Briefings on how AI changes firms that sell expertise: accountants, law firms, consultants and advisers, and what their work and fees become.
The future of professional services, and of consulting in particular, is being shaped by three shifts happening at once: AI is taking over a large share of the tasks professionals used to bill for, the business model built on selling those tasks by the hour is being repriced, and the firms themselves are having to…
Knowledge work is work whose output is information and judgment rather than physical goods: advising, analysing, writing, designing, planning and deciding. Peter Drucker gave it the name in 1959, and for most of the time since, the scarce thing in it was knowing: having the information, the expertise and the time to turn one into…
The jobs AI will replace are, for now, mostly not whole jobs but tasks inside them: drafting, summarising, first-pass research, routine design, data entry, scheduling and the clerical work that surrounds professional services. Whole occupations disappear only where those tasks were most of the job. Everywhere else the job changes shape, and the people who…
Will AI replace consultants? Not as a profession, but it is already replacing a large part of what junior consultants used to do, and it is changing who gets hired at the start of a consulting career. The consultant who survives is the one whose value was never in producing the analysis, but in knowing…
The future of consulting and agencies is being decided by one question: what are clients still willing to pay for once AI can produce the thing that used to fill the invoice? Consulting firms have always sold analysis, and agencies have always sold production. AI now does a large share of both, quickly and cheaply,…
Professional services automation, usually shortened to PSA, is the software that runs the operating side of a firm that sells expertise by the project or the hour: winning work into a plan, staffing it, capturing time, tracking delivery against budget, billing, and forecasting revenue and capacity. It joins the parts of a firm that usually…
AI for law firms means using AI in legal practice: researching the law, reviewing and drafting documents, summarising files and correspondence, managing intake and running the business of the firm. The useful question is not whether it helps, since it plainly does, but where it is safe to use. Legal work has an unusual combination…
AI for accountants means using AI across the work of an accounting or tax practice: preparing and reviewing the books, researching and drafting tax positions, testing and documenting audit work, producing the analysis behind advisory conversations, and running the firm itself. It is a guide for the practitioner, the person whose name goes on the…
AI for professional services is the use of AI inside firms that sell expertise: law, accounting and tax, audit, consulting, advisory and similar practices, where the product is judgment delivered under professional obligations. The tools are the same ones every company can buy. What differs is what a mistake costs, who answers for it, and…
Choosing an AI consulting firm in 2026 is harder than choosing almost any other kind of professional partner, because the market is young, crowded, and inconsistent. Thousands of firms now advertise AI transformation expertise, and a large share of them pivoted into it recently, from general IT, ERP implementation, or process consulting, as late as…