AI Insights & Opportunities for Professional Services 2025
Introduction
Artificial Intelligence is no longer a future trend - it’s the centrepiece of workplace innovation in 2025. As GenAI (generative AI) tools become more powerful and accessible, professional services firms are rapidly evolving their workflows to create new value for both clients and internal teams. According to a June 2025 report from the Thomson Reuters Institute, professionals across legal, tax, accounting, and compliance sectors are not just experimenting - they’re embedding AI into the heart of their operations to drive efficiency, creativity, and competitiveness.
In this article, we’ll explore some of the most significant new ways knowledge workers are using AI, backed by current research and practical examples from this Reuters Report.
A Clear Shift: From “Why AI?” to “How Do We Get The Most From AI?”
The big shift in 2025 is unmistakable. The debate is no longer about whether AI is relevant, but about how organisations can strategically deploy AI to get real results. According to the 2025 Generative AI in Professional Services report, 41% of professionals now use public GenAI tools (think ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot), and 17% have adopted industry-specific AI solutions. Organisational adoption has doubled in the last year - signalling that GenAI is now essential, not optional.
What’s new in AI? Maximise Internal Knowledge with AI-Powered Search & Summarisation
One of the most exciting, business-changing uses of AI highlighted in the report is the rise of AI-powered internal knowledge management. Professional services firms have mountains of internal documents, emails, precedents, training materials, and research - but up until now, searching across this “institutional memory” has been slow, manual, and error-prone.
Enter GenAI: Firms are now deploying secure, private versions of large language models (LLMs) to enable instant searching, summarisation, and synthesis of their entire body of internal knowledge. Here’s how it works and the value delivered:
- Instant answers from internal data: Instead of emailing or messaging colleagues or scouring SharePoint, finance, legal, or consulting staff can ask an AI assistant a specific question (“What were the key findings of our 2024 energy sector report for XY client?”) and get a concise answer, with document references, in seconds.
- Contextual document generation: Need a client update, risk memo, or draft contract? AI can draft it based on the firm’s prior work, current templates, and best practices, pulling from thousands of previous documents.
- Better onboarding and training: New staff can ramp up exponentially faster by interacting with AI-powered internal know-how rather than working through static, outdated manuals.
- Secure, permission-aware: Critical for professional services, these tools respect privacy and information barriers, surfacing only what the user is allowed to see.
ROI and Competitive Advantage
One-third of organisations surveyed have implemented GenAI training specifically for these new workflows, giving them a measurable edge over competitors. Moreover, 95% of professionals believe GenAI will be central to their workflows within five years - a mandate for every firm to build internal GenAI capabilities now.
Practical Example: Making Every Consultant or Accountant a “Super User”
Imagine a tax advisor preparing for a client call. Instead of sifting through dozens of spreadsheets, emails, and reports from previous years, she types her query into her firm’s secure AI assistant:
“Summarise our last three years of advice to Client X on cross-border GST treatment. Highlight risks we flagged last June, and find any regulatory updates since.”
Within moments, the AI provides a neat, bullet-pointed response, cites the relevant documents, and offers links for further reading or downloading the originals.
This saves hours of manual work, reduces oversight risk, and gives the firm a reputation for rapid, accurate, and insightful advice.
Barriers & How to Overcome Them
There’s still work to do. Many firms, according to the report, have not yet measured the ROI of GenAI in these use cases, and only a minority are actively training staff at scale. But those who do invest - by aligning AI goals with business objectives and setting up secure, permission-aware AI systems - are years ahead in terms of efficiency and client impact.
Action Points for 2025
- Start with your “institutional memory”: Identify the document and data repositories that are critical to client service or internal efficiency.
- Invest in AI training: Upskill your team, not just on prompt-writing, but on critical thinking and interpreting AI outputs.
- Set up governance: Ensure you have rules and guardrails to keep client and confidential information secure.
- Track ROI: Establish benchmarks so you can demonstrate concrete time savings, error reduction, or increased win rates.
Conclusion
The next big leap for professional services firms isn’t AI replacing jobs, but AI removing the drudgery, unlocking institutional knowledge, and letting your experts focus on what they do best - being creative, using human judgment, and relationship-building.
If your firm isn’t using AI-powered knowledge management yet, now is the time to move on it. Contact us to learn how our team @ AI Dojo will get your business going with AI, and train your employees to ensure you can capitalise on new opportunities from the get-go!
Reference:
“Using AI in Professional Services: 2025 and Beyond”, Thomson Reuters Institute, 6 June 2025, Read the summary and download report here.
