Pricing Pressures? Here's How AI Can Help

The audit and advisory industry faces significant pricing pressures driven by disruptive technologies, offshore competition, and rising inflation. To stay competitive while maintaining profitability, leading firms are adopting AI to address these pricing challenges head-on — not just to attract new clients, but to keep existing ones happy.

AI offers firms a powerful solution to address pricing pressures in several ways:

• AI enables firms to streamline operations, reducing costs while maintaining high-quality services. This operational efficiency gives firms the flexibility to offer competitive pricing without eroding margins, creating a sustainable approach to profitability.
• With the time savings generated by AI, firms can redeploy their staff’s time from manual tasks to higher-value client services. For example, automating routine tasks like client document analysis or request tracking not only improves efficiency but also allows firms to focus on delivering tailored client services and insights, which clients increasingly value. By concentrating on high-impact activities, firms can justify their pricing and even highlight the added value delivered through these services.
• AI also helps firms adopt smarter pricing strategies by analyzing engagement data to estimate costs more accurately and ensure pricing reflects the complexity and effort of each engagement. This precision enables firms to avoid underpricing complex engagements while offering more competitive rates for simpler ones.

By harnessing AI’s capabilities, firms can deliver greater value to their clients while securing long-term growth and differentiating themselves from competitors.

How Leading Firms Use AI and Automation to Address Pricing Pressures

Many firms in the IPA Top 500 as well as boutique firms are already embracing AI and automation platforms such as Fieldguide to drive dramatic results. These firms are turning to Fieldguide to make their teams as effective as possible by saving time, growing revenue, and improving client satisfaction.

According to a recent Fieldguide benchmark report, Transform Your Firm: The Impact of Smarter Engagements, firms leveraging Fieldguide’s AI and automation platform achieved dramatic efficiency improvements across their engagements. For example, firms were able to use AI to reduce the time spent analyzing client documents by 75% and client requests by 71%, which translates into significant cost savings. These efficiencies help firms maintain gross margins, improve gross margin per hour, or adjust pricing to attract more clients while staying profitable.

AI also provides real-time insights across all their clients, teams, and project work — enabling firms to understand nuances across a variety of criteria. For example, firms can see exactly how many extra hours team members may have to spend with specific clients, allowing them to charge for that additional work or to price future engagements more accurately. Similarly firms can get more detailed visibility into specific team members and the hours billed from past engagements, so they can better determine what they should really be charging for those resources. AI insights allow leaders to better segment their clients and offer tailored pricing based on client needs, allocated resources, or engagement type. This approach ensures that pricing reflects the value delivered, reducing the risk of underpricing.

Reporting: an Example of Pricing Flexibility with AI

Reporting, a traditionally time-intensive and costly part of engagements — especially with PCI assessments — is a good example of how AI helps firms address pricing pressures. According to the Fieldguide benchmark report, firms leveraging AI and automation cut reporting time by 50%. These time savings not only enable firms to price engagements more competitively but also free up resources for client-facing activities. For instance, PCI assessments that once required 40 hours for generating a complex ROC report can now be completed in just 40 seconds. The time saved empowers firms to deliver high-quality work at a fraction of the cost, reinforcing their ability to compete on pricing.

Next Steps for AI

Because firm leaders are focused on preserving their prices and margins, they're turning to technology like Fieldguide AI to empower their teams to maximize their productivity and drive higher-value services.

To start leveraging AI, firms should identify their most time-intensive processes, evaluate solutions like Fieldguide for their potential to automate and transform their firm, and prioritize client-facing activities that drive value. Additionally, firms should review their engagement data to pinpoint areas where pricing strategies could be refined using insights from AI, ensuring they can respond effectively to market pressures while staying profitable. Early adopters of AI will not only navigate pricing pressures more effectively but also set the standard for future pricing in the industry.

Get the business and pricing insights you need to transform your firm in Fieldguide’s Benchmark Report.