The Thomson Reuters Institute surveyed more than 1,500 professionals across 27 countries for its 2026 AI in Professional Services Report, published in February 2026. It found that 40% of firms had been given instructions by different clients both to use AI and not to use AI on their matters. More than half of corporate legal and tax departments want their outside firms to use AI on their work, and fewer than a third know whether those firms do. Around three quarters of both sides said the firm should be the one to raise it, and the survey found that conversation is largely not happening.
Plenty of this is going well. Drawings get marked up faster, a research memo that used to take a day arrives before the meeting, and the admin around a project has thinned in a way clients feel as responsiveness. What to tell them about it is still unsettled, and they already have views.
Why the silence holds
If you've been putting this conversation off, the reason is usually that raising it feels like an admission. You have been using these tools on work you stand behind, and opening the subject seems to invite a question about whether the client is getting your taste or a model's. So the topic waits, and it waits across every matter at once.
Most of the client departments in the survey didn't know whether their firm used AI, and most on both sides expected the firm to bring it up. If your own clients are anywhere near that, you're protecting an impression that mostly hasn't formed yet, and the one that does form will belong to whoever speaks first.
The decision you can make this month
A large firm answers this with a working group, because the question touches client contracts, professional indemnity, marketing and several practice heads at once. The timeline is set by how many people have to agree on the wording.
You have a different constraint, because you decide what leaves the studio. The governance advantage a small practice holds is that this decision fits in an afternoon. It stays an advantage until larger firms learn to move faster on questions like this one.
What a disclosure position contains
What you use it for, in task terms. Research, first drafts, scheduling, mark up, options generation. Say the task, because a client who hears "we use AI" and nothing else fills the gap with whatever they read last week.
What never goes into a tool. Their address, their purchase price, their unreleased plans, their identity before they have announced anything, and any trade pricing a vendor extended to you under terms. Name the categories, since "we protect your data" answers nothing.
Who reviews the output before it leaves. By role, and by name if the practice is small enough. A client asking this wants to know whether the work still carries the taste they hired, and a named reviewer answers that more directly than a paragraph about safeguards.
What they can ask you to change. Give them a real option: a matter run without AI tooling, or a specific tool excluded. A choice with no options in it reads as a notice.
The written policy that sits underneath this is a separate page and a separate afternoon, covering accounts, contractors and the exception path. A client needs the four answers above, and the full policy stays internal.
Related questions
Should we tell clients we use AI on their work?
The Thomson Reuters Institute's 2026 survey found around three quarters of both the firms and the client departments it asked think the firm should start that conversation, and that it is largely not happening. Fewer than a third of those client departments knew whether their firm used AI at all.
What should an AI disclosure to a client say?
Four things: what you use AI for in task terms, what client material never goes into a tool, who reviews the output before it leaves, and what the client can ask you to change.
What if a client tells us not to use AI on their matter?
Take the instruction, record it on the matter file where whoever picks the work up can see it, and price the job for the hours it will now take by hand.
Do clients want their firm to use AI?
They are split. Thomson Reuters found more than half of corporate legal and tax departments want their outside firms to use it, while 40% of firms reported receiving opposite instructions from different clients.
Who is supposed to raise it, the firm or the client?
Around three quarters of both the firms and the client departments surveyed told Thomson Reuters the firm should. The survey found that conversation is largely not happening, which leaves the question open until a client asks it at an awkward moment.
How we read this
Governance in this trade usually gets written as an internal control question: which tools, whose account, what data. This survey moves it into the client relationship, where getting it wrong costs you the relationship rather than a compliance finding.
We treat the disclosure conversation as a sales conversation. A client who hears a specific answer about how their work gets made learns something about how the practice is run, and that is what you were hoping the work would say on your behalf.
We take the direction to hold for a design or architecture practice. A client who commissions drawings has expectations about how the drawings get made, and you want them to hear how that works from you first.
What you can do this week
Write the paragraph: four sentences covering what you use AI for, what never goes into a tool, who reviews the output, and what a client can ask you to change. Write it the way you would say it aloud in a meeting, because that is where it will get used first.
Then take it to three clients. Pick the three whose work you most want to be doing in two years, and ask them what they expect, before the paragraph goes anywhere near a proposal. You find out which side of the Thomson Reuters split each of them sits on, and you get a version of the wording that has survived contact with a real client, which is the one worth putting in an engagement letter.
Expect at least one of the three to have no view at all, which means the position you set becomes theirs by default; write it with that client in mind.
Working together
Flow State Found works with a limited number of businesses to make their best work their baseline. You have been running AI through client work for months and never written down what you would say if a client asked. We settle that position with you and provision the accounts behind it, so what you tell a client stays true on a deadline.
We take on limited engagements, so it starts with a conversation.
Start a conversationFor Deeper Context
- Thomson Reuters Institute, 2026 AI in Professional Services Report, survey of more than 1,500 professionals across 27 countries, published February 9 2026. The client-side figures were collected from corporate legal and tax departments, so those percentages describe the respondents who were asked, and design or architecture clients weren't among them