Moving From Ai Experimentation to Ai Confidence as an Australian Professional Service Business

For Australian professional service businesses, 2025 was the year of exploration and experimentation with Ai. Many businesses have spent the last 12 months running pilots, testing products and then evaluating them. However, as we enter a new year, that exploration period has naturally phased out.

For some, internal policies have made the testing period lengthy and, in certain instances, expensive, leading to increased internal pressure to validate and demonstrate the Return on Investment (ROI).

Externally, businesses are also facing mounting pressure from clients to adopt Ai. Clients are aware of and understand the benefits Ai offers, from increased efficiency to cost savings, and are becoming wiser about how and where they spend their money. They want transparency, value and a breakdown of explainability from their professional service providers, especially when it comes to budgets. If, as an organisation, you’re found to be paying a human to carry out repetitive administrative tasks that could be automated with technology, don’t be surprised if business dwindles.

Clients are increasingly expecting savings to be passed on, not kept for profit. If it doesn’t happen, they are not afraid to replace long-standing business relationships with new ones that offer innovative and cutting-edge technological solutions.

So, how can Australian Professional Service Businesses accurately measure the ROI of Ai?

Increased Efficiency

With Gen Ai, tools and agents can efficiently assist with the mundane, repetitive grunt work that was traditionally performed by humans. The increased speed Ai offers enables businesses to be more agile in their decision-making, opening up and presenting opportunities that may previously have been missed.

If tasks that once took days or even weeks to complete are now being delivered in a fraction of the time, your business is likely already seeing a tangible return on its Ai investment.

Less Human Input on Tasks

While all work and output generated by Ai needs to be evaluated, examined and reviewed by a human, Gen Ai is becoming smarter and more accurate. The reduction in hallucinated content is particularly prevalent in the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models, which are known for improving the factual accuracy of Ai by grounding the responses and outputs from the information or documents provided to the model.

In many cases, the RAG levels of accuracy exceed human ability, making the output more, not less, accurate. Measuring the accuracy of the work produced will provide insight into whether your Ai tools are providing a good return on investment.

Achieving Cost Savings

With automated workflows and Ai agents, the drudgery and time-consuming, repetitive tasks previously handled by humans can now be predominantly managed or performed by technology, resulting in cost savings from both efficiency and human labour perspectives.

If your Ai is working, the business should be seeing cost savings across administrative tasks. If the firm you work for is not achieving cost savings across administrative tasks, then it’s likely not being leveraged correctly.

As we head into 2026, it is clear that the pressure on Australian Professional Service Businesses to demonstrate ROI from Ai technology investments made in 2025 will increase.

The businesses that want to grow, remain competitive and thrive in an ever-evolving landscape must be able to leverage Ai with confidence and measure its ROI effectively. Professional services businesses that fail to leverage Ai to improve business outcomes in 2026 will be left behind.

Madeleine Porter is Legal Industry Expert APAC at iManage.

Last Updated on January 13, 2026 by Madeleine Porter