Professionals of All Stripes Are Uncharacteristically Optimistic About This Whole AI Thing

In a surprising development, it seems professionals are feeling great about how AI can impact their work in the near and slightly less near future. That’s according to the Future of Professionals Report 2024 just released by Thomson Reuters which you can view in its entirety here. 620 of the survey’s more than 2200 respondents are in tax, accounting, and global trade while 115 are in risk and compliance-type jobs, the rest are in legal (1253) or C-suite execs (217). Of the tax people, 438 are at firms and of those, 19 percent are at a 1-3 person firm, 46 percent 4 to 29 people, and the remaining 34 percent work at a firm with 30 or more. The full methodology is on the last page of the report if you want more detailed information than that.

There are two items from the report we’d like to call your attention to, though surely there are many more figures that are interesting in their own right but the Going Concern audience has the attention span of a gnat so we have to make this quick. First we should point out that the report isn’t even supposed to be only about AI, it’s just that AI is disruptive as hell and it’s the main thing people are thinking about when reflecting on what the next five years could look like. This is the Future of Professionals Report after all.

Despite Many Unknowns, Professionals Feel Positive About AI’s Impact

This bit stood out to us mainly because Thomson Reuters felt compelled to remind anyone reading this report that the people they surveyed tend to be real cagey about taking risks.

78% of respondents said they believe AI is a force for good in their profession, an indication that the overall market sentiment is positive, perhaps surprisingly so considering the professionals we surveyed are in professions known for risk aversion.

This number is even higher in the tax firm and tax, accounting, and trade groups if you can believe that. 84 percent of the people in tax, accounting, and trade and 82 percent of the tax firm group believe AI is a force for good in their profession. This kind of optimism in this sector is peculiar to say the least.

What this says to us is that many of these professionals are already, and have already been, using AI to take some of the burden off their plates and are seeing direct positive effects. The report’s numbers don’t really reflect that assumption, however, as 37 percent of respondents have never used AI as a jumping off point for work tasks.

It appears a decent amount of them don’t know where to start. This is where the group using this technology regularly could step in and give their colleagues some suggestions. Unless their colleagues are stubborn boomers and boomer-adjacent Gen Xers who yell at clouds (continue reading for a figure that smashes that stereotype and defies your expectations about how boomers view AI).

What About the Long Term?

This chart is a little confusing because we’re idiots, maybe you can make sense of it in a shorter amount of time than it took us. It seems many of the professionals with an ambitious outlook think that in five years’ time, AI will be capable of working completely independently without needing a human to review its work. What exactly this work is will vary given the demographics of the respondent and what sort of work they do, obviously.

And predictably, the cautious group doesn’t have as much faith in the pace of AI transformation between now and 2029 as the ambitious group.

Here’s something you probably didn’t expect: 25% of baby boomers are in the Ambitious category while just 10% are in Cautious. For Gen Z, 15% landed in Ambitious and 15% Cautious. Boomers somehow are the most ambitious of the five generations in the survey. This report is just full of surprises, isn’t it.

Lastly — yeah, we said it was two items of note but actually there’s a sort of third — is the issue of time savings:

Professionals predict that AI could save them four hours a week in the next year and up to 12 hours per week within the next five years.

The report doesn’t stop at straight predictions though. Thomson Reuters did actual math using actual data gleaned from participating firms:

Assuming a professional works 48 to 50 weeks per year, this could result in up to 200 hours saved annually and is equivalent to adding an extra colleague for every 10 team members, as the four hours saved per week per professional represents approximately 10% of a full-time workload. For US lawyers, that time savings could translate to nearly $100,000 in extra billable time annually. This is calculated with Thomson Reuters data gathered directly from participating firms’ financial management systems, which is then anonymized and aggregated. Ultimately, the way lawyers choose to reinvest their time savings will depend on their individual priorities and goals, which may include increasing billable time, pursuing new business opportunities, or other strategic initiatives.

How all this freed up time will actually be used remains to be seen. Would we be naive to hope for standard 4-day workweeks by the time we cruise into the 2030s?

Yeah, probably.