The 2026 Technology Perceptions Survey Research Report reveals that 92% of fee-earners at financial and professional services firms now use AI at work, up from 48% in 2024.
This statistic is important, signaling a major shift in how daily work gets done. But there’s a more important statistic that remains unexplored: How many firms have the framework in place to govern widespread AI adoption?
The truth is, adopting AI is the easy part. The hard part is making sure your firm has the underlying architecture needed to govern every AI action across both sanctioned and unsanctioned tools.
The firms that choose the right architecture will turn AI into a durable institutional advantage that compounds success. The firms that don’t will spend years trying to close an ever-expanding governance and performance gap.
A workforce that won’t wait
The survey research reveals that even when sanctioned tools exist, a large majority of professionals across financial services, legal, accounting, and consulting firms still use unauthorized AI for everyday tasks.
- 82% of professionals at firms with sanctioned AI tools have used unauthorized tools, with 57% reporting frequent usage.
- 67% of professionals at firms without sanctioned AI tools have used unauthorized tools, with 40% reporting frequent usage.
It’s likely that many professionals are turning to unsanctioned AI tools because they feel that the immediate productivity gains outweigh the perceived risks. Under constant pressure to move quickly, they use them to keep up with heavy workloads and client expectations — especially when sanctioned tools are unavailable or limited in scope.
You might consider “shadow AI” — AI tools used outside of the sanctioned stack — to be a policy failure. But while shadow AI does pose security risks, it indicates that your professionals have found tools that they believe make them faster and more effective. And they’ve likely become proficient at using them: The Tech Perceptions report uncovers that 60% percent of professionals using AI consider themselves expert or advanced AI users.
For industries that have moved deliberately for a century, this is a generational moment. Professionals are adopting tools — sanctioned or not — that are helping them amplify productivity and growth. They’re saving five hours on average each week with AI, and spending the reclaimed time on everything from pursuing new business opportunities to building stronger client relationships.
Professionals are primarily using time saved with AI for:
- Business development (69%)
Pursuing new opportunities, networking, and focusing on strategic initiatives. - Client development (63%)
Focusing on higher-level client work/cultivating relationships.
Professionals also report that AI improves the quality of their work. Ninety percent say that AI improves the quality of at least one work activity, while 72% say AI improves the quality of three or more activities.
To drive competitive advantage and mitigate compliance risk, firms must support what their professionals are already doing with AI while protecting client confidentiality, maintaining privilege, and keeping information walls intact.
The risks of a multi-tool reality
Building governance controls around how your professionals already work starts with a simple reality: you’ll need to manage risk across multiple AI tools.
Partners and practice groups have different preferences and ways of working. So do litigation, M&A, and restructuring. And AI isn’t going to change this. Instead of fighting this reality, firm leadership needs to embrace it, and focus on tackling the compliance exposure that’s created by shadow AI use.
For example, in the legal industry, privilege and confidentiality obligations are statutory and ethical. An ungoverned AI interaction on a sensitive matter brings real risk.
The Tech Perceptions research exposes that the majority of professionals within each industry surveyed are using unsanctioned tools — and putting their firms at significant risk in the process.
Here’s the breakdown of professionals using shadow AI by industry:
- Finance: 83%
- Accounting: 83%
- Consulting: 70%
- Legal: 64%
Since the most regulated work moves the fastest, your governance framework should operate across every AI tool. Client confidentiality, information walls, conflicts, audit trails, and engagement-level controls should hold across Harvey, Legora, Copilot, Claude, and all other AI platforms.
This is a fundamentally different proposition than tool-by-tool acceptable-use policies, which break the moment a partner adopts something new.
The importance of Firm AI
In addition to the AI governance problem, there’s a second problem that very few firms are thinking about: the lack of AI for the firm. While every practice group is solving for its own workflows, who is building AI for the firm? Client relationships, institutional knowledge, conflicts, pricing history, engagement experience, methodology — none of these belong to a single practice group. They belong to the firm.
That’s why we call it Firm AI: it’s the architecture that governs AI tools and turns your firm’s proprietary knowledge and methods into a system that runs the business of the firm. Unlike practice-level AI, which makes individual professionals faster, Firm AI makes the institution itself smarter, more productive, and more scalable.
The strategic distinction matters. Every firm in your peer set will have access to Claude, Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, and other general-purpose AI models, so that can’t be your competitive differentiator. But what will differentiate your firm is whether its accumulated knowledge sits inside an architecture built to use it — compliantly.
The AI conversation that can’t wait
To secure a sustainable competitive advantage, firm leaders need to have conversations about AI governance and Firm AI now. The firms that are pulling ahead are tackling these three questions:
- How are our professionals using AI today, and where is it actually adding value?
Most firms don’t have full visibility into all the AI tools their professionals are using or the ways in which they’re adding value. The most useful way to understand this isn’t by reviewing the AI tools IT approved, it’s assessing what your practices have already adopted on their own. - How do we ensure AI is used safely and effectively across every sanctioned and unsanctioned tool?
To address this, you should start with a framework that can govern AI actions across all tools. This should be paired with centralized oversight, monitoring, and training so teams can use AI effectively while reducing risk. - How can we use Firm AI to drive competitive advantage?
Work towards deploying Firm AI architecture that compounds advantage by amplifying your professionals’ expertise, increasing productivity, and improving scalability.
The firms that take all three questions seriously will define the next era of professional and financial services. The firms that address only the first two questions will keep up. And the firms that address none of them will spend years trying to close a governance and performance gap that will just keep getting wider.
The question shaping your firm’s future
AI adoption across professional and financial services firms has skyrocketed — and shadow AI is pervasive. The question you need to consider now isn’t whether AI will shape how work gets done — it’s whether your firm will put the right architecture in place to govern it and secure a sustained competitive advantage.
To learn more about how AI is reshaping how financial and professional services firms operate and compete, download the 2026 Technology Perceptions Survey Report.