Thomson Reuters published its 2026 Future of Professionals report on June 22, and the headline finding is one most firm leaders will recognize uncomfortably. Adoption is not the problem. Across the professions it surveys, including accounting, 74 percent of people say they use AI tools several times a week, and 44 percent reach for it multiple times a day. The problem is that 91 percent believe their own organizations are falling short of what AI could actually deliver. Near-universal usage, near-universal disappointment.

The gap is not about access to AI. It is about trust and deployment. 96 percent of professionals say any AI they use has to safeguard confidential data, and 90 percent need outputs they can explain and defend, yet 41 percent say they do not have tools that meet that bar. So they improvise. A third admit to using AI their firm never sanctioned, a figure that climbs to 41 percent at organizations seen as moving too slowly. That is the real story buried in the numbers. When a firm does not give its people a safe, approved AI tool, the people do not stop using AI. They paste client data into whatever consumer chatbot is open in another tab. We wrote about exactly this in our client-data edition: the danger was never the technology, it is ungoverned use of it.

The report attaches a price to the gap. 78 percent of corporate clients now consider AI-driven quality improvements important or essential, but only 6 percent say most of their providers actually deliver. Thomson Reuters estimates roughly $143 billion in US legal and accounting revenue is under active reconsideration over the next year based on AI delivery. It is a talent problem too: one in four professionals facing the gap say they would consider leaving within two years, and 62 percent weigh access to professional-grade AI when taking a job. Not having an AI strategy is now a way to lose both clients and staff.

One thing to read with clear eyes. This is Thomson Reuters’ report, and Thomson Reuters sells AI to exactly these professionals. The prescription it lands on, what it brands “Fiduciary-Grade AI,” is conveniently the category it sells. So take the data seriously and the sales pitch with the usual grain of salt. The fix for the value gap is not a shopping spree for premium AI. It is the boring discipline we keep coming back to: give your team one sanctioned tool that protects client data, demand outputs you can explain and defend, and keep a human accountable for what leaves the building. The firms getting value are not the ones with the most AI. They are the ones that deployed it with rules.

Our take: the AI problem in accounting has quietly changed shape. A year ago the question was whether the tools were good enough. Now the tools are ahead of the firms, and the gap is execution. The most useful number in the whole report is the shadow-AI one, because it is the one a firm owner can act on this week. Every person using an unsanctioned chatbot is a confidentiality breach waiting to happen, and they are doing it because nobody handed them a safe alternative. The shortage of value is self-inflicted. So is the fix.

— Footnote

Footnote is an independent publication, with no affiliate links and no vendor paying for placement. It is not professional accounting, tax, or legal advice. Figures are from Thomson Reuters’ 2026 Future of Professionals report (a survey of 1,816 professionals across law, tax, audit, accounting, compliance, risk, and trade), current as of June 2026.