About Saffery
Saffery is a longstanding UK tax & accountancy firm with a 160-year history providing private client and corporate tax advice. Saffery also handles complex cross-border matters where speed, accuracy and confidence are critical.
When generative AI tools began to reshape professional services, Saffery saw both opportunity and risk. The firm wanted to give its teams the benefits of AI efficiency while maintaining its long-standing commitment to quality and compliance.
Challenge: Balancing Innovation and Reliability
With AI adoption accelerating across the profession, Saffery faced a familiar challenge: how to integrate new technology without compromising data security or professional standards.
As Robert Langston, the partner leading the firm's AI initiatives in tax, explains:
“We'd already explored public tools like ChatGPT, but we knew their limitations around reliability, and lack of authoritative sources. Tolley+ AI was the only tool that offered all the benefits of AI with the assurance of Tolley's trusted content.”
The firm's policy on generative AI evolved quickly. While its early approach was cautious, Saffery's tax team led efforts to create a framework that enabled the safe use of Tolley+ AI, Copilot, and Gemini under strict governance.
Solution: Tolley+ AI, Trusted Intelligence for Tax
After piloting Tolley+ AI, Saffery's team found that the platform not only met but exceeded expectations.
Built on Tolley's exclusive guidance, case law and HMRC materials, Tolley+ AI provided fast, citation-backed answers to everyday tax questions, with the reliability of the UK's most authoritative content base.
“It's very quickly become a core part of how we use Tolley,” says Langston. “Even when I could find an answer myself, Tolley+ AI gets there ten times faster and often surfaces points I hadn't considered.”
Key features now used daily include:
- Conversational AI Search: enabling tax professionals to ask complex questions naturally.
- Document Summarisation and Upload: allowing secure analysis of client contracts, particularly valuable for VAT teams.
- AI Drafting Tools: helping generate email and report paragraphs with consistent tone and structure.
“The document analysis feature is a huge time-saver for our VAT specialists,” Langston notes. “It lets them ask detailed tax questions about client contracts without breaching confidentiality.”
Results: More Time for Higher-Value Work
Early feedback from pilots showed clear efficiency gains. Most users expected Tolley+ AI to save them hours per month.
Langston adds:
“We're now putting metrics in place to estimate the time savings. But even without the data, the impact is obvious. People forget how long it used to take. Tasks that took hours now take ten minutes.”
The time saved has been reinvested into client engagement and deeper advisory thinking:
“It means our people can spend more time understanding the client's situation rather than just producing documents. Clients get better conversations and more tailored advice.”
Beyond productivity, Tolley+ AI is influencing team development. Junior advisers use it to prepare more informed questions and first drafts, while senior staff focus on strategic review. The result is a more confident, scalable team.
Outlook: Building the Future of AI-Enabled Tax Advice
Saffery plans to continue expanding the use of Tolley+ AI across its tax practice, embedding it as part of a wider Tolley+ ecosystem that includes Tolley+ Guidance and Tolley+ Research.
Langston concludes:
“I'd definitely recommend Tolley+ AI to other firms,” says Langston. “It's helping our people do their best work. Spending less time searching and more time thinking about what really matters for clients.”
As the profession evolves, Saffery's experience shows how combining trusted tax expertise with intelligent technology allows firms to innovate responsibly. Delivering faster answers, greater confidence, and stronger client relationships.
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