GenAI has made a major impact on the professional services market over the past two years, but many of its more systematic changes may just be beginning
AIGenerative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is more than just a buzzword in today’s corporate lexicon. Its introduction has fundamentally shifted business finances, long-term strategy and investment planning, and talent development in a way that may have seemed impossible just three years ago.
The professional services world is far from immune from these changes. In fact, given the conversational nature of GenAI technology, professionals in the legal, tax & accounting, risk & compliance, and government fields may be those whose daily lives will be most changed by GenAI’s introduction.
Still, even with its rapid adoption, the full impact of GenAI on professional services has not been felt — yet. Here’s how GenAI may change the way you work in 2025.
1. Movement from individual users to enterprise-wide adoption
Clearly, 2024 was the year that GenAI truly begun to be used by professional services workers in large numbers. For many, however, that usage was still on an individual level rather than done through wide scale rollouts within their organizations. For instance, 26% of respondents called themselves active users of publicly available GenAI tools such as ChatGPT, but only 12% said their organizations had integrated GenAI into the organization’s workflow at any sort of scale, according to the Generative AI in Professional Services Report, conducted by the Thomson Reuters Institute (TRI) in early-2024.
Today, organization-wide rollouts are beginning to become more commonplace, especially as business-oriented GenAI tools such as Microsoft Copilot begin to see more adoption. At the corporate level, 79% of respondents to a CNBC survey in October 2024, said that their companies were using Copilot, and half of respondents said their companies had deployed the technology to all users.
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Of course, some professional services sectors — such as law firms and tax & accounting firms — tend to be behind the pace of technology adoption seen in the wider corporate world. Even so, there are signs that enterprise-wide adoption of tools such as Copilot are rapidly increasing. For example, 43% of all corporate tax department respondents reported using GenAI, and business-oriented GenAI ranked as their most-used technology, favored even over publicly available tools such as ChatGPT and proprietary tax-specific tools, according to a forthcoming TRI survey.
2. More integrated training beyond just tools
At this point in 2024, only 19% of respondents to the Generative AI in Professional Services report had any sort of education or training around GenAI being provided by their own organizations. Naturally, over the past 12 months, many organizations have begun to roll-out those training programs in earnest.
At the same time, however, consternation remains around how GenAI training should be conducted. When asked in Thomson Reuters’ Future of Professionals Report which potential negative consequences of AI worried most respondents, the number one fear cited for one-third of respondents was over-reliance on technology at the expense of professional skill development.
To combat this sort of over-reliance, professional services organizations are beginning to focus not just on training GenAI software itself, but also on how GenAI can be integrated into professional training programs at large. In fact, when senior-level respondents were asked in the survey what skills would be more in demand as a result of GenAI, the top answers were a host of soft skills: enthusiasm for new technology, adaptability to change, efficiency, and creativity.
With many organizations still building out what regular AI training should look like, expect those soft skills to take more of a prominent role than were present in initial GenAI training programs.
3. Tech’s adjustment in job roles makes an impact
Upon the initial introduction of GenAI, a number of professionals worried about their own job prospects. Those initial fears were not helped by figures such as what came out of Goldman Sachs, which estimated in April 2023 that 44% of all legal industry tasks could be automated by GenAI. (Goldman Sachs has since walked back some of those numbers after learning more about GenAI’s applications in professional work.)
In the time since, a common refrain has been less about whether GenAI will cost jobs, and more about the needed shift in what skills will be required and what new roles professional services organizations will be looking to fill. As we enter 2025, this shift has already begun to occur in earnest.
As noted in the just-published 2025 Report on the State of the US Legal Market, the composition of law firms is evolving, with a shift towards more experienced lateral hires, growth in two-tier partnership structures, and a reduction in junior associate hiring compared with previous years. For Midsize and larger law firms, just 40.2% of attorneys are associates; in 2009, that figure was 44.5%.
GenAI is poised to subsume a lot of the repeatable tasks currently delegated to law firm associates, which could force many law firms into a decision: Teach associates new skills that are more related to case strategy or have fewer associates. If early observations are any indication, the answer is likely a bit of both.
Notably, this trend isn’t limited to legal. The tax & accounting field also is poised to see the roles of its professionals change. In that forthcoming corporate tax technology survey, for example, 55% of respondents said they anticipate changing job roles as a result of technology within next 3 to 5 years, up from 41% who said that just last year.
4. Government and courts begin to use GenAI
One notable finding from the Generative AI Report in early 2024 was not whether courts and government agencies were using GenAI or not, but rather how many courts and government agencies either weren’t using or didn’t know about generative AI.
At the time, 60% of respondents in both categories said their organizations had no plans around GenAI. More than half were unsure whether they would ever use publicly available tools such as ChatGPT, let alone tools for more specific use cases. And only 14% of government agency respondents and 9% of court respondents said their organizations had any sort of policy governing the use of GenAI.
As a result, 2024 became a time for education and training for government and court personnel around proper GenAI use. And while these professionals tend to take a more cautious approach towards GenAI use, its use was not banned, according to the Future of Professionals Report. For instance, 30% of government respondents said their organization’s overall appetite for GenAI likely would hinder potential adoption; yet a greater portion (43%) said their organization’s desire for GenAI eventually would drive greater adoption.
We expect to see this adoption among courts and government agencies begin to occur to a greater extent in 2025, possibly driven by a need to do more with less, given potential government cutbacks by the Trump administration. Still, this growth could mirror the 2024 growth in legal, tax & accounting, and other professional services.
In addition, both courts and government agencies have cited talent recruitment as a top priority, according to Future of Professionals data, and GenAI could be seen as a way to help solve those capacity problems.
Conclusion
It’s worthwhile to remember that GenAI is still just a bit over two years old, and on the timeline of typical business technology adoption, its growth and impact have far outpaced any technology in recent memory. And there is no reason to believe the pace of change is slowing any time soon.
So, while it may seem like GenAI had an outsized influence on the conversation within many professional services industries, its influence will soon become undeniable — and many of those changes will begin in earnest over the next 12 months.
