AI Transforms Regulated Professions: A Crucial Challenge

AI, a Strategic Lever for Regulated Professions

Artificial intelligence (AI) is gradually infiltrating regulated professions, offering the potential to transform client data into proactive and value-creating actions. These professions, such as notaries, lawyers, accountants, healthcare professionals, judicial commissioners, judicial administrators, and heritage actors, rely on fundamental pillars such as trust, responsibility, confidentiality, compliance, and advisory services. AI could become a major strategic asset for these professions, balancing innovation with caution.

A Valuable Asset: The Trust Relationship

Unlike other sectors that invest heavily in customer relationship management (CRM) tools and digital marketing, regulated professions already possess a considerable asset: a trust relationship often built over several generations. This relationship is enriched by a deep understanding of clients, whether it concerns heritage matters for notaries or economic issues for accountants. However, this data often remains underutilized.

Notaries, for example, are aware of a family's heritage milestones, while lawyers are familiar with the sensitive issues of a business or individual. Accountants, on the other hand, have a clear view of their clients' daily economic realities. Healthcare professionals and judicial commissioners also handle sensitive data within a strict framework. This wealth of information is valuable because it is contextualized and linked to important decision-making moments, yet it is still too often scattered and confined within a case-based logic.

Transforming Information into Action

The challenge for these professions is not the lack of information, but the ability to transform this information into concrete actions. AI can play a key role in organizing and prioritizing data, detecting weak signals, or identifying critical deadlines. It can also highlight risky situations and suggest relevant follow-ups. The goal is not only to save time but to make more informed and timely decisions.

Towards Increased Proactivity

Historically, regulated professions have adopted a reactive approach, responding to client requests. However, expectations are evolving towards a greater anticipation of needs. AI can help establish this proactivity, enabling professionals to know which client to call back, which risk to anticipate, or which opportunity to seize. This shift from a case-based logic to a relationship-focused logic represents a profound change.

Regulatory Constraints: A Potential Advantage

Although the regulatory framework is often seen as a barrier to innovation, it can become a long-term competitive advantage. Regulated professions require secure, traceable, explainable, and compliant solutions. This requirement could foster the emergence of specialized tools tailored to the specific needs of each profession. These tools must be efficient, reliable, contextualized, and acceptable to professionals.

Regulated professions must understand what the tool does, master the data, retain control over decision-making, and comply with their professional obligations. This demand will give rise to a new generation of tools: less generic, more vertical, and more integrated into the professions.

The Importance of Vertical Solutions

Generalist AI has democratized the use of technology, but regulated professions require more targeted solutions. Each profession has its own constraints and processes, making vertical AIs designed for specific uses essential.

A lawyer does not face the same constraints as a notary, just as an accountant does not handle the same data as a wealth advisor. A healthcare professional does not have the same obligations as a judicial commissioner. Each profession has its own language, risks, processes, responsibilities, and key moments.

A Methodical Adoption of AI

The adoption of AI in these professions should not be rushed. It is crucial to identify relevant use cases, test tools with teams, and secure processes. The chosen solutions must integrate seamlessly into the daily lives of professionals without adding unnecessary complexity. It is also essential to train users and measure gains to ensure successful adoption.

Reconciling Performance and Advisory

AI is often associated with productivity, but in regulated professions, it could primarily enhance the quality of advisory services. By enabling a better understanding of clients and anticipating risks, AI could restore time and relevance to human intervention. Thus, it could become the tool that connects trust, data, expertise, and relationships, without compromising the uniqueness of these professions.

Regulated professions are built on a considerable wealth: trust, data, expertise, and relationships. AI can become the tool that finally allows for a better connection between these four dimensions. The question is no longer whether AI will enter these professions. It is already doing so. The real question is: which professions will leverage it as a value driver without relinquishing what makes them unique?