30 | It seems that artificial intelligence (AI) has been just over the horizon for a long time. Developments over recent years, mainly technological, have created opportunities to reimagine how aspects of business might be carried out, with AI seen as transformative. But we can no longer look to tomorrow, to next week, to next year. AI is here – already many professional services firms are using it in their practices, just not in the revolutionary manner many might have expected. There has been no mad rush to replace people with machines, no overnight usurping of lawyers and accountants by robotic replacements. Instead, for both these professions – which we studied through the Next Generation Professional Services (NGPS) project – there has been evolution rather than revolution, the taking over of tasks rather than whole roles in professions aiming to deliver high-value client-focused services. But the road to AI adoption and implementation is not always straightforward and smooth. Through the NGPS project, we sought to understand and address the challenges facing mid-sized law and accountancy firms who are adopting and implementing AI technologies. We interviewed professionals and other staff working in accountancy and law firms in England in 2019 and 2020, all at different stages of AI adoption and with different strategies – starting from different places and with various backgrounds, resources and cultures. A lot of them don’t have a great deal of confidence when it comes to AI. They think they should do something about it, but they don’t really know what. Firms already use IT for managing the progress of jobs, and for basic functions such as document production and storage. For accountants, the biggest change historically was the move to Excel from manual double-entry bookkeeping. But all that did was move processes from pen and paper to Excel files. The key difference is that AI changes the type of tasks professionals undertake, and has a greater effect than earlier changes on the work processes of professionals. It is a more significant – and potentially more controversial – change. ONE STEP AT A TIME AI changes workload patterns; it doesn’t take away the job as a whole – it is not a substitute for a lawyer, but it can substitute for a lawyer spending days wading through piles of documents, and those people can work with it to generate higher productivity and standards of excellence. While it does replace tasks, often it is not a straightforward one-for-one replacement where everything else stays the same. It alters elements connected to that task, so instead of the lawyer having to go through the pile of documents, they have to clean up data and train the AI. We found there are not that many aspects of the work of an accountant or a lawyer that AI can do. There are certain discrete stages and processes in their work that AI can transform, but others for which the human touch is the essential component. There are areas within any profession on which AI would have an impact, and other areas in its current form where there is no role for AI. Most of the tasks changed by AI were early-stage analysis tasks that feed into later-stage activities. Certainly, the advice that was given to clients was not coming out of a computer; the data analysis was given to a professional to
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