For all the excitement about the power of AI to transform businesses, many large companies are struggling when it comes to getting their company-wide AI initiatives off first base. According to recent research, AI project failure rates are on the rise, with 46% of AI proof-of-concepts being scrapped before they reach production. The reasons for these failures can vary widely, but a common thread in most of them is a lack of integration into routine workflows. Standalone AI products may work well in a vacuum, but when it comes to truly transforming business, they can be difficult to plug into existing systems and legacy processes.
Enabling The Enablers
There are some exceptions, however, where AI is already revolutionizing the way professionals work and setting the tone for how big corporations integrate AI. And it’s not the places you’d expect. Some of the most breakthrough real-world use cases for AI right now are coming from the corporate legal, tax and accounting, compliance, global trade, human resources other departments that handle complex, data-heavy information processing workloads. While these corporate enabling functions may be more commonly associated with risk aversion than cutting-edge technology adoption, the fact that they are leading the way on AI should not come as a total surprise.
First, there is the current business environment, which I described in a recent article as the ‘age of uncertainty.’ This is an extraordinarily challenging time to be working in the legal, tax, compliance, or global trade function of a large corporation. From tariffs to tax policy to regulatory reform, the level of volatility affecting so many different aspects of business operations is truly staggering. Meanwhile, talent is scarce. Among corporate legal departments, 62% of current employees say they do not feel like they have enough time to do everything they would like to do – despite working an average of 49 hours per week. The situation in the tax department is even worse, with three quarters of certified public accountants set to retire in the next decade and fewer students than ever are pursuing accounting degrees. The result is more complex, higher-stakes work with fewer resources and a recipe for career burnout.
Connecting The Dots In Complex Corporate Workflows
Then, there is the subject matter. The most successful professionals operating in this world of corporate enabling functions are masters at unearthing information—connecting the dots between seemingly disparate events and concepts and finding relationships and risks that matter to the business. This also happens to be an area where AI can be extraordinarily effective. It is no accident that some of the first, high-profile proof points for generative AI were passing the LSAT, bar exam and CPA exam. Large language models are incredibly effective when it comes to anomaly detection and parsing reams of unstructured data to surface the missing link. And, when those models are grounded in authoritative case law and tax policy information that’s been curated and vetted by attorneys and CPAs, the accuracy and consistency of results is unmatched.
Those strengths have not been lost on corporate legal and tax teams, and other enabling functions inside large corporations who increasingly see AI as a strategic advantage. According to Thomson Reuters’ recent Future of Professionals Report 2025, 81% of professionals believe that AI will have a high or transformational impact on their profession within the next five years, and 54% are already experiencing one type of benefit from AI adoption.
But the biggest wild card that’s helping these corporate enabling functions become the spearheads of enterprise-wide AI adoption is workflow integration. The real reason why corporate counsel and tax departments are proving to be such successful AI use cases is that the solutions developed for these functions are transforming complete, end-to-end processes. It’s not a case where the legal team, for example, is accessing a standalone AI widget that helps research case law or draft documents. They are embedding AI across the entire workflow from legal research to document analysis to drafting in a seamless, connected manner. From an end-user perspective, that means AI is becoming less of a novelty that is used for isolated tasks and more of a built-in feature that is embedded at every step in the process.
Making The Promise of AI a Reality
That was always the promise of AI – to transform complex, data- and information-intensive workflows by augmenting human expertise with powerful analytics and processing capabilities. It’s taken a bunch of lawyers, accountants, compliance professionals and others who have not historically been considered the hubs of technological innovation to make that promise a reality. Ultimately, by following some of the lessons learned implementing large-scale AI initiatives in these key enabling functions, business leaders will start to develop the roadmap for enterprise AI transformation.