"By 2005, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine" declared Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman in 1998. In 2025, MIT economist Daron Acemoglu remarked "The industry has not produced products or services that are hugely valuable. If you compare AI to the internet, it was clear how the internet was going to change everything."

It is tough to make predictions, especially about the future, goes the old adage. Yet the practical economic impact of AI is already making itself apparent in tangible and measurable ways within professional services-based industries.

The economic significance of AI, and the Agents that animate them, lie in how  effectively they reshape the unit economics, workflow efficiency, and margins of a  business. A recent iClerk case study provides a real-world example of a professional  services firm that doubled service revenue on their professional engineering reporting business.

The firm provides Phase II Environmental Remediation Assessments with workflows consisting of mundane tasks in a sector with rising labor and equipment costs and competitive pressure that demands low cost bids. The reporting tasks involved are both repetitive yet critical, requiring tacit knowledge, social intelligence, and complex judgment, processes which rely heavily on the nuanced judgment of licensed engineers.

The customer was contracted to provide Phase II Environmental Remediation  Assessments across five decommissioned gas leases, a report workflow that takes ~12 engineering hours to process, and includes collecting months of borehole logs, lab results, location-based, statutory guidelines, and numerous proprietary macros.

iClerk Environmental Assessment Agents were deployed to automate this important process, improving the unit economics of the firm overnight. The Agent ingests field and lab data in real time, matches location-based, regulatory thresholds with traceable, auditable exceedance accuracy,  alerts, and report generation, and human reviews for approval. The Agent automatically assembles a regulator-ready, multi-hundred-page report with chain-of-custody. iClerk Agents automated 12 hours of engineering time to minutes and expanded profit margins by 50% on this product line.

These types of results are available to companies ranging from finance and insurance, to legal, engineering, compliance and education sectors. AI Agents allow companies to  leverage AI today, through a gradual, selective process, rather than requiring massive  organizational or economic change. Change your business one agent at a time with iClerk.