It's easy to get caught up in the headline excitement about artificial intelligence. For the past few years, AI technology has brought a sense of magic and excitement that has generated a flurry of activity, learning and discovery in most organizations.
Yet the fervor also creates tremendous pressure on business leaders to invest in and leverage it. Firms everywhere are searching for ways to seize first-mover advantages, or at least prevent competitors' AI use from becoming disruptive. That makes foundational investment in AI technology and talent a business imperative. However, the challenge firms are facing today is how to turn that investment into value, outcomes, and strategic advantage.
As one of the top 10% of Microsoft Copilot users globally (based on active usage per license), Plante Moran has found that successfully scaling AI is less about the dollar amount invested than about encouraging human adaptability. While the firm intends to invest more than $500 million in technology advances over the next several years to continue innovating and supporting client and staff needs, achieving true AI value impact is much more than just investment and AI activity metrics.
Since AI technology is broadly accessible to everyone, a firm's true competitive advantage lies in whether or not its people trust the tools, apply them responsibly, and are willing to redesign their processes and data around them at scale. That's why our overarching AI adoption philosophy can be summed up as "value and trust before scale."
It's a philosophy that requires a strong commitment to the "people" and "process" sides of the "people, process, technology" equation. Nonetheless, with that commitment in place, there is no ceiling on the value AI can bring to team members and to client relationships.
Supercharge value
Professional services firms have reason to be optimistic about AI's impact, despite the prevailing narrative that often paints a different picture. In truth, firms do themselves a disservice when they treat their work as a commodity that AI can replace. We see it differently. We see AI supercharging and scaling the value that our team members provide — accelerating client outcomes, scaling advisory services, and compounding trust and quality.
Here's the rationale for that belief: More than ever, clients need firms' insights and ideas to help them go faster and farther. AI gives staff more time for nurturing relationships, creativity, judgment, skepticism and advice — the very things clients cherish and want professional services firms to bring to the table. We see this as being a trusted advisory. In that context, the real measure of AI success lies in how well a firm develops "trusted intelligence" to compound human judgment and creativity — which is a true winning combination.
Trusted intelligence brings together secure AI, trusted data and human expertise to help staff and clients alike move faster and make smarter decisions while preserving trust and quality. Think of it as a flywheel. It starts with teaching people how to use AI as a thought partner to augment their own intelligence. As the technology uplifts their tasks, they can then redesign their data and workflows for greater efficiency and effectiveness. We view it as a human-in-the-loop concept that ensures AI empowers and enables team members rather than substituting for industry expertise.
Make no mistake: Firms must do some heavy lifting to help reposition people, skills and talent. Still, we've already seen benefits from team members embracing this trusted intelligence approach.
Recently, for example, 1,000 of our team members constructed and proposed 2,000 AI agents as the result of an "agent builder" campaign we launched shortly after training them on the firm's AI platform. We made sure security and governance were locked down and non-negotiable first. Then, within those parameters, the campaign encouraged incremental AI proficiency and fueled innovation by asking team members to craft custom AI agents to assist with their daily workflows.
What's important to note is that the focus of this campaign wasn't on building perfect AI agents; it was on continuous learning and on adopting new mindsets about applying AI to daily work.
Cultivate trusted intelligence
Too often, AI literacy and adoption campaigns center specifically on the tools. We believe better results are achieved through deliberate, deeply value-led initiatives to build trusted intelligence. These aim to improve not only productivity but also quality, client experience and team member experience. Ultimately, firms need all their staff to lean into their mission to create value for clients and for themselves.
Although AI adoption follows a classic bell curve in most organizations, including Plante Moran, we've accelerated AI literacy and trusted intelligence through an opt-in/readiness model that allows individualized learning. Instead of an initial forced deployment to everyone, staff who wanted AI tools were given them after going through an onboarding, training, and certification process. Leaders enticed their teams to sign up, but as early adopters began talking about the benefits they were gaining, the excitement went viral from the bottom up.
This grassroots empowerment approach requires a strong foundation, but these are some of the steps we've taken to set one:
- Start with robust AI and data governance structures. Tools for the CPA profession must meet robust security standards. Therefore, our AI governance committee is a key pillar of our AI strategy. It's a cross-functional team that scrutinizes tools against a defined set of controls, policies and standards. Establishing a responsible AI stance early enables firms to move with both speed and discipline, and is a key accelerant of AI literacy and adoption.
- Set a positive tone from the top. To foster trust and buy-in, leaders must convey and model affirmative messages. Leaders should share their enthusiasm and vision for trusted intelligence, reaffirm their commitment to investing in team members and tools, and actively use AI themselves. However, they should also educate staff about the vital importance of safeguarding security by working within the established governance methodologies. It truly takes a village to both protect security and promote adoption.
- Invest in training. In addition to developing custom training on our tools, we held "office hours" to answer questions, made prompt libraries easily available, and encouraged staff to share tools, tips and insights via our enterprise networking and communication platform. Still, given how rapidly AI is advancing, we urge our team to learn by doing. Demystifying AI agents through continuous learning opportunities, for example, has given staff a greater sense of AI proficiency, thus unlocking a huge innovation pipeline.
- Dedicate "AI ambassadors" to every practice area. These AI champions are critical focal points in our efforts to scale value across the organization quickly. They are responsible not only for inspiring AI adoption and reviewing agents created by individuals within their practice areas, but also for bringing to the firm's AI Center of Excellence any agents we should consider scaling. These individuals' perspectives will also help shape our ever-evolving AI framework over time.
- Think horizontally and vertically. The horizontal plane represents overall AI enablement and the continuous learning journey. It involves accelerating everyone's AI literacy and competency, such as the agent builder campaign designed to generate excitement around everyday AI use. The vertical plane, on the other hand, represents processes for harvesting and scaling value from AI, like our AI ambassadors' roles. For example, when a team member in our audit practice developed an agent to streamline internal controls assessments, an AI ambassador brought it to the attention of our AI CoE. Now, our AI engineering team is working to rapidly scale it and incorporate it into a multi-agent workflow for others in the firm.
Not every AI agent built by staff gets published, of course. One of the primary functions of the AI CoE is to understand the problem a tool is being designed to solve, as well as the impact it might have on the overall business process. Before moving forward, a cross-functional team evaluates a tool's likely value through the lenses of user experience, business process engineering, AI engineering and more. With so many priorities and possible ideas in the funnel, it's imperative to be disciplined and not overlook this part of the process.
Redefine human ingenuity and outcomes
A "trusted intelligence" vision will accelerate client outcomes, scale advisory services, and compound trust and quality. It will enable staff to accelerate their careers as trusted advisors. These steps will allow firms to measure AI value using traditional business metrics that matter to clients and staff, rather than activity and spending metrics that don't (e.g., the number of licenses purchased, dollars invested or tokens consumed).
Indeed, token pricing adds another reason to be value-led. As AI becomes a consumption-based capability, firms need to understand not just who is using AI, but where its use is producing measurable value that meaningfully exceeds the cost of the tokens consumed.
The future of AI in professional services will not be won by the firms that spend the most. It will be won by the firms that learn the fastest, govern the smartest and empower their people to turn trusted intelligence into better outcomes.
Although AI technology is powerful and continues to improve, it is human judgment and creativity combined with trusted data that will drive real business outcomes. AI's potential is not to replace human ingenuity but to multiply it. By choosing to laser focus on value and trust before scale, AI and human expertise together can deliver lasting benefits to staff, clients and the profession.
