Published by Intent Amplify, delivering research-driven insights for legal knowledge leaders, AI leaders, risk leaders, architecture teams, legal operations leaders, innovation teams, and professional services decision-makers navigating trusted AI adoption, cited answers, governed knowledge discovery, client trust, regulatory expectations, and digital transformation.
Professional services firms do not have a content problem. They have a confidence, traceability, and governance problem.
Legal, tax, accounting, compliance, and advisory teams already sit on years of knowledge. The challenge is turning that knowledge into answers clients and professionals can trust quickly, consistently, and with source authority, citations, governance, and proof attached.
That is where Agentic RAG becomes important.
Retrieval-augmented generation connects AI to enterprise knowledge. Agentic RAG extends that foundation with planning, retrieval orchestration, source evaluation, permission-aware access, workflow logic, quality controls, and traceability. In professional-services environments, value depends not only on answer accuracy but also on the ability to verify sources, review evidence, explain reasoning, and defend outcomes.
Thomson Reuters found that 40% of professional services organizations now use GenAI, up from 22% the prior year, while 87% expect GenAI to become central to workflow within five years.¹
Progress Agentic RAG shows what this looks like in practice. In its case study with a leading European law firm, Progress helped transform legal and accounting knowledge into trusted, traceable AI answers grounded in internal expertise and selected authoritative sources.
Download the full Progress case study PDF
Key Figures for Legal Knowledge, AI, Risk, and Architecture Leaders
Agentic AI adoption remains early in professional services: 15% of organizations currently use it, 53% are planning or considering it, and 77% expect it to become central to workflow by 2030. ¹
Progress reports up to 95% faster AI-readiness and more than 80% cost savings compared with building similar RAG capabilities internally.²
Progress notes that traditional enterprise search can require employees to open 8-12 documents to answer one question.³
The featured law firm supports approximately 300 legal and accounting professionals, serves more than 20,000 clients, and processes thousands of questions per month through its AI assistant.⁴
Legal professionals expect AI to free nearly 240 hours per year, creating about $19,000 in annual value per professional.⁵
Microsoft analyzed 31,000 workers across 31 countries and found 81% of leaders expect AI agents to be integrated into company AI strategy within 12-18 months.⁶
IBM expects AI-enabled workflows to grow from 3% in 2024 to 25% by 2026, an 8x increase.⁷
Google Cloud supports grounding checks with a score from 0 to 1, up to 200 facts, and 10,000 characters per fact.⁸
McKinsey estimates agent-enabled process reinvention can reduce time to resolution by 60-90% in selected workflows.⁹
PwC analyzed nearly one billion job ads and found AI-exposed industries had 3x higher revenue-per-worker growth.¹⁰
Why Cited, Governed Answers Matter in Legal and Professional Services
Clients do not pay professional services firms for fluent paragraphs. They pay for judgment, accountability, and defensible advice. That judgment depends on evidence, source authority, and professional review.
That judgment depends on evidence. A legal answer must connect to statutes, internal interpretations, policy documents, client context, jurisdictional nuance, and current guidance. A tax answer must survive scrutiny. A compliance answer must be explainable, traceable, and audit-ready.
Agentic RAG strengthens that chain. It retrieves the right material, evaluates context, produces a grounded draft, and gives professionals a citation trail. The expert still decides. The system removes friction around finding, validating, citing, and proving.
Progress Agentic RAG for Governed Legal Knowledge Delivery
The Progress case study is valuable because it starts with a real professional services constraint: knowledge is sensitive, distributed, and constantly changing.
The law firm did not need generic AI writing. It needed a governed knowledge architecture for trusted, traceable answer delivery. Progress Agentic RAG allowed the firm to connect internal legal and accounting knowledge with selected authoritative external sources, apply tailored retrieval strategies, and return answers with citations and source traceability.
This gives lawyers and accountants more time for professional judgment and less time spent searching. Clients receive faster answers that are easier to trust because the supporting sources are visible, cited, and reviewable.
The Trust Advantage: Governed Knowledge as a Client Experience
Professional services brands are built on trust, expertise, and defensibility. Agentic RAG turns that trust into a more transparent and verifiable client experience. A firm can say, "Here is the answer, here is the source, and here is how our professional judgment applies." That is more powerful than saying, "Our AI suggested it."
This is why Progress is positioned well for the next phase of enterprise AI. It helps organizations move beyond experimentation toward governed, cited, client-ready knowledge delivery.
That also changes implementation planning. Firms should not begin with every possible workflow. They should start where source quality, repeatability, risk sensitivity, and client demand intersect, such as employment questions, tax interpretations, compliance FAQs, contract playbooks, and policy guidance. These workflows create measurable value because the questions are common enough to scale, sensitive enough to require professional review, and important enough for clients to notice.
The payoff is not automation alone. It is governed consistently at the client-service scale.
Bottom Line
Professional services firms should not scale AI on confidence alone. They need answers that are trusted because they are cited, governed, permission-aware, traceable, and reviewed by professionals.
Agentic RAG gives firms that foundation. Progress makes governed, cited, and traceable AI knowledge delivery practical.
Download the full Progress case study PDF to see how a leading law firm used Progress Agentic RAG to turn legal and accounting knowledge into trusted, cited, and traceable AI answers.
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References
Thomson Reuters (2026) AI in Professional Services Report 2026. Thomson Reuters, 2026.
Progress (n.d.) RAG-as-a-Service Solution. Progress Software Corporation.
Progress (n.d.) From Search to Answers with Agentic RAG. Progress Software Corporation.
Progress (n.d.) Leading Law Firm Agentic RAG Success Story. Progress Software Corporation.
Thomson Reuters (2025) Future of Professionals Report 2025. Thomson Reuters, 2025.
Microsoft (2025) 2025 Work Trend Index Annual Report. Microsoft Corporation, 2025.
IBM (2025). From AI Projects to Profits. IBM Corporation, 2025.
Google Cloud (n.d.) Check Grounding with RAG. Google Cloud.
McKinsey & Company (2025) Seizing the Agentic AI Advantage. McKinsey & Company, 2025.
PwC (2025) 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), 2025.
