How AI is impacting lawyers, auditors, and accountants holds lessons for us all

S·Eye on AIHow AI is impacting lawyers, auditors, and accountants holds lessons for us allBY Jeremy KahnBY Jeremy KahnEditor, AIJeremy KahnEditor, AIJeremy Kahn is the AI editor at Fortune, spearheading the publication's coverage of artificial intelligence

He also co- Eye on AI, Fortune’s flagship AI

SEE FULL BIOLawyers and other fessionals, such as auditors and accountants, are more ly to report gains from AI than some other "knowledge workers. " But how AI is changing these fessions holds lessons for us all

Getty ImagesHello and welcome to Eye on AI

In today’s edition…the U

Senate rejects moratorium on state-level AI laws…Meta unveils its new AI organization…Microsoft says AI can out diagnose doctors…and Anthropic shows why you shouldn’t let an AI agent run your just yet

AI is rapidly changing work for many of those in fessional services—lawyers, accountants, auditors, compliance officers, consultants, and tax advisors

In many ways, the experience of these fessionals, and the es they work for, are a harbinger of what’s ly to happen for other kinds of knowledge workers in the near future

Because of this, it was interesting to hear the discussion yesterday at a conference on the “Future of fessionals” at Oxford University’s Said School of

The conference was sponsored by Thomson Reuters, in part to coincide with the publication of a report it commissioned on trends in fessionals’ use of AI

Slightly more than half—53%—of the respondents said their firm had found at least one AI use case that was earning a return, which is twice what other, broader surveys have t to find

Not surprisingly, Thomson Reuters found it was the fessional firms where AI usage was part of a well-defined strategy and that had implemented governance structures around AI implementation that were most ly to see gains from the nology

Interestingly, among firms where AI adoption was less structured, 64% of those surveyed still reported ROI from at least one use case, which may reflect how powerful and time-saving these tools can be even when used by individuals to imve their own workflows

The biggest factors holding back AI use cases, the respondents said, included concerns inaccuracy (with 50% of those surveyed noting this was a blem) and data security (42%)

For more on how law firms are using AI, check out this feature from my Fortune colleague Jeff John Roberts

Mind the gaps Here are a few tidbits from the conference worth highlighting:Mari Sako, the Oxford fessor of management studies who helped organize the conference, talked the three gaps that fessionals needed to watch out for in trying to manage AI implementation: One was the responsibility gap between model developers, application builders, and end users of AI models

Who bears responsibility for the model’s accuracy and possible harms

A second was the principles to practice gap

Es enact high-minded “Responsible AI” principles but then the teams building or deploying AI ducts struggle to operationalize them

One reason this happens is that first gap—it means that teams building AI applications may not have visibility into the data used to train a model they are deploying or detailed information how it may perform

This can make it hard to apply AI principles transparency and mitigating bias, among other things

Finally, she said, there is a goals gap

Is everyone in the aligned why AI is being used in the first place

Is it for human augmentation or automation

Is it operational efficiency or revenue growth

Is the goal to be more accurate than a human, or simply to come close to human performance at a lower cost

What role should environmental sustainability play in these decisions

Not a substitute for human judgment Ian Freeman, a partner at KPMG UK, talked his firm’s increasing use of AI tools to help auditors

In the past, auditors were forced to rely on sampling transactions, trying to apply more scrutiny to those that presented a bigger risk

But now, with AI, it is possible to run a screen on every single transaction

But still, it is the riskiest transactions that should get the most scrutiny and AI can help identify those

Freeman said AI could also help more junior auditors understand the rationale for bing certain transactions

And he said AI models could help with a lot of routine financial analysis

But he said KPMG had a policy of not deploying AI in situations that called for human judgment

Auditing is full of such cases, such as deciding on materiality thresholds, making a call whether a client has submitted enough evidence to justify a particular accounting treatment, or deciding on appriate warranty reserves for a new duct

That sounds good, but I also wonder the ability of AI models to act as tutors or digital mentors to junior auditors, helping them to develop their fessional judgment

Surely, that seems it might be a good use case for AI too

A senior partner from a large law firm (parts of the conference were conducted under Chatham House Rules, so I can’t name them) noted that many corporate legal departments are embracing AI faster than legal firms—something the Thomson Reuters survey also showed—and that this disparity was putting pressure on the firms

Corporate counsel are demanding that external lawyers be more transparent their AI usage—and critically, putting pressure on legal bills on the theory that many legal tasks can now be done in far fewer billable hours

