Neil Araujo – CEO & Co-Founder, iManage.
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We are living through a period of profound change—one that is affecting not just how we work but also how knowledge workers and professional services firms alike structure their businesses and think about where they add unique value and differentiate themselves. Nobody can predict exactly what the industry will look like in 10 years. What we know for certain is that we will be working differently, and the professionals and organizations that are not preparing for that now will find themselves overwhelmed when it arrives.
The “iManage Knowledge Work Benchmark Report 2026“ surveyed more than 3,000 knowledge work professionals across law firms, legal departments and professional services organizations worldwide. The data shows that there is a measurable gap between organizations that are building the foundation to operate in an AI-driven environment and those that are not—and that gap is widening.
In legal and other professional services, the relationship between time and value is evolving. The volume and velocity at which work can be produced is increasing rapidly, and that creates both challenges and opportunities.
The work that is most easily automated—drafting standard agreements, pulling precedent, summarizing documents—will increasingly be handled that way. That frees professionals to focus on what AI cannot replicate: judgment, critical thinking and analysis. Professional services firms that equip themselves with the right tools will be able to do more of that higher-value work and do it better. Those that do not will find it harder to keep pace with the volume of inbound work that AI is going to generate.
This simple point—that when the nature of the work changes, the tools must change to keep pace—came up in a conversation I had recently with a customer in the South. I asked them what they do when it snows where they live, and they said they wait until it melts. That may work in Austin, Texas, but in Chicago, where I live, you need a snowblower to clear your driveway because you’re expected to still show up to work. It’s a similar situation for professional services: Over time, the way you work and what you work on will look very different—and the organizations that prepare themselves now will be far better positioned to serve clients at the level those clients expect.
A Confidence Gap, And What It Reveals
The research puts numbers to this. The “iManage Knowledge Work Benchmark Report 2026” placed respondents along a knowledge maturity curve. Among the most mature organizations, 88% to 92% believed the changes ahead would have a positive impact on their business. Among the least mature, only 55% to 65% felt the same. That is a significant divergence, and it reflects genuine differences in how these organizations have invested.
The most mature professional services firms anchor their AI strategies in data quality. They treat institutional knowledge as an asset to be captured, structured and made accessible—so that it can directly support business objectives rather than sit dormant in systems that are hard to search and harder to act on. Their people adopt new tools early not because they are required to but because the culture supports experimentation and learning. In less mature organizations, roughly 40% of end users ultimately adopt new tools. That difference compounds over time, and it shows up directly in how confident those organizations feel about what is coming.
Preparing For The Future
There are several practical steps that professional services can take to make sure they are ready for what is coming.
One is to prioritize IA over AI—in other words, shore up your information architecture before layering on AI tools. This means having a reliable, well-governed repository with sufficient context to make that information useful to a human or an agent.
At the same time, firms need to remove friction from the way knowledge is created, captured and brought into the organization. The platforms and systems used to organize knowledge work should support people within the applications and workflows they already use, making it natural to save a new document, bring existing content into the appropriate repository or file an email without interrupting their work. Integrations with tools such as Microsoft 365 are critical because they make capturing knowledge seamless; there is no need to leave the application or interrupt the workflows. When the user experience is intuitive and knowledge capture becomes part of the everyday workflow, firms are far more likely to preserve the context and institutional knowledge that AI systems need to deliver useful results.
Finally, governance cannot be bolted on after the fact. This is something professional services need to address from the get-go. Without clear rules around what data can be accessed, where it is processed and how long it remains in place before being deemed obsolete, new AI tools—and especially agentic workflows—risk creating chaos.
A Strong Foundation, A Stronger Future
Professional services firms that invest now in their knowledge infrastructure—in the quality of their data, the accessibility and governance of their institutional knowledge and the capabilities of their people—are the ones best positioned to absorb this change and act on it. Those that do not will find the gap harder to close as the pace of change increases.
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