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AI in the workplace

Since the public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022, the impact of AI has changed the world. Even though new technologies and AI developments have emerged — including Microsoft’s Copilot, Gemini, and AI chatbots — some concerns still remain. Could AI replace professional work, result in job losses, or be used unethically in the workplace? The report identifies reasons professionals believe they should not apply generative AI to their workflows — unease regarding reliability, accuracy, lack of human touch, general output, limitations, biases, and the need for regulation. These qualms highlight the need for robust practices among users of this technology to ensure reliable and responsible adoption of GenAI in professional workplaces.

Despite the concerns, there is a larger percentage of respondents in each field who believe that they should apply generative AI to their work:

• Law firms (59%)
• Corporate legal (57%)
• Tax firms (61%)
• Corporate tax (75%)
• Corporate risk (62%)
• Government (48%)

An increasing number of professionals are seeing the many ways this ever-improving technology can help them save time by handling mundane — though necessary — tasks. This technology, in turn, can allow them to devote more hours to work that they find more engaging and that their clients and organizations see as more profitable. The report’s respondents cited five reasons why they should use GenAI in their work.

With all of the reasons for using this technology, GenAI adoption rates have increased significantly compared to last year. Almost a quarter of respondents (22%) indicated their organizations had already rolled out generative AI, and 18% had active plans to do so. Both percentages are higher than those in the 2024 report, nearly double last year’s figure in the case of active usage. 

What’s more exciting is that implementation timelines are accelerating. More than half of those in the Thomson Reuters Institute report who are considering GenAI expect implementation within the next 12 months — and 95% believe it will play a central role in their workflow within the next five years. Especially with new advancements like the rise of agentic AI architecture and its AI agents, preparing for the future of work is as crucial as ever.

Generative AI use cases for professionals

How are professionals using AI for work? Professionals are realizing that generative AI works best with routine tasks and not on the work they’re best at. Through machine learning, algorithms, natural-language processing, and large-language models (LLMs), valuable transformations could be made — from AI models to systems to productivity. 

Complex reasoning, deeper understanding of clients or subject matter, and leveraging empathy or compassion are not replaceable by AI-driven technology, which is designed to tackle non-complex, repeatable, fact-based work. In other words, professionals shouldn’t view GenAI as a tool that replaces them and their expertise but instead provides more time for what they do best.

It’s unsurprising, then, that professionals surveyed in the 2025 report stated they use AI to help with essential and repetitive tasks. These are the types of use cases that a well-crafted, generative AI-powered tool can automate rapidly and accurately. At the same time, professionals are realizing that generative AI’s ability to gather and analyze massive datasets can help them clarify complex situations and glean practical, actionable insights.

The report makes some general observations worth noting about professionals’ use of GenAI. One is that the use cases in each profession have remained remarkably stable in 2025 compared with the 2024 data from the Thomson Reuters Institute. Most current users (72%) engage with GenAI at least weekly, with over 40% using it daily or multiple times daily. This data tells us that professionals who use generative AI are likely to use it more frequently than not — rarely do they use it just once a month.

The following sections explain how professionals are using AI for work in each industry, as identified by the 2025 report. 

Legal professionals

By using GenAI-powered tools to automate drafting contracts and other standardized writing, as well as to review and summarize legal documents, professionals can find and optimize their workflows step by step to save significant time and effort. Additionally, legal professionals can employ generative AI to analyze large volumes of legal data, helping them quickly identify relevant information, improve brainstorming, and enhance strategic decision-making.

Top use cases for legal professionals:

1. Document review
2. Document summarization 
3. Legal research
4. Brief or memo drafting 
5. Contract drafting 
6. Correspondence drafting

Tax, accounting, and audit professionals

Tax research and tax return preparation remain the most common use cases cited — exactly the type of repeatable that professionals point to as benefits of AI. GenAI-powered technology can automatically categorize expenses, provide forecasting, reconcile accounts, and generate financial reports, saving time and reducing the risk of manual errors.

The top use cases for tax, accounting, and audit professionals:

1. Tax research
2. Tax return preparation
3. Tax advisory
4. Accounting/bookkeeping
5. Document summarization
6. Document review

Risk and fraud professionals

Among risk and fraud professionals, the use case of document summarization jumped 27 percentage points in 2025 over 2024. This leap is most likely due to GenAI’s summarization capabilities and the need among risk management professionals to synthesize numerous new and revised government rules and regulations to remain in compliance. This optimization can with the use of public records, social media, and other sources.

Top use cases for risk and fraud professionals:

1. Document summarization
2. Risk assessment and reporting
3. Document review

Government professionals

Of the practitioners surveyed in the report, government legal professionals have been the slowest to integrate AI into their workplaces. However, further inputs from respondents point out that . In the 2025 Thomson Reuters Institute report, 13% of government respondents said they were using GenAI tools, compared to 11% in 2024. The proportion of government respondents who said they have no plans to use GenAI technology dropped to 41% in 2025, compared to 60% in 2024.

Top use cases for government professionals:

1. Legal research 
2. Document summarization 
3. Document review
4. Brief or memo drafting 
5. Knowledge management 
6. Correspondence drafting

Do your best work with CoCounsel

As the 2025 Generative AI in Professional Services Report notes, the GenAI “revolution” has really been more of an evolution. This steady progression involves the adoption of both publicly available and industry-specific AI-driven tools and an increased understanding among professionals in numerous fields of generative AI use cases.

Since most of those use cases involve automating routine, mundane tasks, professionals are seeking out specific solutions like AI assistants. In order to successfully integrate GenAI and maintain its usefulness, professionals need to evaluate which solution will fit into their workplace.

When researching a generative AI assistant, you need one that is professional-grade — one that understands professional standards and can deliver real-time, reliable results at superhuman speed. Most importantly, it needs to be encrypted from start to finish so your data — and your customers’ — remains private and secure. This is professional-grade generative AI.

By grounding responses in this authority, professional-grade generative AI tools like CoCounsel help ensure that technology enhances rather than undermines the quality of services that professionals need to provide, which can improve their productivity and save them time. CoCounsel is the industry-leading GenAI assistant that works alongside you from task to task, from research to analysis — creating a single, seamless workstream to help professionals do their best work. This is the best AI can offer.

For legal professionals, CoCounsel automates specific necessary but mundane tasks such as document review, document and data analysis, and legal research. It provides authoritaFor legal professionals, CoCounsel automates specific necessary but mundane tasks such as document review, document and data analysis, and legal research. It provides authoritative information and insights derived from Westlaw Precision and Practical Law legal content and datasets. For tax, accounting, and audit professionals, CoCounsel can accelerate research and clarify complex tax questions without requiring practitioners to spend hours hunting through numerous documents and endless pages of online content. This is the future of work.

AI is rapidly transforming the legal, tax and accounting, and risk and fraud professions — and clients expect more than ever before. A trusted generative AI solution you can rely on is invaluable so you can continue to do your best work today and navigate tomorrow with confidence.