Robert Ambrogi Blog
Most professionals are now using artificial intelligence at work, but far fewer are getting much value out of it, according to new research from Thomson Reuters. And the cost of that shortfall is starting to show up in lost clients, departing talent, and a generation of professionals who may take longer to develop the independent judgment expected of them.
The findings come from Thomson Reuters’ Future of Professionals Report 2026, the fourth annual edition of the study, released today. The report is based on a survey of 1,816 professionals across law, tax, audit, accounting, compliance, risk, and global trade, conducted in March and April 2026 across 62 countries. Respondents came from private-practice firms as well as in-house corporate and government departments.
Adoption Is High, But Payoff Is Not
The report’s overarching finding is that AI adoption is no longer the obstacle. Seventy-four percent of professionals say they now use AI tools several times a week, and 44% report using them multiple times a day. But 91% say their organizations are falling short of what the technology could deliver — a shortfall the report labels an “AI value gap.”
The reason for the gap, the report says, lies with the organizations deploying the AI. In firms and departments with a named AI strategy, 66% of professionals said AI was meeting or exceeding expectations for creating value. But at organizations with no active strategy, that figure dropped to 22%.
Even at firms or departments that have a named AI strategy, 35% of professionals said it is not visible in their day-to-day work. Overall, 17% said their organization has no strategic direction on AI at all. Roughly half the profession is working at an organization where the strategy on paper does not match how the work actually gets done, the report says.
When professionals were asked why strategies stall, the most common answers had nothing to do with the technology. Rather, they were that tools were not yet in place (47%), people were not trained to work in the intended way (43%), strategy was not translated into clear operational priorities (32%), and there was no shared understanding of the plan (30%).
“These barriers are not primarily technical,” the report says. “All four are change management problems, the classic markers of a strategy that has been articulated but not operationalized, and likely familiar to anyone who has led or lived through large-scale organizational change.”
The Risk of ‘Shadow AI’
The study reports that 34% of professionals use AI tools their organization has not sanctioned and in ways their organization cannot see. That share rises to 41% among professionals who say their organization is moving too slowly on AI.
This “shadow AI,” the report says, has significant implications for data-exposure and governance risk.
At the same time, the report says, professionals are clear about the capabilities they expect from AI, with 96% saying it must safeguard confidential data, 94% saying its outputs must be grounded in authoritative content, and 90% saying it must produce reasoning that can be explained and defended.
Yet 41% of professionals said they lack access to AI tools designed for professional work and built on verified professional content.
As it happens, those findings closely align with Thomson Reuters’ positioning of its own legal AI products. The company markets its CoCounsel assistant as “Fiduciary-Grade AI,” and the report uses that term frequently.
“Not all AI is created equal. In professions where there is real liability, the standard has to be much higher,” President and CEO Steve Hasker said in the press release accompanying the report. “When outputs shape legal judgments, regulatory filings, or client advice, ‘almost right’ isn’t good enough.”
Clients Consider Dropping AI Laggards
One of the report’s more-striking findings is the gap between client expectations and firms’ delivery. Of corporate clients who buy professional services, 78% said receiving AI-enabled quality improvements from their providers is very important or essential, but only 6% said most or all of their providers actually deliver.
As a result, 32% said they have reconsidered, or plan within 12 months to reconsider, relationships with firms they view as falling behind. Among those reconsidering, a third estimated more than $1 million in annual work was at risk.
Extrapolating that to the U.S. legal and CPA markets, Thomson Reuters estimates that roughly $143 billion in client revenue is “under active reconsideration.”
The Risk of Losing Talent
Another side of that same coin is the risk of losing talent. Of the 91% of professionals who reported some degree of AI value gap, one in four (24%) said they were considering leaving their organization within two years, and 13% within 12 months, all at an estimated replacement cost of $232,000 per professional.
The report says mid-career professionals — described as the most embedded AI users and the most mobile — is the group most likely to leave, and it notes that almost half of senior leaders believe meaningful talent pressure is still at least three years away.
Access to professional-grade tools, the report argues, is becoming a key factor in recruiting. Sixty-two percent of professionals said it would factor into accepting a new role, and among those already using such tools, roughly one in three said they would turn down a role that did not offer them, compared with 12% of those without access.
Another concern the report raises is the longer-term impact of AI on how professional judgment develops.
Forty-eight percent of professionals said they were worried about AI’s impact on the development of independent judgment, and 71% said those who are early in their careers need structured support from experienced peers to build the skills AI risks displacing.
Three futures and a change-management prescription
A portion of the report asks professionals to locate themselves among three “illustrative futures”:
- Ai to Elevate, in which AI frees professionals to focus on higher-value judgment work.
- AI to Scale, in which AI increases capacity and throughput.
- AI to Reimagine, in which AI drives structural reinvention of how the work is done.
Fifty-two percent of professionals preferred Elevate, 31% preferred Scale, 7% preferred Reimagine, and 8% chose none of the three.
The report argues that deliberately choosing and committing to a direction produces better outcomes than drifting into one by default, and that 35% of professionals work somewhere whose AI approach does not match their own preference.
To close that gap between strategy and execution, the report suggests applying the ADKAR change-management framework — Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement — and it offers guidance for both leaders and individual professionals at each stage.
The report closes with five questions it urges leaders to answer honestly, among them whether their AI strategy is “legible at the individual level” and whether mid-career professionals are aligned with the direction the organization has chosen.
“No single finding in this report describes a crisis,” the report concludes. “The commercial
pressure, the talent risk, the execution gap, the pipeline problem: each is individually manageable. But together, they describe a profession where AI is driving change faster than most firms and departments were built to handle.”