AI platform for professional firms

One platform, configured to each firm

The ZCM platform is in development and is designed to bring AI into accounting, tax, and legal practice. It combines a versioned record of primary sources, configurable practice workflows, model orchestration, separate verification, and the governance controls a regulated firm needs. Each firm will use its configuration as a hosted service, and its data will remain its own.

The layers of the platform

Each layer depends on the one beneath it, and the foundation is a dated record of the law itself.

  1. DeliveryBrowser application, with a Microsoft Word add-in and an application programming interface on the roadmap
  2. GovernanceNamed accounts, role-based access, an audit log of every action, and retention rules by document type
  3. VerificationCitation checks, financial statement checks, figure tracing, consistency checks, and adversarial review
  4. Model orchestrationModel-agnostic routing under the firm's policy settings, with the producing model recorded on every output
  5. Practice workflowsMatter workflows, house style, precedents, and review gates configured to each firm
  6. KnowledgeLegislation, rulings, accounting standards, and guidance held by version, with effective dates and status

The knowledge layer is the foundation. A change in the law is loaded there once and flows through everything built on it.

Knowledge

Primary sources are ingested from official registers and broken into provision-level units with stable identifiers. Each compilation is retained as a version, which allows a provision to be read as it stood on a given date. Rulings and guidance carry their status, whether current, draft, withdrawn, or superseded.

Accounting standards are designed to be held in the same way, under licence from their publishers, by version and effective date. Financial statements can then be checked against the standards that applied to their reporting period.

Practice workflows

Matter workflows are designed to be configured within the hosted service to each firm's precedents and voice, with the intake, structure, and review gates each type of matter needs. Drafts therefore arrive in the firm's own form.

Model orchestration

The platform is model-agnostic. Each task is routed to a model the firm has approved, under policy settings the firm controls, and every output records the model that produced it. Models run in the firm's region where one is available, and a model hosted elsewhere is used only where the firm opts in.

Verification

Every legislative reference is extracted and checked for existence, currency, accuracy of quotation, and application, and every material figure is traced to the document it came from. Findings are reported proposition by proposition, with the evidence behind each one.

Financial statements are checked against the presentation and disclosure requirements of the applicable accounting standards, and their figures are traced to the trial balance, the ledgers, and other source records.

Adversarial review

Before a deliverable is relied on, a separate review pass reads it as an opposing adviser would. It tests authority, characterisation, quantification, internal consistency, and disclosure, and ranks each finding by severity.

Governance

Named accounts, role-based permissions, an audit log of every action, and retention rules by document type give a firm a record of how each output was produced and checked. That record supports the firm's obligations to its clients, to courts, and to regulators.

Delivery

The platform is designed to be delivered through a browser application. The roadmap includes a Microsoft Word add-in that sends a draft to the hosted service for checking, and an application programming interface for practice management and document systems.

Built once, used throughout

Identity, consent and delegation, professional profiles, engagement records, and the audit log are designed to sit in a shared core that everything built on the platform uses.

Anything new built on the platform is designed to start from the same shared foundations. A firm's controls are designed to apply in the same way wherever its people work on it.

The first capabilities designed for the platform are verification of tax advice and financial statements, and valuation and evidence for the 30 June 2027 capital gains reset in Australia.

Talk to us about what you need

We meet clients and business partners by video conference or in person in Hong Kong.

Contact us