whole team is using it outside your control.

Most importantly, don't pretend this is hype that will go away. The adoption curve on ChatGPT has been unprecedented — faster than social media, faster than smartphones. Millions of people in your sector are already using it. The question isn't whether your team will encounter it. The question is whether they'll do so guided by your firm's values or on their own terms.

What Comes Next

I don't know if ChatGPT will become your firm's standard tool. I don't know if OpenAI's model will be the one you end up using. But I do know this: the era of general-purpose AI being available to knowledge workers has started. It's not coming. It's here.

In my next post, I'll walk through what ChatGPT can and can't actually do for your firm, based on two weeks of real testing. I'll show you some early patterns in where it works and where it falls short.

For now, the most important step is the simplest one: try it yourself.