The battle for AI in professional services

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For the past two years, the AI industry has spoken about professional services in the careful language of augmentation and copilots, useful tools sitting alongside the lawyer, banker or consultant, helping them work faster. That framing is over. In the past month, four separate announcements have made it clear that the foundation model companies, the legal AI specialists, the consultancies and the banks are now in open competition for the same customers, the same workflows and the same revenue.

On Monday, OpenAI launched a standalone consulting business, the OpenAI Deployment Company, with $4 billion in committed capital at a $10 billion pre-money valuation. Among the investors are three names that ought to give anyone in the consulting industry pause: Bain & Company, Capgemini and McKinsey & Company. The blue-blood consultancies have collectively put money into the venture most likely to disintermediate them.

A week earlier, Anthropic announced its own version: a $1.5 billion joint venture backed by a number of investors including Blackstone and Goldman Sachs (who are invested in both OpenAI and Anthropic). The same week, Anthropic released ten agent templates aimed squarely at financial services, covering pitchbook generation, financial modelling, KYC screening and month-end close. 

In March, Harvey raised $200 million at an $11 billion valuation. Legora followed days later with $550 million at a $5.55 billion valuation, then added a $50 million extension in late April that brought in Nvidia, Atlassian and Barclays.

Four announcements, four billion-dollar-plus rounds, all pointed at the same target. This is what an open fight looks like, and it is worth working through who is doing what.

OpenAI's move: vertical integration into consulting

The model behind the OpenAI Deployment Company is borrowed wholesale from Palantir. Forward deployed engineers, or FDEs, parachute into client organisations and live inside the complexity: legacy systems, compliance constraints, internal politics. They don’t just ship software and leave, but embed themselves for the duration of the deployment.

To staff this from day one, OpenAI is acquiring Tomoro, a UK-based applied AI consulting firm with around 150 engineers and a client list that includes Tesco, Virgin Atlantic and Supercell. The Deployment Company will operate as a majority-owned subsidiary, with its FDEs working directly alongside frontier model and product teams inside OpenAI proper.

The strategic logic is straightforward, and OpenAI is not hiding it. Enterprise already accounts for more than 40% of OpenAI's revenue, with the company reporting around $25 billion in annualised revenue as of February and projecting $85 billion by 2030. OpenAI's API market share has reportedly dropped from roughly 50% in 2023 to around 25% by mid-2025, as Anthropic and Google have pushed in. Owning the deployment layer is OpenAI's structural response. The FDEs sitting inside enterprises are the reason those enterprises keep choosing OpenAI's models, regardless of what the model leaderboards say next quarter.

For the investment partners, the appeal is captive distribution. OpenAI's backers collectively sponsor more than 2,000 portfolio companies globally. Bain & Company's announcement made the structure explicit: its private equity clients and their portfolio companies will receive priority access for joint Bain-Deployment Company work, extending a three-year Bain-OpenAI partnership. The consultancies are not partnering out of curiosity. They are buying a seat at the table when AI deployment moves from pilot to procurement, on the assumption that being inside the tent is better than being outside it.

Anthropic's move: agents for finance

Anthropic is fighting the same battle from a different angle. Its $1.5 billion joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs is structurally similar to OpenAI's Deployment Company, with the same goal of embedding engineers inside enterprises to convert pilots into durable systems. The list of named target sectors is telling: community banks, mid-sized manufacturers, regional health systems, the firms that lack the internal resources to deploy AI on their own.

The agent templates released alongside that announcement go further. Anthropic now offers ten ready-made workflows specifically for banks, asset managers and insurers. A pitch builder that generates comparables models and draft pitchbooks. An earnings reviewer that reads transcripts and flags model updates. A general ledger reconciler. A month-end closer. A financial statement auditor. A KYC screener that assembles entity files and packages escalations for compliance teams. 

This is not a consulting arm in the sense that OpenAI's is. It is something more aggressive. Anthropic has skipped the implementation question entirely and built the deliverables that an analyst, associate or junior auditor would otherwise produce. The pitch is not "we will help your bank deploy AI." The pitch is "here is the work product. Decide whether you still want to pay an analyst to produce it."

Anthropic was last valued at $380 billion. OpenAI closed its most recent round at $852 billion. Both are pursuing trillion-dollar-plus IPOs this year, and the financial services push is part of the justification for those numbers.

The legal front: Harvey versus Legora

If the OpenAI and Anthropic moves are the foundation model companies coming down into the services layer, Harvey and Legora are the legal AI specialists fighting it out for the most profitable single vertical inside professional services.

