Meet the professional services firms taking on the challenges of tomorrow

Created by WIRED Consulting in partnership with HSBC UK

These three Trailblazers are making a difference through smart thinking. Here’s how…

Nobody in business needs to be told how valuable professional services are to the British economy. These firms, which help external corporations or public bodies do their work successfully, represent a collective turnover of £277 billion annually¹. Britain is the second largest exporter of professional services in the world; the sector employs more than 14 per cent of the workforce.

“Far more than financial value adders, professional and business services are the enablers of enterprise,” says Victoria Ritchie, Head of Professional and Business Services at HSBC UK. “They provide the insight, governance, and innovation that underpin investment decisions, corporate strategy, and public confidence in markets.”

In finding ways to help others work smarter, many of these organisations have taken on missions that will help define the economy of the future. These Trailblazers are three of them. Perhaps they’ll inspire what challenge you take on next…

Artificial intelligence offers compelling opportunities if it is deployed in the right scenarios. But identifying where and how to use the technology can be hard.

Who's working on it? Elixirr

Since it was founded in 2009 by Stephen Newton and Graham Busby, the boutique management consultancy Elixirr has made a virtue of agility. It is smaller than its multinational, franchised and therefore bureaucratic competitors, meaning it has been able to embrace new technologies and workplace practices at speed and scale as a way of offering more effective service to clients. Recently, it has deployed gen-AI for tasks such as writing client contracts. This has helped free up time spent on admin for helping clients themselves work through how best to use AI. “We want to take our own medicine,” explains co-founder and deputy CEO Graham Busby.

AI promises substantial productivity gains that could add trillions of dollars to the global economy. But unlocking that value is proving notoriously challenging. Elixirr wants to help businesses succeed with AI where others are hitting dead ends – and also to help them avoid being swept up by AI hype.

WIth any new project, the company’s first step is always to ask whether AI is even the correct solution to a given business problem. This assessment involves a holistic examination of a client’s internal processes, business culture and employee skills, as well as what technologies they already have in place. If the problem can be solved with current systems, all the better.

Only once that process is complete, says Adam Hofmann, the firm’s Principal of Generative AI Strategy & Implementation, do Elixirr’s consultants ask if there’s “an entirely new way to do this, end-to-end” with AI, and one which can be designed in conjunction with those who will eventually use it. “If there is, then I get excited because we get to build something new and disruptive.” It’s working: one client has projected $50 million in savings over the next two years.

When a teacher can’t make it to work at short notice, schools are left scrambling to find supply teachers, who are often not a good fit for pupils.

Who working on it? ZenEducate

Slava Kremerman founded ZenEducate after hearing from a family member how fraught the process of hiring supply teachers could be in schools. Every morning, agency staff would urgently phone supply teachers with little or no knowledge of each teacher’s location, availability, subject expertise or reputation among other schools. “It was awful for the teachers,” says Kremerman. “It was awful for the schools. And we saw that technology could be used to make something better.”

ZenEducate is a supply teacher app that tracks all that information in advance, and allows schools to find staff that suit their particular needs. It pre-vets teachers to meet child safety standards using proprietary technology to conduct the dozen-plus checks necessary, and aims to offer a seamless post-booking experience for schools with benefits like auto-generated digital invoices in place of the usual paper timesheets. After the engagement, teachers and schools can offer each other feedback which is displayed on the platform.

Available in the UK and recently launched in the USA, ZenEducate saves the hiring school about £20 per teacher per day, says Kremerman, meaning pan-UK adoption could put hundreds of millions of pounds back into the education system annually “Schools, teachers and students win with us,” says Kremerman, “which is what puts the fire in the belly for me.”

Regional law firms are often very traditional businesses, which can leave clients underserved and overcharged for vital legal advice.

Who's working on it? Rothera Bray

“Law firms have a reputation for archaic ways of working,” says Christina Yardley, who has been CEO of East Midlands solicitors Rothera Bray since 2019. And yet during the Covid-19 pandemic, she continues, many law firms were notably fast to adopt new approaches. “Covid was awful, but for firms that are energised and want to move forward, being forced to adapt brought a lot of benefits.”

At Rothera Bray, modernisation has meant implementing new tech tools, including using the AI-integrated case management system Actionstep to both streamline workflows and to keep track of bottlenecks. With enough data, Yardley believes AI will help Rothera Bray proactively identify and anticipate individual needs, enhancing the overall experience and creating a more streamlined and cost-effective client journey.

Yardley has also looked to the technology sector itself for inspiration. The firm now has a data-driven approach to everything from tracking when and how new matters are opened to measuring client satisfaction. The firm has tripled in size in three years through mergers, but has also developed a flat, non-hierarchical internal structure – unusual for the legal profession – to encourage collaboration and honest feedback. The idea is that client needs will be better addressed if junior staff can easily share their insights and if the data is available to supplement it. “It’s about service,” says Yardley. “And how we stand in our people’s and our clients’ shoes better.”