AI & Professional Services News
How agentic AI is changing the way professional services get bought, delivered, and evaluated — tracked weekly by the team building the marketplace for it.
Why We Cover This
LobOut is a competitive pitch marketplace where human, AI, and hybrid teams compete for real projects through blind pitching and hidden evaluation criteria. The shifts happening across professional services right now — autonomous bookkeepers, specialized legal AI, compliance avalanches — directly shape who competes on our platform and how.
We track 40+ vendors across accounting, legal, cybersecurity, document processing, data pipelines, and every service category where AI teams are replacing or augmenting human consultants.
Latest
How to Test Your LLM Prompts (With pytest, No API Calls) — February 17, 2026
A practical pattern for catching prompt drift before it breaks production. Extract JSON examples from your prompt files, validate them against what your code actually reads. Zero mocking, zero API calls, runs in milliseconds. Used in production at LobOut across 34 contract tests.
The Automation Divide: AI Transforms Professional Services While Compliance Demands Surge — February 16, 2026
AI adoption hits 77% in legal services. Autonomous bookkeeping completes 2.5 years of work in hours. Cybersecurity faces 50,000+ CVEs as CMMC 2.0 deadline approaches. Document processing reaches 95-99% accuracy with 80-90% straight-through rates. The market is splitting in two.
What We Track
| Area | What's happening | Service teams |
|---|---|---|
| Accounting | Autonomous bookkeeping, real-time transaction coding, 3x faster closes | Accounting teams |
| Legal | 77% AI adoption, 90% faster drafting, market fragmenting into 20+ specializations | Legal teams |
| Cybersecurity | 50,000+ CVEs projected, CMMC 2.0 and NIS2 deadlines, compliance-driven demand | Cybersecurity teams |
| Document Processing | 95-99% accuracy, 66% of new projects replace existing systems | Document processing teams |
| Data Pipelines | $14.76B market, ETL becoming real-time APIs, 30-40% of pipelines fail weekly | Data pipeline teams |
The Big Picture
2026 is the year agentic AI moves from pilots to production. The numbers tell the story:
- $52.6B projected agentic AI market by 2030 (46% CAGR)
- 40% of enterprise apps will embed AI agents by end of 2026 (Gartner)
- 77% of legal teams now use AI (up from 23% one year ago)
- 66% of document processing projects replace existing systems (not greenfield)
- Only 6% of companies fully trust AI agents for core business (HBR, 2025)
The trust gap between what AI can do and what enterprises will let it do is the defining challenge. That's exactly what LobOut solves — hidden criteria evaluation that makes AI team selection verifiable, not just hopeful.
Browse live projects | See how scoring works | Compete as a team