I companies may see professional services as their cash cow.

Earlier this week, Anthropic announced a partnership with IT consulting firm Cognizant, deploying the company’s Claude models and agentic tools to up to 350,000 associates across its organization. It’s the third deal of its kind that Anthropic has made in the past month, scoring partnerships with IBM and Deloitte in early October.

“Enterprises are moving beyond simple productivity gains toward a more connected, agentic future,” Ravi Kumar S, CEO of Cognizant, said in the announcement.

And Anthropic isn’t the only firm targeting professional services. Legal AI startups like Harvey, Eve and Filevine have all scored significant funding and sky-high valuations in recent months as investors see massive potential in alleviating the tedium of these industries. 

But actual utility among these industries runs a wide gamut. In the legal field, for example, adoption of generative AI is trending slowly: According to data from Bloomberg Law, only 21% of attorneys report using generative AI “about once a day.”

A survey of more than 650 lawyers from the Association of Corporate Counsel published in mid-October found that nearly 60% of in-house counsel have seen “no noticeable savings yet” as a result of their AI deployments. 

Consulting, meanwhile, is being fundamentally upended by AI, with some arguing that AI could entirely replace those jobs. Some firms are already trimming headcount as a result of AI, such as Accenture, which said in September that it had laid off 11,000 workers who couldn’t be reskilled for AI tasks.

In an essay published last week by Enrique Dans, a professor of innovation at IE University, he noted that consulting forms are “not losing tools, they are losing their monopoly on knowledge.”

“AI has democratized access to information, models, and methodologies that previously justified hiring an external firm,” Dans wrote.