Industry Insights
These industry insights explore the structural tensions reshaping professional services firms, from AI and platform economics to private equity, governance, operating models, profitability, and large-scale transformation. The articles combine strategic analysis, industry research, and real-world transformation experience to examine how the business model of professional services is changing.
Other categories
Subscribe to our newsletter
What Will Clients Still Buy? How AI Is Redrawing the Boundary of Professional Services
7. September 2026
Professional services firms have spent the past several years examining what artificial intelligence will do to their own operating models. The questions are becoming familiar. How much professional work can be automated? How many hours can be removed from an engagement? What happens to utilisation when professionals become more productive? How should firms price work
The AI Capability Layer: Who Will Own the Infrastructure Behind AI-Enabled Professional Services?
31. August 2026
For several years, the artificial-intelligence discussion inside professional services has focused primarily on what individual firms are building. Deloitte, PwC, EY, KPMG and their competitors have invested heavily in internal AI environments, proprietary tools, data platforms, technology alliances and workflow automation. The assumption underneath much of the debate has been familiar: each firm chooses its
The Sales-Delivery Assumption: Why One Operating Model No Longer Fits Every Professional Services Business
23. August 2026
Professional services firms have traditionally treated sales and delivery as two parts of the same operating model. The partner who owned the client relationship usually also controlled much of the capability required to serve that client. The team sat nearby, often in the same service line and member firm, which meant that revenue, delivery responsibility,
The Institutional Test: What Private Equity Has Not Yet Proved in US Accounting
6. August 2026
Five years ago, the central question surrounding private equity investment in US accounting firms was whether the model could work at all. Accounting firms were constrained by professional-ownership rules, built around partnership economics and governed through structures that often made major strategic decisions slow, politically difficult and expensive for the current generation of partners. External
Trust Capital: Why Professional Services Manufacture Judgment but Accumulate Trust
26. July 2026
This article builds on Manufacturing Judgment: How Professional Services Build Their Most Valuable Asset, which argued that professional-services firms have always produced two outcomes through client work. Every engagement delivers something visible to the client while quietly contributing to the development of professional judgment inside the firm. The same work that generates today’s revenue also
Manufacturing Judgment: How Professional Services Build Their Most Valuable Asset
15. July 2026
This article builds on When Expertise Becomes Metered Infrastructure: How AI Is Changing the Economics of Professional Services, which explored how artificial intelligence is changing the economics of expertise. This article examines the next question: how those changing economics affect the way professional-services firms manufacture professional judgment. For more than a century, professional-services firms have
The Industrialization of Tax: How Recurring Expertise Quietly Adopted a Different Economic Model
28. June 2026
Tax has long been regarded as one of the great advisory disciplines within professional services. It sits at the intersection of regulation, finance, corporate strategy and governance. That description remains true, but it has become incomplete. Beneath the advisory narrative, the economics of large parts of tax have changed. Many tax practices no longer operate
The Transferability Problem: Why Professional-Services Roll-Ups May Be Discovering That Institutional Trust Is Harder to Scale Than Revenue
13. June 2026
For much of the past decade, professional services appeared to offer one of the most compelling consolidation opportunities in the economy. Across accounting, legal services, wealth management, engineering consulting, and numerous specialist advisory sectors, investors encountered industries that remained remarkably fragmented despite decades of broader corporate consolidation. Thousands of firms operated with recurring revenues, loyal
When Expertise Becomes Metered Infrastructure: How AI Is Changing the Economics of Professional Services
3. June 2026
What happens when expertise itself starts behaving like infrastructure? The current AI debate is dominated by questions about replacement. Will consultants disappear? Will lawyers disappear? Will accountants disappear? Will software developers disappear? Depending on who is speaking, artificial intelligence will either eliminate large parts of knowledge work or leave the fundamentals largely unchanged. The discussion
The Regulated Trust Layer: How Private Equity Is Separating Audit From the Economic Platform Around It
25. May 2026
The audit partner still signs the opinion. The local audit partnership still exists legally. The firm still presents itself externally as a partnership of professionals operating under regulatory oversight, professional standards and independence requirements. In many jurisdictions, the structure still formally complies with rules requiring licensed CPAs or equivalent professionals to own and control the