2025 Generative AI in Professional Services Report: GenAI adoption is on the rise, now business strategy needs to follow

Since generative AI (GenAI) burst onto the scene in late-2022, its rise in professional services has been dramatic. It started with early adopters of ChatGPT and other related publicly available tools, but it has quickly morphed into an entire ecosystem that includes business-focused GenAI baked into many commonly used tools, industry-specific GenAI that can perform tasks tailored to what professionals need, and even newer technologies such as agentic AI that are set to make waves.

For professionals in legal, tax, risk & fraud, and government industries, the shift has been both quick and dramatic. Already more than half of all legal, tax, risk & fraud and government professionals have used GenAI in some fashion, with a wide range of use cases already arising, according to the newly published Thomson Reuters Institute’s 2025 Generative AI in Professional Services Report. In fact, the report shows that professionals from across the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand are not only expecting GenAI to become a more common part of their work, but they’re feeling more positive about the impact GenAI will have on their profession.

However, even with usage skyrocketing, many of the firms, departments, and agencies in which these professionals work still have a way to go to fully extract value from GenAI. The report shows that few organizations are capturing return-on-investment (ROI) metrics, regularly training staff on GenAI updates, or integrating GenAI use into their policies. In addition, few professionals say their firms and their clients are having conversations around GenAI use. And even more worrisome, questions about GenAI’s impact on billing rates and costs remain unanswered.

This year’s report reflects a crossroads: GenAI itself is seeing adoption on a wide scale, but professional services industries largely still have yet to discern what it means for the future of their businesses.

Key findings in the report

Some key findings in this year’s Generative AI in Professional Services Report include:

• • • Steady usage increases — A large portion (41%) of respondents said they personally use publicly-available tools such as ChatGPT, and 17% said they personally use industry-specific GenAI tools. On an organization-wide level, the percentage of respondents who said their organizations were actively using GenAI nearly doubled over the past year, to 22% in 2025, compared to 12% in 2024.
    • Soon to be central to workflow — Just 13% said GenAI is central to their organizations, workflow currently, but an additional 29% said they believe it will be central within the next year. Further, 95% of all respondents believe it will be central to their organization’s workflow within the next five years.

• • • Maintaining positivity — More than half (55%) of all respondents categorize their sentiment towards GenAI in their profession as excited or hopeful. Meanwhile, the proportion who said they were hesitant, concerned or fearful fell 12 percentage points over the past year.
    • Business questions remain — Only 20% said they knew their organizations were measuring ROI of GenAI, and many firm respondents remain unsure about GenAI’s impact on rates or client costs. And while 57% of corporate clients want their outside firms to be using GenAI, 71% of law firms’ clients and 59% of tax firms’ clients said they did not know whether their firms were using it or not.
    • Policies & training still needed — More than half of respondents (52%) said they believed their organizations had no policies around GenAI at work, whether a standalone policy or as part of a larger technology policy. Nearly two-thirds (64%), meanwhile, said they had received no GenAI training at work.

At this point, it is evident that GenAI is here to stay. Professionals across multiple industries are adopting it for their own personal use in droves, whether leveraging free tools or, increasingly, business or industry-specific technologies. Organization-wide adoption is beginning to occur as well, albeit slowly.

The question, then, becomes what will professional services industries do with GenAI once it’s adopted. As the report reveals, many may not yet know — but they do know they need to begin having those conversations quickly.

“The next 24 months will be extremely telling on the impact of GenAI on the legal industry and professional work more broadly,” said one Australian law firm attorney. “As products move out of development [and in]to production, we will be able to see the actual effects of this technology across various sectors.”