Professional Services
AI Enablement & Training
Hearn Whitby Partners
A research copilot people
actually open every week.
Weekly active staff
12 weeks
71%
Was
0%
+71 pts
71%
Weekly active, 90 days
12 yrs
Archive indexed
8 wks
Kickoff to production
02 · The engagement
Published
01 · Challenge
What was actually broken
Not the symptom, the cause.
Hearn Whitby had already built a research copilot for its advisory associates, but adoption had stalled at under 20% three months after launch. Associates said they didn’t trust its answers and didn’t have time to learn a new tool on top of billable work.
02 · Approach
How we scoped it
And what we deliberately chose not to build first.
Rather than rebuild the copilot, we diagnosed the adoption gap: training had been a single all-hands demo, there was no governance playbook associates could point to when a partner asked “can we actually rely on this,” and nobody owned usage as a metric. We built role-based training instead of a generic session, a governance playbook partners signed off on, and an internal champions program with associates who were already using the tool well.
03 · Architecture
The system, in one diagram
What it connects to, what a person still reviews, where the guardrails sit.
Solution architecture
Enablement
12 years of work
Existing copilot
By practice group
Role-based tracks
1 per 20 staff
Champions program
Responsible-AI rules
Governance playbook
Pass · For practice leads
Weekly use dashboard
Else · Into the roadmap
Feedback loop
Weekly active use tracked per practice group · reviewed monthly
No new system architecture — this engagement focused on the adoption layer around an existing copilot: role-based training tracks, a responsible-AI governance playbook, a champions program, and a weekly-active-use dashboard visible to practice group leads.
04 · Result
What changed
Measured in production, not in the pilot.
Weekly active use rose from under 20% to 71% of client-facing staff within 90 days, driven less by the tool changing and more by associates having a clear answer to “when is this appropriate to rely on” and a peer they could ask.
Result at a glance
Client
Hearn Whitby Partners
Industry
Professional Services
Service
AI Enablement & Training
Time to production
12 weeks
Headline
71%
of client-facing staff using the copilot weekly within 90 days
03 · What changed
In the client’s own operating numbers
71%
of client-facing staff using the copilot weekly within 90 days
5.5 hrs
saved per associate per week
12 weeks
from kickoff to firmwide rollout
+71 pts
Weekly active staff
0%
→
71%
04 · In their words
Operators, not buyers
We thought we had an AI tool problem. We actually had an adoption problem. Northwind's governance playbook is what let our partners say yes to associates using it on client matters — that was the real unlock, not a new feature.
Marcus Feld, Managing Partner, Hearn Whitby Partners
Let’s find out
what it’s worth in production.
Have a workflow like this one? A 30-minute call is enough to tell whether it is ready to build.