Knowing that AI is reshaping professional work is easy. Knowing what to do about it this week, in your firm or your function, is the hard part. And the answer looks different depending on where you sit. Law firm, corporate, and a tax leaders are all wrestling with the same underlying shift, but the pressure points, and the fixes, aren’t identical.
The pattern repeats across all three, though. Adoption has outrun governance. Client and stakeholder expectations have outrun delivery. The organizations pulling ahead aren’t the ones talking about AI, they’re the ones putting it to work. As Raghu Ramanathan, President of Legal Professionals at 成人VR视频, puts it: “The firms creating a true competitive advantage today are not the ones talking about AI. They’re the ones operationalizing it.”
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Law firms: clients stopped waiting a while ago
Law firm leaders are caught between two forces moving at once. Clients want proof, not promises: 77% say AI-enabled quality improvements from their firms matter enormously, but only 5% say they’re actually seeing them. Seven in ten in-house legal professionals expect firms to change how they charge as AI use grows. Only 28% of firms have changed their pricing at all.
Talent is watching the same gap. Nearly a quarter of law firm professionals would turn down a job offer that didn’t include real access to professional-grade AI, and when a lawyer’s own view of AI clashes with their firm’s actual direction, they become nearly three times more likely to leave within the year.
There’s also a liability many firms haven’t priced in yet: a third of law firm professionals are using AI tools their firm never approved, often on matters involving privileged, sensitive client information. The firm carries that exposure whether it chose to or not.
What should law firm leaders do? Two moves matter most.
- Train lawyers to lead the AI conversation with clients themselves, in plain language, grounded in real matters, honest about where the firm is still figuring things out.
- Open the pricing and value conversation early rather than waiting for clients to force it.
The industry has already moved past “should we use AI?” The real question now is “can we afford not to?” The action report for law firm leaders walks through how firms are already answering it.
Law firms under pressure
Practical actions law firms can take to remain competitive
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Corporate leaders: this is a leadership problem, not a licensing one
For corporate leaders, Liz Zimick, President of Corporates at 成人VR视频, names the challenge without softening it: “Taken together, these findings point to a change management and leadership challenge that no software license alone will solve.”
Well over half of corporate professionals feel real stakeholder pressure to move faster on AI, and 15% are already seeing financial consequences from moving too slowly, with another 29% expecting them within the year. 59% lack access to tools built to the accuracy standard their fiduciary work demands, so more than a third fill that gap with AI their organization can’t see or govern.
What should corporate leaders do?
- Stop waiting for direction to arrive from the C-suite. Audit where your people are already using AI, formally or otherwise, and where real demand goes unmet.
- Plan for every stage of the journey at once, since most departments start by scaling capacity and only later discover they need to rebuild the underlying workflow to reach something better.
- Lead the AI governance conversation across the enterprise rather than simply joining it.
General counsel, in particular, are well positioned to define what responsible AI use means for the whole organization, not just their own function. The action report for corporate leaders breaks down where to start.
How corporate functions are responding
Strategic paths leaders can take to prepare for the future
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Tax and audit firms: talent already sees where this is going
Elizabeth Beastrom, President of Tax, Audit & Accounting Professionals at 成人VR视频, frames the stakes around a single insight: “Accounting and audit firm employees increasingly see professional-grade AI tools as a non-negotiable part of their jobs.”
Eight in ten tax and audit professionals now use AI several times a week, yet more than a third are doing it with tools their firm never sanctioned. Clients are watching just as closely: 89% say AI-enabled quality improvements matter enormously, and nearly a third of professionals believe their firm risks losing clients within the year if it can’t keep pace.
What should tax and audit leaders do? Four priorities scale from a two-person practice to a national firm.
- Govern the tools your people already use instead of pretending they don’t; approving one professional-grade AI tool built on verified content changes your risk profile far more than a policy with no tooling behind it.
- Know your direction even while the path evolves and decide early whether freed-up time should fund growth, work-life balance, or higher-value advisory work, because chasing all three at once dilutes each.
- Ask your people honestly what they want AI to change about their work, then build your deployment, and your recruiting pitch, around the real answer.
- Decide now what work your early-career professionals still need to do by hand, before AI quietly removes the chance to teach it.
The action report for tax & audit firm leaders goes deeper on each of these four moves.
Choose your path. Don’t drift into one.
Across law, corporate, and tax alike, the organizations getting real value from AI share one thing in common: they named a direction instead of waiting for one to emerge. The biggest gaps were never really technical, they were organizational: the right tools not yet in place, people never trained to work the new way, a strategy that never made it past the leadership deck. Closing that AI value gap takes leadership, not procurement.
