Eight teams. One door.

Every Monday I used to open four systems and copy numbers into a fifth. Planning in one place, hours in another, purchase orders in the finance package, and the actual client conversation in email. None of them talk to each other, and all of them are staying — we are not replacing a working finance system because an AI cannot read it.

Now I ask the question the way I would ask a colleague. Which projects are over their budgeted hours, which purchase orders are still unmatched, who is over-booked next week. It reads all four, and I get one answer with the numbers traceable back to where they came from.

That is about six hours a week, and honestly the bigger thing is that I stopped dreading Mondays.

Our stack is what you would expect from a firm this old. A practice management system from 2009 that still does exactly what it should, a document archive nobody wants to touch, payroll, and two things that only have a database and a weekly CSV. Every vendor’s AI roadmap starts with “first, migrate”.

What I actually needed was a way to expose a narrow, read-only slice of those systems and be able to prove what the slice was. Not a chatbot per system. One place where I say: this role sees these fields on these clients, and that is the whole of it.

Six systems are behind it now, and there were no new logins for anyone. The connector for the 2009 one took an afternoon, which I did not believe until I watched it.

My problem was never whether AI is useful. It was that I could not answer the only question that matters in my job: what did it see, on whose behalf, and where did that go. “We have a policy” is not an answer. Neither is a vendor promising they do not train on our data.

Every call through the gate is a row: who asked, which system, which fields came back, what was masked, when. It is append-only, so it is evidence rather than a report someone assembled afterwards. Our DPIA took two weeks instead of the quarter I had budgeted, because most of it was screenshots of things that already existed.

Processing stays in the EU and I can point at the sub-processor list. That sentence used to take me a month of emails.

Everyone else in the business got their assistant months before I let it near mine. Salary, sick leave, performance notes — if that leaks, it is not an incident report, it is people’s lives. The default answer in HR is therefore no, and it is a defensible answer.

What changed my mind was masking at the field level rather than the record level. A manager’s assistant can see who reports to whom, contract end dates and remaining leave. It cannot see salary or absence reason, because those fields never leave the system for that role — not redacted afterwards, never sent.

The unexpected win was leavers. Revoking someone used to be a checklist across six systems and I never fully trusted it. Now it is one switch, and the log shows me it took effect.

Sixty spreadsheets a month left this building, and every one of them was a reasonable request. A rep wants to know which of their accounts shipped less this quarter than last. The answer lives half in the CRM and half in the transport system, so somebody exports both and mails them around. Those files then live in inboxes forever.

Now the rep asks it directly and the gate scopes the answer to their own accounts, because that is what their role allows. No export, no file, no copy of our customer list sitting in a personal Drive two jobs later.

We went from about sixty exports a month to none, and the answers arrive in seconds instead of the next morning.

We are small enough that two clients in the same category is normal and awkward. The NDAs have always said the work is walled off. Until this year that wall was a promise about how careful people are, which is a fine thing to say in a pitch and a terrible thing to rely on.

The scopes are per client now. If you are not on the account, your assistant cannot reach that account’s files, briefs or messages — not “should not”. Twice this year a prospect’s procurement team asked how we separate competing accounts, and I sent one page instead of drafting a careful paragraph.

It has won us work. That is not what I expected from a piece of access plumbing.

We are engineers, so of course the first plan was to build it. Then you write the estimate honestly and it is not the model work at all — it is per-user authorisation, an audit trail somebody will eventually subpoena, rate limits, secret storage, and a way to revoke one person at four in the morning. That is a quarter of work before the feature exists.

So we used the gate as the substrate and wrote only the part that is ours. Our own product’s data goes through the same connectors as the CRM and the support tool, under the same roles, into the same log.

First release was fourteen days in, with no bespoke auth code in our repository. The security review was the shortest I have sat through.