Highlights
- Embedded across firms properly, AI can help firms strengthen expertise, create new services and improve client outcomes while keeping human judgement at the centre.
- Firms need high-quality data, the right technology architecture, workforce adoption and cultural change to embed AI into everyday workflows and unlock long-term value.
- Inflexion's dedicated digital, data and AI specialists work alongside management teams to identify high-impact use cases, accelerate enterprise-wide AI adoption and turn emerging technologies into competitive advantage across professional services businesses.
Technology and AI represent a significant transformation opportunity for professional services businesses. Professional services has long been an important area of focus for Inflexion, and our investments across a broad range of businesses in the sector mean we are seeing first-hand how AI is creating opportunities and driving change. Support from an experienced backer can help firms move from experimentation to enterprise-wide adoption and maximise the opportunity.
For professional services firms, the opportunity is twofold: using AI to transform their own operations and enhance client delivery, while also developing new capabilities to help clients adopt AI across their businesses. As organisations move beyond experimenting with generative AI tools towards enterprise-wide adoption, this is creating new opportunities for advisers to help clients rethink data, technology, operating models and workforce capabilities.
“Adoption is a key barrier to growth,” says Isabelle Pagnotta, Partner and Head of Business Services at Inflexion, referring to the potential to be left behind if your team doesn’t adapt. “There is a big human aspect – people need to be open to embracing change and that comes from talking about it and experimenting with it. Everyone has the tools but not everyone has adopted it.”
And that’s because not everyone knows where to start. "There is a huge industry emerging around helping organisations prepare their businesses for AI at an enterprise level," says Isabelle. "It’s about far more than Claude or ChatGPT. Companies need clean, accessible data, the right technology architecture and the skills to embed AI into everyday workflows. In the near term, I see a growth of newer capabilities in professional services firms assisting clients in AI adoption and training.”
The pace of adoption has accelerated rapidly as businesses seek to avoid falling behind, with many recognising that successful AI implementation depends as much on people and processes as it does on technology.
The level of workflow change AI enables can feel overwhelming. One of the advantages of working across a sizeable portfolio is being able to share practical experience, what has worked, what hasn’t and how businesses are approaching adoption.
Indeed, Inflexion’s in-house value acceleration team includes experts in digital, data and AI, as well as a growing network of Inflexion Ignite Associates, specialists from our global network that support the value acceleration team and who roll their sleeves up to work with the portfolio directly.
Not every professional services sector will change at the same speed. Activities that are highly standardised and rules-based are likely to see the fastest transformation, while advisory work requiring judgement and trusted relationships is expected to remain human-led. Rather than replacing expertise, AI is allowing professionals to spend more time applying it.
As AI becomes more widely available, combining high-quality data with domain expertise, cultural change and the ability to turn insight into action will become crucial.
Since inception, Inflexion has worked with a wide range of professional services businesses and therefore understands the challenges they can face. Its current portfolio management teams are using AI to solve different commercial challenges, deepen expertise, strengthen client relationships and accelerate growth:
dss+ – The firm has launched a new AI-powered platform to help organisations spot risk earlier and act faster.
Axiom – Embedding AI across its platform has helped Axiom to improve service delivery and create new revenue streams.
dss+: using AI to move from hindsight to prevention
dss+ has been helping organisations improve safety by spotting operational risks and increasing awareness for over half a century. The specialist consultancy has married its expertise with AI to help clients move from understanding what happened to anticipating what lies ahead through an innovative prevention intelligence system.
dss+360 is the firm’s AI-powered platform which aggregates operational, behavioural and cultural data. Rather than relying solely on retrospective dashboards, the platform helps organisations identify weak signals, detect patterns and focus interventions where risk is most concentrated – helping leaders to spot risk earlier and act faster. Inflexion has played an important role in accelerating the platform’s development.
In the past, dashboards were largely compliance-driven. They gave organisations visibility of what had happened. What AI enables us to do now is combine 55 years of dss+ methodology and experience with much greater processing power to identify patterns and risks that would be difficult for humans to spot alone.
The platform’s intelligence is powered by Bradley AI, dss+’s proprietary engine named after the Bradley Curve, a long-established methodology in workplace safety conceived at dss+ itself. Bradley AI analyses large volumes of operational data to surface critical risks and early warning signals, enabling faster and more targeted intervention.
The precision matters. For example, one client provided dss+ with one million safety observations collected over a year. While analysing it would have previously taken more than a week, dss+360 processed the data within hours. The time saved was about much more than productivity; the analysis revealed that fewer than 5% of observations related to the company’s most critical risks, prompting leadership to change behaviours and priorities.
dss+ sees AI as augmenting expertise rather than replacing it. “Our mission is risk reduction, not time savings,” says Davide. “AI helps us be faster and more accurate, but human judgement remains critical. There is no automated decision or recommendation that goes to a client without expert review.”
Alongside this workstream, Inflexion is helping dss+ to explore AI-enabled efficiencies within the business itself. The efforts were initiated by Inflexion’s value acceleration team and are being led by dss+’s CTO and include engaging with AI for proposal generation and content creation.
Axiom: AI as a driver of new products and services
While AI is often associated with efficiency gains and cost reduction, Axiom has found it is increasingly a driver of commercial growth. AI is now embedded across the platform and part of the value creation plan through a centralised CTO-led strategy spanning service delivery, products, content and operational efficiency, supported by Inflexion’s in-house AI expertise.
The business was carved out of Marlowe plc in 2024 and today provides software and services to more than 40,000 clients worldwide, with its 1,300 specialists supporting organisations including Bentley, Walmart, Shell Energy and Sony.
“AI represents one of the largest structural opportunities the governance, risk and compliance (GRC) market has seen in years,” enthuses CEO Alex Dacre.
The Axiom team is working with Inflexion to harness AI to create new services and expanding expert capacity. Because Axiom operates in high-stakes areas including employment law, health and safety, cyber security and ISO certification, the technology must be implemented carefully.
We use AI carefully and with major guardrails. The human layer of what we do remains front and centre. Judgement, interpretation, relationships and human accountability remain essential.
Rather than replacing people, Axiom is using AI to augment expertise. AI-first advisory is rolling out across Employment Law, Health & Safety, Cyber and ISO, automating repetitive tasks such as drafting contracts, policies and evidence gathering. This is helping expand expert capacity while allowing consultants to spend more time on higher-value advisory work and customer interaction.
“Our experts are able to spend more time focused on higher-risk and more value-add areas for the client,” Alex explains.
It means AI is not only improving service delivery but also creating new revenue streams. In cyber services, Axiom has launched continuous AI testing and cyber essentials automation, while its Enterprise Compliance products now include AI-powered data insights. In e-learning, conversational learning has already been deployed, using Axiom’s proprietary content and decades of regulatory data to create a more interactive, AI-supported learning experience for customers. The business is also rolling out LLM-powered authoring and change detection across its regulatory intelligence capabilities, helping clients navigate evolving compliance requirements faster and more effectively.
Alex is clear that to succeed, AI must be combined with deep domain expertise, proprietary content and strong operational discipline – and humans remain key.
If you are running a professional services business and want to explore how AI could accelerate your growth, please get in touch.
