Gilbert + Tobin didn’t chase AI hype. The Australian corporate law firm went methodical, rolling out ChatGPT Enterprise to operations teams first, then expanding across marketing, business development, recruitment, finance, and eventually parts of legal practice. The results are concrete: 87% of enabled users are active, more than double the adoption rate the firm typically sees for new tools. A recruitment research task that once took four hours now runs in 20 minutes. Conflict and KYC checks dropped from three to eight hours down to five minutes. Audit reports covering 300 entities no longer eat up a full day of manual work.
What stands out is how the firm framed adoption. CEO Sam Nickless didn’t send a memo from the corner office — he showed employees his own ChatGPT use and delivered a blunt message: “AI is not cheating.” The framing matters in a profession where trust and accountability are the product. Gilbert + Tobin treated the technology as another tool for applying judgment, not a replacement for it. The business transformation team skipped generic training and embedded directly into team meetings, demonstrating role-specific workflows for marketing, finance, recruitment, and other functions. Internal videos, showcases, and use-case stories kept momentum going as ChatGPT gained new capabilities.
The governance layer is equally deliberate. The firm handles confidential client data subject to varying requirements, so it established clear guidance on approved tasks, input restrictions, and output review protocols before scaling. Moving to an OpenAI environment with Australian data residency gave them the confidence to expand access without violating client expectations. Role-based access, contractual protections, and administrative controls were assessed upfront, not bolted on later.
The firm’s next move is Codex, OpenAI’s tool for chaining defined steps across larger workflows — shifting from AI that assists individuals to AI that completes sequences of work. That’s a meaningful threshold. Many organizations stall at individual productivity gains. Gilbert + Tobin is betting that workflow-level automation can compound those early wins without breaking the governance framework that made the rollout credible. Whether the 87% engagement holds as complexity increases is the honest question. The firm’s track record with tool adoption suggests it won’t take that for granted.
