Partners at law and accounting firms say the one thing they most want from business-development technology is help finding new business in relationships their firms already have. But 78% say the relationship data at their firms is hard to act on, and most of those using AI for business development are using general-purpose chatbots that cannot see that data at all.
Those are among the findings of a survey of 123 partners released today by Introhive, the relationship intelligence company that captures and maps firm relationships from email and calendar data.
The report, AI and Business Development in Law and Accounting Firms, was conducted for Introhive by the strategy firm Thinktiv. It drew 42 responses from legal services, 42 from accounting and 39 from other professional services.
“Partners are being asked to grow the book with AI, and most of those using it are doing so with a chatbot that has no access to their firm’s relationship data,” Introhive CEO Lee Blakemore said in a statement accompanying the report.
In an exclusive interview yesterday with LawSites, I asked Blakemore what most surprised him about the findings. He said the results left him with “mixed emotions.”
“There’s this perception that firms and people are far more progressed than they really are,” he said. “I see all of the energy and all the momentum and all the rush to deploy AI, and it seems like it’s almost at a frantic pace right now.
“I’m not surprised to see that although there’s been a lot of money invested and a lot of progress on deployments, there’s still a lot of work to be done in regards to actually adding value and changing the way work has been done. I guess I was surprised that I wasn’t surprised.”
Great Ambitions for AI and BD
The report categorizes firms into four stages of business development maturity, from basic data hygiene (Stage 1) and relationship visibility (Stage 2) to structured BD programs (Stage 3) and AI-driven BD (Stage 4).
Of the partners who responded to the survey, 57% said their firms sit at Stage 1 or 2. Yet 84% expect to reach Stage 3 or 4 within 18 to 24 months, and the number expecting to run AI-driven BD grows from eight respondents to 40.
Asked whether that timeline is realistic, Blakemore said he would “never want to bet against the largest law firms in the world.” The challenge, however, is that the target keeps moving.
“It’s kind of like that old black-and-white photograph of the land grab in Oklahoma, all the carts waiting for the gun to go off,” he said. “Everybody’s racing right now as fast as they possibly can. And as soon as they get to where they wanted to get to, there’s going to be something ahead of them.
“Two years from now, when people have gotten to that 84%, I think they’re going to be talking about where they still need to get to.”
Among partners already using AI for business development, 68% rely only on general-purpose tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini. They rate their satisfaction with those tools at 6.7 out of 10. Just 22% say their firm has a fully developed and implemented AI strategy, even though 51% say strategy is the biggest driver of AI return on investment.
What Partners Say They Want
Asked to name the single BD capability they most want done well each week, 47% chose surfacing new business opportunities, well ahead of who-knows-whom mapping (24%) and automated data capture (17%).
Asked what they would most value from combining information across the firm, they ranked cross-sell opportunities (54%), alerts on at-risk relationships (49%) and relationship mapping (46%) at the top. Credit attribution ranked last, at 15%.
Their biggest sources of friction, according to the report, are knowing where to focus BD time (50%), making time for BD (45%) and identifying cross-sell opportunities (43%). Partners rate the overall difficulty of business development at 3.4 out of 5.
Blakemore said the contrast between what partners want and what they can do with their data was the finding that struck him most.
“They know the information’s there, but they don’t know what to do with it,” he said. “Law partners specifically understand that there is an opportunity within the relationship data they have, their contacts, their network. They want to take action there, but they’re struggling to take action.”
A New Interface for An Old Problem
I asked Blakemore how much of that struggle is a software problem and how much is endemic to professionals who simply do not like entering data. He conceded that CRM adoption at law firms has been “negligible,” and said the reason is structural.
“In order to get the effectiveness you wanted out of the CRM, you needed people to go spend time in it, and history has shown the likelihood of that happening was pretty low,” he said. “In professional services, the ability to dictate the behavior of your end-user professionals is somewhat limited. You’re just not going to dictate that to law partners.”
But AI can change that equation, he said, by becoming “the new user interface,” one that prompts a lawyer to act rather than asking the lawyer to log into a separate system.
