It ain’t what you know, it’s the way that you know it. The iManage Knowledge Work Benchmark Report 2026, drafted by RSGI, surveyed more than 3,000 decision-makers across 26 countries. Its central finding: the firms most sophisticated at managing their own knowledge are the ones pulling ahead — financially, and in how confidently they put AI to work.
Almost everyone is now using AI. Eighty-five percent of firms are piloting, implementing or running it. But only 17 percent say it is fully integrated and widely used. Embracing AI and embedding it are not the same thing, and the gap between the two is where the real story sits.
[key-findings]
What predicts which side of that gap a firm falls on is not its AI budget but its knowledge work maturity — how well it organises, governs and reuses the information it already holds. The most mature organisations are markedly more likely to report top-quartile financial performance, year-on-year revenue growth and customer retention above 90 percent. They are also the most likely to expect AI to be genuinely transformative, and the least likely to be replacing systems wholesale: their confidence shows up as disciplined investment, not disruption for its own sake.
The basics, though, remain stubborn. End users still spend an average of 37 minutes a day looking for information, even at firms confident they can find what they need. Governance lags hardest of all: a quarter of organisations let staff use public AI tools with little oversight, and more than a third have suffered a policy violation as a result. Tellingly, it is firms in the middle of the maturity curve - ambitious, but still building their controls - that report the most incidents.
The implication is the one RSGI has argued consistently. Get the foundations right before chasing the frontier.
“competitive advantage in law firms is being dictated by their digital prowess as much as their legal expertise — if not more so”.
-Reena SenGupta
Key findings
Key findings
At a glance
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