AI in professional firms: what 71% of Spanish advisories do now

71% of Spanish professional firms — tax and labour advisories, gestorías, law firms — already use artificial intelligence in their daily work, up 66% from a year ago, according to the fifth edition of Wolters Kluwer’s 2026 Advisory Barometer, published on June 30. This isn’t a survey about future intentions: it’s a snapshot of a sector that, by its own account, turned AI into routine tooling in under twelve months. At Evicron, an AI and custom software studio based in Barcelona, we see the same shift with the advisory and legal firms we work with: the question is no longer “should we try AI?” but “which process do we automate first?”

What the 2026 Advisory Barometer found

The report, produced by Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting España and also covered by outlets like RRHH Digital, confirms three numbers that define where the sector stands:

• 71% of firms already use AI in daily operations.
• +66% growth compared with the previous edition of the barometer — adoption isn’t marginal, it accelerated within a single year.
• Advisors themselves rank automation and efficiency gains as the top benefit (71%), followed by better client service (55%) and internal process optimisation (46%).

The underlying read, per Wolters Kluwer’s own report, is a sector “in full transformation”: the traditional firm, built around filling out and filing paperwork, is shifting toward a more strategic profile, with AI absorbing repetitive work to free up time for real client advisory.

Where AI actually delivers in a professional firm (and where it doesn’t)

The three benefits the barometer reports match what we see project by project: AI in professional services performs best the more repetitive and structured the task is.

Automating document-heavy tasks

Drafting contract boilerplate, summarising long case files, extracting data from invoices or payslips, and triaging incoming correspondence are all tasks where an AI assistant connected to the firm’s own templates and precedents saves hours every week — without replacing the legal or fiscal judgment of the person who signs off.

Faster client responses

An assistant that handles frequent questions — deadlines, required documents, the status of a filing — frees the team from repetitive queries and leaves human time for the cases that genuinely need professional judgment. It’s the same pattern other high-volume, simple-query sectors are already applying.

What still needs a person

Neither the barometer nor our own experience suggests AI replaces an advisor’s judgment: interpreting regulation, negotiating with the tax authority or the other side, and ultimate responsibility for what gets signed remain — and will remain — human work. AI removes volume, not judgment.

What changes on August 2 if your firm already uses AI

If your firm already runs client-facing chatbots or generates documents with generative AI, Article 50 of the EU AI Act takes effect on August 2, 2026, requiring you to disclose that it’s AI and to label AI-generated content. We cover the full checklist in our article on the EU AI Act’s transparency deadline — if you have an assistant live today, there are only days left to review it.

How to start without a big-firm budget

You don’t need enterprise-scale tooling to benefit from the same trend the barometer describes. The sequence we typically recommend for applied AI projects in professional services:

• Pick one repetitive document process — a specific contract type, case file summaries, mail triage — instead of trying to automate the whole firm at once.
• Connect the assistant to your own templates and precedents, not a generic model with no context on how your firm works: output quality depends on how well it knows your practice.
• Define what a person always reviews before anything is sent or signed: AI proposes, the professional decides and signs.
• Measure hours saved per week, not per quarter — if you picked the right process, the saving shows up almost immediately.

It’s the same weekly-sprint approach, with a working demo by week two, that we apply on any applied AI project: validate with one real process from the firm before committing budget to anything broader.

The takeaway

The 2026 Advisory Barometer confirms a trend that’s no longer emerging: seven out of ten Spanish firms use AI daily, and the ones that haven’t started are losing ground to those already automating their repetitive document work. You don’t need the budget of a large firm to apply it — one well-chosen process, connected to your own templates, starts giving back hours from week one.

Want to figure out which process in your firm is the best candidate to start with? Get in touch: the first consultation is free and we reply within 24 hours.