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Numbers at the scale of billions have a way of feeling abstract -- impressive in a headline, irrelevant by the second paragraph. So before getting to $32 billion, start smaller. Start with 240 hours. That is the number of hours per year the average legal professional expects to reclaim as a result of AI, according to the Thomson Reuters Future of Professionals Report 2025. Up from 200 hours the year before. At an average professional billing rate, that is roughly $19,000 in recovered productive capacity per person, per year. Multiply that across the US legal, tax, and accounting sectors, and you arrive at the $32 billion figure. It is not a projection built on optimistic assumptions about a technology that might mature someday. It is an extrapolation of time savings that professionals are already reporting today in firms that have moved from experimentation to actual strategy. That distinction matters.
Where the $32 Billion Comes From
The Thomson Reuters data breaks AI's financial impact into four categories, each of which contributes to the aggregate number in different ways and at different timescales.
The fastest-moving category is operational efficiency: time saved, errors reduced, response times improved. These gains show up quickly once AI is integrated into daily workflows, and they are the ones most firms point to when they talk about early ROI. They are real and significant, but they are also the most commoditized. Every firm that adopts AI with even minimal strategic intent will eventually capture these gains. The question is when and how much ground they will have lost to firms that started earlier.
The second category is quality improvement: better client communication, more accurate outputs, advanced analytics, and stronger risk mitigation. These gains take longer to materialize and require more deliberate workflow design, but they translate most directly into client retention and the ability to charge for expertise rather than hours. In a profession moving steadily away from billable-hour pricing models -- a third of firms in the Thomson Reuters study are already billing a higher proportion of work on non-hourly arrangements -- quality improvements are the foundation of sustainable revenue growth.
The third category is talent, which most firms undercount in their ROI calculations. AI that removes administrative burden from skilled professionals improves job satisfaction, reduces turnover, and makes firms more competitive in recruiting. Given the ongoing talent pressures in public accounting, the cost of replacing a mid-level professional runs well into six figures when recruiting, onboarding, and ramp-up time are factored in. AI that keeps good people in their seats has real dollar value, even if it rarely appears in a technology ROI calculation.
The fourth category is top- and bottom-line growth: revenue expansion, cost reduction, and the compounding advantage that comes from reinvesting early efficiency gains into better service delivery.
The Firms Capturing This Value Are Not the Largest Ones
A reasonable assumption is that the $32 billion impact flows primarily to large firms with large technology budgets and dedicated innovation teams. The Thomson Reuters data does not support that assumption. The strongest predictor of AI ROI is not firm size. It is the presence of a visible, documented AI strategy -- and that is something a ten-person CPA firm can build as readily as a national practice.
Firms with a documented AI approach are 3.5 times more likely to see measurable benefits than firms without one. They are nearly twice as likely to see direct revenue growth. These ratios hold across firm sizes and across the range of services accounting firms provide. What separates the firms capturing value from those that are not is deliberateness -- a clear answer to what they are trying to accomplish with AI, which workflows it will touch, and how they will know it is working.
The 22% of firms that currently have visible AI strategies are not uniformly large or well-resourced. They are uniformly intentional. That is an important distinction for smaller and mid-size accounting firms that may assume the AI ROI story is someone else's story. It is not.
The Time Value of Starting Now
The 240-hour figure deserves more examination than it typically receives. Those are hours that legal and accounting professionals are not spending on low-value work -- document drafting, data extraction, routine research, compliance cross-referencing. They are hours that become available for the work that actually requires professional judgment: advising clients, interpreting complex situations, building relationships, and developing new service offerings.
That reallocation has a compounding quality. Professionals who spend more time on high-judgment work get better at high-judgment work. Firms whose professionals are consistently operating closer to the top of their capability range deliver better client outcomes. Better client outcomes lead to higher retention and referral rates. The $32 billion aggregate figure is, at its core, a description of what happens when a profession's most skilled people spend more of their time doing what only they can do.
Prior technology transitions in public accounting -- from manual processes to software, from desktop to cloud -- followed a similar pattern. Firms that adopted early and deliberately captured disproportionate value. The ones that waited found themselves closing a gap that had grown while they deliberated.
The Gap Is Not Staying Where It Is
The Thomson Reuters report is direct about what happens to firms that delay. Organizations without an AI strategy risk falling behind within three years as competitors reinvest their efficiency gains into lower costs and better client experiences. 30% of survey respondents already believe their organization is moving too slowly in AI adoption. That self-awareness is useful, but awareness without action doesn't close the gap.
What makes the current moment different from earlier technology transitions is the pace. AI capabilities are advancing faster than accounting software did, and the ROI for early adopters is arriving faster, too. Firms that got serious about cloud-based practice management in 2015 had years before the laggards felt meaningful competitive pressure. The Thomson Reuters data suggests the equivalent window for AI is measured in months, not years. Firms already seeing ROI are reinvesting it now. The compounding has started.
For accounting firms seeking to build their visibility and authority in a competitive market, the AI story is increasingly part of how clients evaluate and choose a firm. Not because clients want to know which tools a firm uses, but because strategic AI adoption signals something clients care about deeply: that the firm is run well, thinks ahead, and invests in the quality of its own work.
The $32 Billion Is Already Being Divided
The aggregate number is real, and it is already being distributed among the firms that moved first and moved deliberately. Every quarter that passes without a documented AI strategy is a quarter in which that distribution continues without a firm's participation. The 240 hours, the $19,000 per professional, the compounding quality and talent advantages -- none of it requires a massive technology budget or a dedicated innovation team. It requires a decision, a plan, and the discipline to follow through on both.
At Winsome Marketing, we help accounting firms build the content and authority that positions them as the kind of forward-thinking practice clients actively seek out. If your firm is ready to tell that story, we can help you tell it well.