Which-AI Recommendation · Sample
For the work your team flagged — document drafting, meeting notes and a paraplanning workflow that eats hours — the right starting combination is Microsoft 365 Copilot plus Power Automate, inside the Microsoft 365 tenant you already run. Consumer ChatGPT should come out of client-facing work, not because the tool is bad, but because a licensed advice firm can't defend where that client data goes. The single most important next action is a written acceptable-use policy before ASIC's Report 798 expectations and your PI renewal make the current arrangement expensive to explain.
Meridian Advisory is a Melbourne-based financial planning and operations practice of roughly 38 staff, operating under its own AFSL and serving around 900 client households.[1] Your website and job listings point to a Microsoft 365 environment with Xplan as the advice platform, and a recent adviser job ad lists "confidence with AI drafting tools" as desirable, which usually means the tools arrived before the policy did.[1] Your quiz answers confirm it: you want AI to help with drafting documents and proposals, meeting notes and admin, and automating repetitive workflows; staff already use ChatGPT weekly in client-facing work; and nobody currently owns AI oversight. You selected "Accounting or financial advice", and your public profile matches — we've mapped your obligations to ASIC and the Corporations Act accordingly.
Vendor-neutral means exactly that: we earn nothing from any of these picks, and every recommendation below is justified by the tasks you flagged, not by preference.
Microsoft 365 Copilot For drafting, meeting notes & admin · start here
You already run Microsoft 365, so Copilot is the lowest-friction move for the drafting and admin work you flagged: file notes from Teams meetings, first-draft client emails in Outlook, document summaries in Word. Client data stays inside your existing tenant and its controls, which matters enormously for a licensed firm. License a pilot group of heavy drafters first, not the whole firm.
Power Automate For the paraplanning workflow
Your statement-of-advice preparation is high-volume, template-driven and review-gated — the profile of a workflow that pays back through automation rather than a chat assistant. It's already included in most M365 licensing you hold, so the cost is design effort, not new subscriptions. Industry pattern: firms your size reclaim 8 to 15 hours per adviser per month on drafting workflows alone.
Anthropic Claude Worth evaluating · long-document work
For heavy document analysis — comparing policy documents, reviewing long client files — Claude's drafting quality and enterprise data controls (no training on your data on commercial plans) make it the strongest complement to Copilot. Evaluate it against your real documents in a governed trial rather than buying firm-wide on day one.
What to skip, for now And why
Consumer ChatGPT in client-facing work — the free and Plus tiers can't give you the data-handling assurances your AFSL obligations assume; if the team values it, the Business tier with training disabled is the governed path. Google Gemini — capable, but you have no Google Workspace footprint, so it would add a second ecosystem to govern for no task you've flagged. Buying everything at once — two tools rolled out well beats five rolled out loosely.
Three scores from your quiz answers — read them as the guardrails to put around the rollout above, not as a verdict on the business.
Governance 34 / 100
AI is in your advice workflows but nothing is written down: no acceptable-use policy, no register of tools, no named owner. This is the guardrail to fix before the Copilot pilot, because ASIC Report 798 makes clear that licensees remain responsible for AI-assisted advice, and reviews found governance arrangements lagging adoption in over half the licensees studied.[2]
Build 58 / 100
Strong foundations: a modern Microsoft 365 tenant, cloud-hosted advice platform, and a team already comfortable with AI tools. The gap between what your team does ad hoc and what a governed rollout could do reliably is small — which is exactly why the shortlist above starts inside your tenant.
Operations 47 / 100
You have IT support but no monitoring of AI use, no audit trail of what client data enters which tools, and no review cadence. Operations is what keeps the shortlist safe next quarter, not just today.
We checked the public anti-spoofing records on meridianadvisory.com.au, the same records an attacker checks before impersonating you. SPF and DKIM are present and healthy. DMARC is published but set to p=none, which means you're observing spoofing attempts but not blocking them. For a firm that emails advice documents and invoice details to 900 households, that's the gap a business-email-compromise crew looks for. The fix is a staged move to p=quarantine then p=reject — it's quick, and any competent IT provider can do it.
Jot down the one or two problems that cost your team the most time or sleep — for Meridian, that's probably the paraplanning bottleneck and the ungoverned ChatGPT use — and book a 15-minute chat to talk through how you'd solve them. No pitch, no obligation; a senior engineer on the call. If your reading of this report is that you're in decent shape, "no action needed for now" is a perfectly good outcome too.
Seven questions, then our AI researches your business and an Evisent engineer reviews every word before it's sent. One report email, then nothing unless you ask.
Find which AI is right for you → See where Meridian ended up →