Future of Professionals Report 2026

In a Reimagine future, the question isn’t how to make current services or functions faster or cheaper, it’s what AI makes possible that wasn’t before. New client propositions for firms. New operating models for departments. New definitions of what professional work even is. Reimagine organizations are not optimizing; they are rebuilding.

For firms, Reimagine often shows up as new business models: subscription advisory, productized services, AI-native practices that compete on something other than billable hours. For corporate and government departments, it shows up as a fundamental rethink of what the function exists to do, risk teams providing predictive risk intelligence, global trade teams ‘always-on’ trade intelligence, government legal teams rebuilding justice delivery around continuous AI-enabled systems rather than paper-based processing.

Early careers look least like traditional professional development. Junior professionals move into hybrid roles combining domain expertise with technology capability, in functions that are being rebuilt rather than optimized.

The trade-off: Reimagine carries the highest transition risk. New models, whether commercial or operational, require sustained investment before they pay back. Clients and stakeholders may need to redesign how they engage. Individual professionals who can adapt will find new roles opening up; those who can’t may find themselves exposed.

Reimagine professionals are the most ambitious and the most impatient: 61% use AI multiple times a day, 55% say their organization is moving too slowly, and they are more than twice as likely as Elevate or Scale professionals to rank financial and career advancement as their top AI priority. They are also the most mobile and one in five is considering a move within two years. They know what they want. The question is whether their organization is moving fast enough to keep them.

In a Scale future, AI primarily addresses a capacity question. Volume increases. Response times improve. Consistency is easier to maintain across a larger body of work, without proportional headcount growth.

For firms, particularly tax and audit, Scale answers a recruitment problem the profession has been wrestling with for years: how to do more, when there are not enough qualified people to hire. For corporate legal, tax and compliance departments, Scale answers a different version of the same problem: how to absorb growing volumes of work the business is generating without growing the team to match. For government legal departments, it is often about meeting public expectations on responsiveness and throughput within fixed budgets that don’t move year to year.

Early careers develop through breadth: high exposure to varied work, with quality assurance and consistency as the primary learning framework. Professionals oversee accuracy while AI handles routine output, enabling mid-career professionals to take on management responsibility earlier than on other paths.

The trade-off: as AI capability spreads, the throughput advantage erodes, competitors and peer departments catch up. Client and stakeholder relationships may become more transactional over time. Individual professionals spend less time on routine tasks, freeing them in theory for more complex work, though whether that promise is realized depends entirely on how the time is reinvested by the firm or the function.

Scale professionals are operationally embedded and delivery-focused with 51% using AI multiple times a day. They are more likely to be decision-makers, more likely to feel their organization is moving too slowly, and more focused on consistency and throughput than on reinvention. For Scale professionals, AI’s job is to clear the path to more: more clients, more work, and more capacity without sacrificing reliability.

In an Elevate future, human expertise sits at the center of the proposition. AI handles the groundwork so professionals can focus on the judgment, relationships, and strategic thinking that command the greatest value.

The service proposition becomes about expertise and accountability over throughput.

For firms, this typically means routine tasks are automated, and the time released is reinvested in deeper, higher-value engagement; fees hold or rise because the quality of what clients receive has genuinely improved. For corporate and government departments, the parallel is doing more strategic work with the same headcount: the function moves from cost center to strategic enabler, the in-house counsel who shifts from contract review to commercial advisory, the tax director who moves from compliance to planning, the public-sector legal team that takes on more governance and risk leadership without growing in size.

Early careers are built on substantive work from day one: AI compresses the learning curve, so junior professionals develop judgment faster than the traditional route allows, though foundational experience requires more deliberate design.

The trade-off: Elevate firms may serve a smaller market as price-sensitive clients go elsewhere; Elevate departments may need to reframe their internal value story before the headcount conversation reaches them. In both, newer professionals may find fewer opportunities to develop foundational experience the traditional way. The path depends on a clear-eyed view of what your expertise is worth, and what work is no longer worth doing in-house, or worth charging for at all.

You are among the 52% of professionals who prefer this path, the largest group by some distance. Professionals who choose Elevate tend to invest the time AI frees up in deeper, more complex work. They are more likely than any other group to say their organization’s pace feels about right, not because they lack ambition, but because quality matters more than speed. They are daily AI users who want their judgment to become more valuable, not redundant.