The two forces reshaping every business – and the framework helping you lead through both.
There’s a tension building in boardrooms, law firms, tax practices, and compliance teams across Australia. It doesn’t always make it onto the agenda, but it’s there in every conversation about technology investment, every regulatory update, and every discussion about what it means to find growth and to stay competitive.
This tension has two names: complexity and confidence.
Complexity is intensifying. The sheer volume and speed of change, the pace of AI advancement, the weight of regulatory mandates – it all only continues to increase.
And confidence? Confidence is being stress-tested. For professionals operating in highly regulated environments this is not a minor inconvenience, confidence is a requirement.
So the real question isn’t whether to invest in AI. That debate is largely settled. The question is how to turn AI investment into genuine competitive advantage – without losing control, compromising security, or leaving yourself exposed when the auditors knock.
Two Waves, One Imperative
Two major forces are driving the complexity curve right now.
The first is AI. What started as experimentation has moved quickly into workflow transformation and, increasingly, agentic AI systems that don’t just respond to a prompt, but act towards an outcome. This shift is creating a new set of expectations: leadership wants scale, employees want efficiency, and customers expect excellence.
The second force is regulatory compliance. The burden of compliance mandates is growing, and it’s not straightforward. Different timelines. Different jurisdictions. Different approaches. The cost of getting it wrong goes beyond fines and penalties – though those are significant. The deeper cost is the erosion of trust. And in professional services, trust is everything.
Navigating both of these waves requires more than deploying the latest tools. It requires a deliberate approach to AI.
The Problem With Only Measuring Cost and Time
Here’s where a lot of organisations get stuck. The traditional ROI debate around AI has always centred on cost savings and time efficiencies. And those things matter – they’re real, measurable, and worth tracking.
But if that’s all you measure, you’re missing most of the value. And, critically, you’re missing most of the risk.
In professional services, missing risk isn’t a learning experience. It becomes a headline.
Consider this: in the 2025 Thomson Reuters Future of Professionals study, only 14% of Australian organisations said they have an AI strategy. But the ones that do have been able to unlock 2x revenue growth. That gap isn’t about technology – it’s about intention and measurement.
Think of it this way: if all you measure is speed, you might be accelerating very fast in the wrong direction. We’ve all met someone who is energetic, efficient – and yet still incorrect. That’s not a position any professional wants to be in.
What’s needed is a broader framework – one that captures the full picture of AI’s value and its risks.
A Five Pillar Framework for Measuring Real AI ROI
1. Financial ROI – The Foundation, Not the Ceiling
Financial returns are the starting point, not the destination. Cost savings, time efficiencies, unlocked capacity that can be redeployed to higher-value work – these are legitimate and important metrics. But this is the floor of what AI can deliver, not the ceiling.
Organisations that look towards a deeper AI strategy are the ones creating sustainable growth. Financial ROI tells you if AI is working today. The other four pillars tell you if it’s building something that can outpace your competitors, tomorrow.
2. Risk Management ROI – The Trust Multiplier
This is the separation between general-purpose AI and fiduciary-grade AI.
General-purpose AI can quickly give you plausible answers for generic tasks. . But in highly regulated professional environments, when almost right just isn’t good enough, you need AI designed at every stage of its lifecycle for regulated workflows, grounded in authoritative content, with data security as a bedrock.
Organisations that get this right aren’t just reducing compliance burden. They’re building competitive advantage: faster response times, better adaptation to regulatory change, fewer penalties, and a foundation of trust that clients, regulators, and courts can rely on.
This is an area Thomson Reuters has invested in deeply. CoCounsel, the company’s professional-grade AI technology, now has over one million users worldwide who rely on it daily precisely because it’s built to meet the standards that professional environments demand.
3. Talent ROI – Where Scale Happens
Let’s be clear, AI doesn’t create value, the people who use it do.
In Australia, there are two dimensions to the talent challenge: capacity and capability. Capacity is increasingly addressable, the Jobs and Skills Commission identified that 30% of assessed occupations face a national shortage, and AI-driven productivity gains can meaningfully move towards bridging that gap.
But capability is where the long-term advantage is built. Upskilling, reskilling, and genuinely reimagining how work gets done – this is the harder, more important work. If organisations don’t invest here, AI ROI drops. It’s that simple. The technology without talent skilled to use it thoughtfully is just expensive software.
4. Innovation ROI – From Efficiency to Advantage
This is the pillar where the rubber meets the road: did we actually do what we said we’d do with the time and capacity AI freed up?
The productivity gains from AI are only valuable if they’re reinvested – into new services, better client experiences, stronger pricing positions, or entirely reimagined ways of working. That requires a culture of experimentation, genuine curiosity about what clients need, and the willingness, and ability, to adapt faster than the competition.
Innovation ROI is what transforms short-term efficiency into long-term competitive advantage. It’s the difference between using AI to do the same things slightly faster, and using AI to do things that weren’t possible before.
5. Societal Impact ROI – Building Legacy
This one is harder to quantify, but it might be the most important of all.
The organisations that will define the next decade of professional services aren’t just the ones that deployed AI earliest — they’re the ones that did it responsibly, transparently, and in service of something larger than their own bottom line.
Thomson Reuters has been part of the professional services ecosystem for over 150 years. In Australia, our story began with The Law Book Company in 1898. What’s kept us relevant across more than a century of change isn’t any single technology or product – it’s a consistent commitment to serving customers today while informing the way forward and providing the insight and innovation they’ll need to succeed tomorrow.
For Thomson Reuters, the societal impact pillar means several things.
- The Thomson Reuters Foundation leads the AI Company Data Initiative in partnership with UNESCO, helping map how businesses, particularly small and medium enterprises, are using AI, grounded in UNESCO’s ethical AI principles
- Our Thomson Reuters Labs team is convening the Trusted AI Alliance to establish guardrails for agentic AI as it continues to evolve.
- Through Thomson Reuters Ventures, we’re investing over $150 million in start-ups across legal, tax, trade, risk, and media. The best innovation doesn’t always come from within, and we’re here to support those who’s curiosity has gone down different paths to success.
- And, Reuters remains committed to its approach over more than 170 years: advancing the use of new technologies to deliver trusted news with speed, accuracy, insight and analysis.
There’s no single formula for the societal pillar. It has to be authentic. Every organisation will express it differently. But the thread running through all of it is the same: responsible information, responsible technology, and professional-grade outcome.
2026: The Year of AI Impact
If 2023 was the year of AI expectation, 2024 was the year of experimentation, and 2025 was the year of implementation – then 2026 is the year of AI impact. This year AI has to prove itself.
Not through hype. Not through adoption metrics. Through real differentiation, and measurable, defensible impact.
The organisations that will lead this moment are the ones approaching AI not as a cost-cutting exercise, but as a strategic transformation. They’re measuring value across all five pillars. They’re investing in the capability of their people, not just the capability of their tools. They’re choosing AI that can stand up to scrutiny – not just AI that sounds impressive in a demo.
The question facing every organisation right now isn’t whether to use AI. It’s whether you’re going to be part of the cohort that leads this transformation in a trusted, confident, and deliberate manner.
The framework is there. The tools are ready. The moment is now.