“If you expect the attorney to pull their head out of whatever they’re doing and go log in someplace else to write some email to somebody they hadn’t talked to in 90 days, they’re not going to do it,” he said.
“But now, in their day-to-day workflow, they can be prompted: ‘You haven’t talked to Bob in 35 days. Would you like to send an email? Here’s a script.’ You can do all of that on your treadmill, in your earbuds. That’s what people want.”
Of course, that only works if the underlying data is accurate, he said.
“The threshold for quality in CRM was, you’re going to send out a Christmas card list and if you got some bounce-backs, it was okay,” he said. “That can’t be the case anymore. If it’s all automated, it has to be accurate. It has to work.”
Measuring Return
According to the survey, 63% of firms have no revenue-linked way to measure BD return on investment. Instead, 28% track intermediate metrics such as introductions and meetings, 22% track usage and logins, and 13% have no formal measurement. Only 15% can track revenue with strong attribution.
The most convincing proof of BD value, partners in the survey said, would be cross-sell and expansion revenue (44%) and pipeline generated or deals influenced (35%).
I asked Blakemore how Introhive proves its own ROI to customers when most firms cannot connect BD activity to revenue. He acknowledged it is not easy.
“It starts with a person’s disposition toward the topic,” he said. “If you are skeptical that having quality data is going to lead to more business for you as a lawyer, then whatever business case I provide, you’re going to be able to poke holes in it. You’ll say, ‘I would have known that anyway,’ or ‘Your data didn’t produce the business, my relationship produced the business.'”
What does work, he said, is the “if I had only known” dilemma.
“If I had only known this, I would have contacted Bob a lot sooner than I did, and I probably would have won that business,” he said. “That’s how we tend to make the case. But I’m not going to say it’s a slam dunk. It’s in the eye of the beholder.”
MCP and ‘Agnostic’ Access to Data
The report includes a section that discusses Introhive’s MCP server and why it matters to BD. The server lets customers use assistants such as Claude, Harvey, ChatGPT and Copilot to query the firm’s relationship data, subject to each user’s existing permissions and the firm’s governance policies.
While Blakemore was candid that the report’s discussion of MCP is partly self-serving, he believes it was essential for Introhive to provide MCP access to its customers.
“Our clients are large, global, billion-dollar-plus organizations,” he said. “We’re not going to dictate much to them in regards to what platform they should use, and we’re probably not going to win much shelf space on their desktop.
“So, for us, we need to be the data provider of high-quality, accurate, secure data and provide it wherever you happen to work, whatever platform you choose. MCP is just a vehicle that allows us to do that.”
He said that Introhive has taken the same agnostic approach to AI vendors as it has to CRM vendors, noting that AI purchasing inside firms is often run by IT or innovation groups rather than the marketing and BD teams.
A Complex Environment
Blakemore said the survey results should be read against a broader set of forces reshaping both the legal and accounting professions.
While AI is one of those forces, he also pointed to pressure on traditional business models and – in accounting especially but now increasingly in legal – the arrival of private equity ownership, which he said is “starting to change the culture” by putting top-down pressure on partners to generate pipeline and revenue.
“You have the AI trend, you have the AI pressure on the business models, and then you have two of these industries undertaking a level of transformation as it relates to outside investment,” he said. “You’ve got three dimensions happening at once, which makes for a very complex environment.”
Add to that what he called a “keep up with the Joneses” dynamic driven by competitors’ press releases, and partners who are now being asked to take on BD responsibilities they once left to marketing staff.
“All those factors create a lot of anxiety,” he said.
I asked him what law firms should take away from the report.
“Deploying AI without having the quality data to make it actionable, you’re kind of throwing money away. But also, fundamentally, this isn’t about AI. This is about getting people to have a behavioral change.”
“You can deploy all the technology,” he said, “but if you don’t make it usable, if you don’t get the data right, if you don’t do the change management, you’ll be sitting there having deployed all these tools and you still won’t have moved the needle on the thing that mattered. That’s a tale as old as technology itself.”