Harvey raised $200 million in March 2026 at an $11 billion valuation, in a round co-led by GIC and Sequoia. Annual recurring revenue hit $190 million in January, up from $100 million the previous August. Total capital raised across six rounds now exceeds $1 billion. In the space of fourteen months, Harvey has gone from a $3 billion Series D valuation to $11 billion.

Legora, the Stockholm-based competitor founded only in 2023, raised $550 million in March 2026 at a $5.55 billion valuation, led by Accel. A $50 million Series D extension followed in late April, taking the round to $600 million and bringing in Nvidia's NVentures, Atlassian and Barclays. Legora crossed $100 million in ARR in the same window. 

The brand war between the two is where the category tells you what it has become. Harvey signed Gabriel Macht, the actor who played the high-powered lawyer in Suits, as a brand partner, and entered a multi-year partnership with Fulham Football Club. Legora responded by hiring Jude Law for a global campaign under the slogan "Law just got more attractive”. Two AI startups, less than four years old between them, paying movie stars to advertise software to lawyers.

And it appears to be working. Speaking to Harry Stebbings on the 20VC podcast this week, Legora's Chief Revenue Officer Patrick Forquer said the Jude Law campaign alone has generated $50 million of qualified pipeline. In the same interview, Forquer described Legora as the fastest-growing enterprise business ever to reach $100 million in ARR, and said the company is on track to clear $250 million in ARR by the end of the year.

The wider field

Beyond legal, the same pattern is visible across professional services verticals.

In healthcare, Abridge raised at a $2.75 billion valuation. In customer service, Bret Taylor's Sierra crossed a multi-billion-dollar valuation. In finance, Hebbia and Rogo are both building workflow AI specifically for investment banks. Eudia raised over $100 million for Fortune 500 in-house legal teams. Blue J raised $122 million for tax research. Crosby and Eve are scaling on the litigation and contract sides of legal.

Crunchbase data shows legal tech alone raised over $4 billion globally in 2025, a 77% increase on 2024. Omdia projects more than $1 trillion will flow through the systems integrator market in 2026. The capital is not speculative. It is following a thesis: that the operating layer for AI in regulated professional verticals is where the durable margin lives.

What this means for public and private markets

For public markets, the existing professional services giants are confronting a question they did not have to answer two years ago. The Deployment Company has changed the geometry: McKinsey, Bain and Capgemini have chosen a side, and the firms that have not made a comparable move are more exposed than they were just a few months ago. But professional services are not consumer software. Switching costs are high, partner relationships are deep, and no large enterprise bets its compliance position on a three-year-old startup. The incumbents do have time to respond.

For private markets, the picture is genuinely contested. The bull case for the specialists is real: Harvey, Legora and their counterparts are building verticalised distribution that no single foundation model company can credibly own across every regulated industry. The bear case is also real. The model companies are not standing still, Microsoft Copilot is bundling at price points the specialists cannot match, and winning a pilot is not the same as retaining the contract eighteen months later.

The same dynamic is opening up one vertical down. Legal AI is too crowded to enter at the top end, but tax, audit, insurance underwriting and specialist consulting are each multi-billion-dollar markets without a defined leader. A number of highly funded and sector focused startups are betting that distribution in regulated verticals is won by going deeper into a single workflow than the generalists are willing to. The practical implication for investors is that the trade is not specialists versus generalists. It is identifying which companies inside each category are building the deepest relationships and the most defensible workflows now, before the structure of the market is priced in.

The bottom line

The professional services category has spent forty years selling implementation services for software it did not build or own itself. It is now watching the software builders move in directly, with the active sponsorship of some of the largest names in private equity and consulting. The fight is real, the capital is committed, and the customer is the same in every case.

But the outcome is not predetermined. Professional services is, at its core, a relationship business. Law firms, banks and consultancies do not switch providers on the basis of better technology alone. They switch when trust, regulatory comfort, and partner-level conviction align with a credible alternative, and that process takes years. The foundation model companies bring overwhelming capital and technical depth. The vertical specialists bring domain knowledge and customer intimacy. The incumbents bring deep relationships, regulatory depth, and the right to lose slowly. All three are genuine advantages, and none of them is a guarantee.

The interesting question for investors is not who wins. It is which specific companies inside each category are building the deepest relationships and the most defensible workflows now, before the eventual structure of this market becomes obvious. By then, it will already be priced in.

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The Unsophisticated Investor is brought to you by Scott & Rob, the founders of Shuttle. We’re both sick of private markets being a playground exclusive to the ultra-wealthy so we started a company to challenge the status-quo. Shuttle’s singular focus is to unlock private markets for Millennial and Gen Z tech professionals and help them build wealth through the highest performing private market opportunities.

Scott & Rob
Shuttle Co-Founders