Five Forces Transforming Professional Services PR Right Now, and How to Stay Ahead

Gina Rubel

The professional services sector is not slowing down. According to The Business Research Company, the global market is projected to reach roughly $8.48 trillion by 2030, growing at a compound annual growth rate of about 6.2%. While size has never guaranteed stability, the companies we advise, from law firms and accounting firms to consulting and financial services agencies, are absorbing more structural change than at any point in our tenure.

While change can often seem threatening, for communicators, it is actually a mandate. The forces below are converging simultaneously, and the professional services firms that treat them as a connected strategy, rather than a series of isolated fire drills, will be the ones earning the trust of their clients and colleagues.

1. Responsible, not reckless or reluctant, AI adoption

The lazy narrative about professional services is that they resist technology. I have never bought it. As Lexitas CEO Nishat Mehta framed it in a recent conversation with my colleague Jennifer Simpson Carr, the sector is not slow to adopt technology so much as focused on responsibly adopting it. That distinction matters because caution rooted in professional responsibility is a feature, not a bug.

Technology is no longer optional. According to a Thomson Reuters survey summarized by ON24, about two-fifths of professionals in legal, tax, accounting and related fields now use generative AI tools, and the share of organizations actively using the technology nearly doubled to 22% in 2025 from 12% in 2024. The pressure is increasingly coming from clients who have adopted AI internally and now expect their advisers to demonstrate the same level of sophistication.

For communications teams, the guiding principle should be discipline. In order to adopt this new technology responsibly, communicators need to deconstruct workflows to identify ways AI genuinely helps, while insisting on quality control and keeping human judgment at the center. AI is not just an operational question. It is a client service, pricing, talent and competitive positioning issue all at once, and PR leaders should be helping shape the firm's public posture on all of it.

2. AI visibility and the rise of the earned-media signal

Prospective clients and referral sources increasingly begin their searches for advisors inside a generative AI engine, not on your website. Google's AI Overviews and other generative search tools now answer questions directly and surface names without requiring a single click. Welcome to our zero-click world.

If your professional services firm is absent or inconsistent in that environment, you are effectively invisible at the exact moment a buyer is forming an impression. As Steve Halsey wrote in O'Dwyer's, AI now "writes the first draft of your crisis narrative," whether you participate in that drafting or not.

Here is the part that should reframe how communicators spend their time. A 2026 analysis by Muck Rack found that roughly 82% to 85% of the links cited in AI-generated responses came from earned, non-paid sources such as news coverage and reviews, not firm-controlled channels. Generative AI systems reward clarity, consistency and corroboration. They look for clear attribution, credible third-party validation, and repeated association between an expert and a subject.

The practical takeaway: treat earned media, thought leadership and speaking engagements as one integrated system rather than scattered tactics. More content alone does not create visibility. Signal management does. A tax partner who publishes numerous client alerts but is never quoted in media stories or never appears on a panel will lose ground to a competitor who does all three.

3. The value question and pricing pressure

AI compresses time, and time is exactly what many professional services historically have billed for. That tension is real across the fields of law, accounting and consulting. I do not expect the billable hour or time-based models to vanish overnight. Mehta, who heads up Lexitas, a leading national provider of technology-enabled legal support services, estimates that law firms have a 10-to-50-year transition toward outcome-based pricing, and after a career in legal communications, I think that sounds about right. But a long transition is not a reprieve. It still requires professional services firms to prepare now.

This is where public relations earns its keep. When efficiency gains raise the obvious client question, "Why am I paying the same for work that took less time?" professional services firms need a clear, defensible story about value. That story is not about hours. It is about judgment, risk allocation, media access, industry fluency, and outcomes. PR and marketing leaders should help professional services firms articulate their value proposition before clients force the conversation. Otherwise, the firms that wait will have the answer determined for them.

4. Marketing, PR and Communications belong in the strategy conversation

For decades, marketing, PR, communications and business development in professional services were treated as tactical support. Lawyers, CPAs, partners or principals asked for materials, and communicators produced them. That model no longer reflects how these businesses compete. Industry observers now describe a two-speed economy, in which firms with stronger operational alignment and clearer market positioning are pulling away from the rest.

Consider growth through lateral or senior hires, a strategy common across the sector. Research presented at a recent Legal Marketing Association conference found that nearly 70% of lateral partners underperform expectations and almost half leave within five years. Those failures are rarely about capability. They are about integration: internal communication, client outreach, cross-practice collaboration and market positioning that never got coordinated. Those are communications problems, which make them business problems.

I am not arguing that communicators should replace subject-matter leaders in governance. These remain expert-led institutions, as they should. However, excluding the people responsible for client engagement, market intelligence, reputation, and firm positioning creates blind spots that competitive firms can no longer afford. In many organizations, communications leaders have already earned the seat. The open question is whether leadership structures have caught up.

5. Reputation resilience in an age of misinformation and deepfakes

Perception is nine-tenths of one’s truth, and generative AI has poured accelerant on that. Fabricated statements, deepfakes and coordinated misinformation now can damage credibility within hours, long before facts catch up. In this environment, communicators are not just storytellers. We are risk managers and stewards of trust. Just think of the AI slop that floods your feed daily, the fake clips and fabricated "news" videos that millions believe are real before a fact-checker ever weighs in.

Reputation is not built in the moment a crisis hits. It is built on everything you do beforehand, and it rests on three things: clarity, consistency and courage. Consider CrowdStrike. On July 19, 2024, a faulty update to the cybersecurity firm's Falcon software crashed an estimated 8.5 million Windows systems in what has been called the largest IT outage in history, disrupting airlines, banks and hospitals worldwide. Within hours, CEO George Kurtz was on live television taking responsibility and making one thing unambiguous: this was a software defect, not a cyberattack. The company reinforced that same message across its blog, its support portal and a public letter to customers.

That combination is rarer than it should be. As crisis-communications experts observed in Cybersecurity Dive, an immediate, unreserved apology is uncommon in an industry more prone to deflecting blame. Companies that acknowledge and own a problem early position themselves as the authority on their own situation. CrowdStrike's response was not flawless. Offering some affected partners $10 food-delivery vouchers struck many as tone-deaf against the scale of the damage. However, the core communications discipline, clarity about what happened, consistency across every channel and the courage to own it publicly and quickly, is exactly what kept a catastrophic operational failure from becoming a catastrophic loss of trust.

For professional services specifically, where the “product” is based on confidence in your advice, thatr eservoir of trust is the whole game.

The through-line is trust

A single thread runs through all five forces: trust. AI adoption is a trust question. AI visibility is about which sources systems trust enough to surface. Pricing is about trusting that the value is real. A seat at the table reflects trust in communications as a strategic function. Reputation is trust made visible.

That is also why the human element is not going away. Cision's “Inside PR 2026” study of nearly 600 professionals found that storytelling was the most in-demand skill for the year, cited by 59% of respondents, ahead of media relations and strategic planning. The tools are changing fast, but the fundamentals are not. Be clear about what you stand for. Be consistent across every channel. Be courageous under pressure. In a market moving this quickly, that discipline is not just good communications. It is the strongest competitive advantage a professional services firm has.

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Gina F. Rubel, Esq., is Founder and CEO of Furia Rubel Communications, a public relations, crisis communications and marketing agency serving professional services clients. She is an attorney, author of "Everyday PR," co-host of “On Record PR” and a Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management. Connect with her on LinkedIn at in/ginafuriarubel/ or at www.furiarubel.com.