What 400 Firm Leaders Just Told Us About Going Deep on AI

Last year, 83% of 350 firm leaders polled told us something I couldn't stop thinking about: their AI vision had outpaced their execution. Nearly everyone believed, but far fewer had made it real. So this May we went back into the field, this time to 400 audit and advisory leaders, with one question underneath all the others: what happened to the firms that closed that gap?

Today we're publishing the answer. The AI-Native Firm Advantage splits those 400 firms into two groups based on a single variable: how deeply AI is embedded in their core workflows. Active deployers, the 51% of firms running AI across most or all of their engagements, are outperforming casual users on every single dimension we measured, from profitability and capacity to retention and client wins.

The gaps are bigger than we expected

Some numbers from the report. 74.5% of active deployers saw profitability increase 10% or more, compared to 52% of casual users. 70.1% are taking on more engagements with the same headcount, versus 46.9%. And 73.5% say AI is now a factor in winning or retaining clients, against 53.6% of everyone else.

Here's the part that gets overlooked: casual users are seeing results too. This is a study of firms already using AI, and even the shallow end shows real gains. What the data reveals is the difference between AI that saves time on tasks and AI that changes how an engagement is staffed, priced, and delivered. Those are two different things, and the market is starting to price them differently.

The org is the advantage

The single widest gap in the study has nothing to do with technology. 87.3% of active deployers have formally redesigned roles, team structures, or staffing ratios as a direct result of AI. Only 60.7% of casual users have.

That finding matches what we hear in nearly every conversation with firm leaders. The firms getting the most from AI treat it as an operating model decision, one that reshapes who does what on an engagement, rather than a procurement decision. Practitioner led, agent executed. The tools are increasingly available to everyone. What compounds is the redesign around them.

The finding that means the most to me

When I was an auditor, the hardest part wasn't the hours. It was watching smart, motivated people spend those hours on work a machine should have been doing. In 2025, 54% of practitioners named repetitive, low-value tasks as a top driver of burnout, and 96% believed AI could help.

This year, 75% of active deployers report AI has improved staff retention. 80.9% say career paths for entry and mid-level professionals have been reshaped. And the skill these firms are investing in most heavily, relative to everyone else, surprised me: client advisory and relationship skills, at 47.1% versus 28.1%. They aren't just training people to use AI. They're building the judgment and client-facing capabilities that sit on the other side of it, the work that stays human.

For a profession that has struggled to convince young talent this is where the interesting work lives, that may be the most important result in the report.

The gap compounds from here

These findings lock together and create a compounding flywheel. AI frees up capacity. Reinvested capacity shifts firms toward advisory work, which lifts margins. Better margins fund deeper AI investment, and the cycle turns again, faster each time. For 204 of the 400 firms in this study, that cycle is already running.

Which is why I'd say this to leaders at firms still in the shallow end: the data should feel urgent, but it shouldn't feel discouraging. Every firm in the active deployer group started where you are. You don't need to rebuild everything at once. You need to be moving, intentionally, with your people at the center, because the distance between the two groups grows with each cycle that passes.

The profession I came back to serve is being rebuilt right now, and the firms doing the building are measurably better places to work, to grow, and to be a client. That's worth understanding in detail.

Read the full report: The AI-Native Firm Advantage