AI for Professional Services: Why Firms Should Audit Their Copilot Setup Before Competitors Do
By John Martines · April 10, 2026 · 5 min read
If your firm is paying for Microsoft 365 — and almost every law office, accounting firm, financial advisory and HR consultancy is — there's a good chance you're sitting on AI capability you haven't turned on yet. And...
If your firm is paying for Microsoft 365 — and almost every law office, accounting firm, financial advisory and HR consultancy is — there's a good chance you're sitting on AI capability you haven't turned on yet. And as of right now, that gap just got a lot more significant.
Microsoft recently upgraded Copilot to support what's called multi-agent collaboration. In plain English: instead of one AI assistant handling a single task, multiple AI models can now work together on a single request — each one handling the piece it's best at, then handing off to the next. Think of it like having a team of specialists instead of one generalist. One agent drafts the client summary, another cross-references your document library, another flags compliance language, and another formats the output. All in one workflow. All inside tools you're already paying for.
That's a meaningful shift. And for most professional services firms, it means the question is no longer "should we invest in AI?" It's "are we configured to actually use what we're already paying for?"
What this actually means for your firm
Let's make this concrete. Say you run a 15-person accounting firm. Your team is already using Outlook, Teams, Word, and Excel every day. You're likely on a Microsoft 365 Business Standard or Business Premium plan, which runs somewhere between $12.50 and $22 per user per month. Copilot for Microsoft 365 — the AI layer that sits on top of all of it — is an add-on at $30 per user per month.
That $30 is where most firms either tap in or leave money on the table.
Without the right setup, Copilot is just a fancier autocomplete. With the right setup — especially now that multi-agent workflows are live — it can do things like pull a client's prior-year documents from SharePoint, draft a status letter in your firm's voice, flag anything that needs partner review, and drop it into a formatted email ready to send. A task that used to take 45 minutes might take 8.
Now multiply that across 10 clients. Across a tax season. Across your entire client-facing team.
The honest answer about where most firms actually are
Here's the reality: most small and mid-sized professional services firms fall into one of three buckets.
Bucket one: they bought Microsoft 365, maybe even added the Copilot license, and nobody really uses it beyond the occasional Teams meeting summary. It's running in the background, mostly ignored.
Bucket two: a few people on the team use Copilot informally — asking it to draft an email here, summarize a document there — but there's no consistency, no training, and no intentional workflow built around it. The firm isn't getting 10% of what it could be getting.
Bucket three: they haven't touched it yet because they're waiting to "figure out AI" before they commit. Meanwhile, the firms in bucket two are already pulling ahead, even in their unoptimized state.
If you're reading this and feeling a flicker of recognition, you're probably in bucket one or two. That's not a criticism — it's where most firms are. The good news is that moving from bucket one or two into "actually using this well" isn't a six-month technology project. It's often a matter of a few focused hours with someone who knows what they're doing.
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