Changing career paths and the need for AI expertise AI is also possibly going to change how fessional service firms think career paths within their and even who leads these firms, several lawyers at the conference said

AI expertise is increasingly important to how these firms operate, and yet it is difficult to attract the talent these es need if these “non-qualified” nical experts (the term “non-qualified” is simply used to denote an employee who has not been admitted to the bar, but its pejorative connotations are hard to escape) know they will always be treated as second-class compared to the client-facing lawyers and also are ineligible for motion to the highest ranks of the firm’s management

Michael Buenger, executive vice president and chief operating officer at the National Center for State Courts in the U. , said that if large law firms had trouble attracting and retaining AI expertise, the situation was far worse for governments

And he pointed out that judges and juries were increasingly being asked to rule on evidence, particularly evidence, but also other kinds of documentary evidence, that might be AI manipulated, but without access to independent expertise to help them make calls what has been altered by AI and how

If not addressed, he said, this could seriously undermine faith in the courts to der justice

There were lots more insights from the conference, but that’s all we have space for today

Note: The essay above was written and edited by humans

The news items below are curated by the author

Short summaries of the relevant stories were created using AI

These summaries were then edited and fact-checked by the author, who also wrote the blurb headlines

This entire was then further edited by additional humans

Com@jeremyakahnWant to know more how to use AI to transform your

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AI IN THE NEWSSenate strips 10-year moratorium on state AI laws from Trump tax bill

Senate voted 99-1 to remove the controversial measure from President Donald Trump’s landmark “Big Beautiful Bill. ” The restrictions had been supported by Silicon Valley companies and venture capitalists as well as their allies in the Trump administration

Bipartisan opposition to the moratorium—led by Sen

Marsha Blackburn—centered on preserving state-level tections Tennessee’s Elvis Act, which tects citizens from unauthorized use of their voice or ness, including in AI-generated content

Critics warned that in the absence of federal AI regulation, the ban on state-level laws would leave U

Citizens with no tection from AI harms at all

But companies argue that the increasing patchwork of state-level AI regulation is unworkable, hampering AI gress

Read more from Bloomberg News here

Meta announced new AI leadership team and key hires from rival AI labs

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent a memo to employees formally announcing the creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs, a new organization uniting the company’s foundational AI model, duct, and Fundamental AI Re (FAIR) teams under a single umbrella

Zuckerberg also announced the hiring of 11 minent AI reers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic

You can read more Meta’s AI talent raid from Wired here

Cloudflare begins blocking AI web-crawlers by default

Internet content dery vider Cloudflare announced it has begun blocking AI companies’ web crawlers from accessing website content by default

Owners of the websites can choose to unblock specific crawlers—such as those Google uses to build its index—or even opt for a “pay per crawl” option that will allow them to monetize the scraping of their content

EYE ON AI REEven better than House

Microsoft has unveiled an AI system for medical diagnoses that it claims can accurately diagnose complex cases four times more accurately than individual human doctors (under certain conditions—more on that in a sec. ) The “Microsoft AI Diagnostic Orchestrator” (MAI-DxO—gotta love those AI acronyms) consists of five AI “agents” that each have a distinct role to play in scouring the medical literature, hypothesizing what the patient’s condition might be, ordering tests to eliminate possibilities, and even trying to optimize these tests to derive the most useful information at the least cost

These five “AI doctors” then engage in a cess Microsoft is dubbing “chain of debate,” where they collaborate and critique one another, ultimately arriving at a diagnosis

Microsoft tried powering the system with different AI models from OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic, and DeepSeek, but found it worked best when using OpenAI’s o3 model (Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI, sells OpenAI's models through its cloud service, and depends on OpenAI for many of its own AI offerings)

As for the poor performance of the human docs, it is important to note that in the test they were not allowed to consult either medical textbooks or colleagues

Nonetheless, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman said the system could transform healthcare—although the company also said MAI-DxO is just a re ject and is not yet being turned into a duct

You can read more from the Financial Times here

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BRAIN FOODAI tries to run a vending machine

Hilarity ensues, Part Deux

A month ago in the re section of this, I wrote re from Andon Labs what happens when you try to have various AI models run a simulated vending machine

Now, Anthropic teamed up with Andon Labs to test one of its models, Claude 3. 7 Sonnet, to see how it did running a real-life vending machine in Anthropic’s San Francisco office

The answer, as it turns out, is not well at all

The entire Anthropic blog makes for fun reading

And the experiment makes it that AI agents bably are nowhere near ready for a lot of complex, multi-step tasks over long time periods

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