Across consulting, legal, and other professional services firms, AI is transforming from an experimental tool to one that has a tangible impact. The early hype around tools like ChatGPT has evolved into more strategic questions: How can firms use AI not just to improve productivity, but to deepen their competitive advantage? AI was at the heart of the recent KIMRA conference, an annual gathering of professional and financial services experts that aims to tackle strategic questions facing their businesses.
In the UK and across Europe, this shift is happening against a backdrop of evolving regulation, strong client demand, and an increasingly competitive talent landscape. The EU AI Act and GDPR are shaping how firms approach responsible AI deployment, while clients — especially in regulated industries — are asking tougher questions about relevance and value. As a result, AI adoption is not just accelerating, but is becoming more intentional as firms grow more risk-aware.
Across our conversations with leading professional services firms, three core themes consistently stand out in how AI is being used to reshape the business: business development, service delivery, and talent development. The firms creating real value from AI are going beyond these tactical areas, fundamentally rethinking how they operate as intelligence-driven organizations.
Smarter Business Development: Moving From Relationships to Insight-Led Growth
Unlike in the past, successful business development today depends less on who you know and more on what you know — about clients, markets, and emerging trends. AI is enabling firms to identify opportunities earlier and with more precision. By scanning earnings calls, regulatory filings, market commentary, and M&A activity, professionals can spot companies under pressure or in transformation mode quickly and efficiently. This creates the conditions for proactive, insight-led conversations.
AI also helps teams tailor their approach to client conversations. With just minutes of preparation, professionals can walk into meetings fluent in a client’s strategy, investor pressures, or competitive positioning. Firms are also improving win rates by using AI to craft more personalized, commercially relevant proposals — integrating past casework, market intelligence, and internal IP into compelling narratives.
Better, Faster Delivery: Elevating Client Work With AI-Powered Insights
Once a project begins, AI accelerates time to value. Research that used to take hours or days can now be completed in minutes. Consultants and legal teams are using AI to extract key insights from thousands of documents, surface relevant precedents, and synthesize trends across industries and geographies.
AI enables teams to shift time away from manual information gathering and toward higher-value activities like analysis, strategic recommendations, and deeper client engagement. Many AlphaSense clients report 30% to 40% time savings across core research tasks, unlocking capacity to go further into the issues that matter most.
Tools like AlphaSense Deep Research elevate the role of the researcher, empowering them to deliver sharper insights to clients and help close critical expertise gaps. As client challenges grow increasingly complex, firms need to bring deeper expertise and insights to the table. AI is a key factor to meet that demand.
Automation is also playing a growing role in delivery. Routine tasks, such as conducting data analysis, drafting deliverables, and summarizing calls, are increasingly handled by AI, freeing up professionals to focus on judgment, creativity, and client relationships.
Talent Development: Creating More AI-Literate Professionals
Professional services firms are rethinking how they train and develop their people as client needs evolve. Today’s clients expect more than functional expertise — they want advisors who understand market context, who ask better questions, and who can connect the dots across sectors and geographies.
AI is helping close that gap. It’s enabling firms to deliver more tailored, contextual learning — curating insights and internal content to help individuals ramp up faster in new industries, accounts, or roles. Firms are also investing in AI literacy — not just tool training, but helping professionals understand where AI creates commercial value, how to use it responsibly, and when human oversight is essential. This is especially important in high-stakes environments like legal, due diligence, or regulatory advisory.
The Future: Turning Knowledge Into Competitive Advantage
Unlocking the institutional knowledge firms already possess is one of the most powerful, and often overlooked, applications of AI in professional services.
Professional services firms sit on a goldmine of IP, built through decades of client engagements, that can help solve today’s challenges. Yet much of this knowledge remains siloed: in PDFs, slide decks, memos, emails, and the minds of individual partners. Without structure or scale, its value is limited.
AI deconstructs that. By connecting, surfacing, and activating internal knowledge — and combining it with live external intelligence on markets, competitors, and clients — firms can create a powerful flywheel: smarter pitches, faster onboarding, and more impactful delivery.
The real differentiator is more than just having access to the latest LLMs or external data. It’s the ability to fuse external insight with proprietary internal IP to generate unique, high-conviction perspectives and improve enterprise intelligence.
Firms that approach this as a unified capability rather than a one-off initiative are building a solid advantage. They’re not just moving faster, but are delivering more value in a market where client needs are only growing in complexity.
A Clear AI Strategy: The New Differentiator
Adopting tools like Copilot or ChatGPT is no longer a strategy — it’s table stakes. These tools have brought AI into the hands of professionals, and they play an important role in increasing everyday productivity. But firms that stop there risk falling into a dangerous trap: thinking they’ve “integrated AI” when in reality, they’ve only scratched the surface.
The firms seeing the greatest return are those with a clear AI vision, one that’s tightly aligned with the firm’s business priorities and operating model, and ask the right questions:
- How does AI help us scale what we’re best at?
- How do we embed it into our processes, not just our people?
- How do we use it to differentiate, not just keep pace?
This isn’t about chasing the latest tools. It’s about building a capability that enhances your firm’s core value proposition — delivering sharper insight, faster outcomes, and more trusted client relationships.
At AlphaSense, we help professional service firms do exactly that. By combining proprietary knowledge with world-class market and enterprise intelligence, we enable professionals to operate with more clarity, commerciality, and confidence — across every phase of the client lifecycle.
The future of professional services won’t be solely AI-powered. It will be won by those who lead with intelligence.
