The nature of knowledge work is changing.

In 2026, Anthropic published one of the largest studies ever conducted on the real-world economic impact of artificial intelligence. Drawing on interviews with over 81,000 Claude users, the research provides a rare glimpse into how professionals are actually using AI, how it is affecting productivity, and how workers perceive the opportunities and risks emerging from its adoption.

The findings are significant.

While concerns around job displacement remain widespread, the dominant theme is not replacement. It is expansion. Professionals are using AI to accomplish work that was previously too complex, too expensive, or too time-consuming to undertake.

This distinction matters.

Throughout previous waves of technology adoption, the primary benefit was efficiency. Workers completed existing tasks faster. Anthropic's research suggests something different is now occurring. Knowledge workers are increasingly using AI to expand the scope of what they can deliver, enabling new services, new products, and entirely new business models.

For coaches, consultants, advisors, and other expertise-based professionals, this shift may prove especially important.

Over the past year, Productised.ai has observed similar patterns emerging among practitioners building AI-powered assessments, diagnostics, reports, onboarding experiences, and strategic planning tools. The most successful adopters are not simply using AI to accelerate existing workflows. They are redesigning how expertise is delivered.

This blog post explores the convergence between Anthropic's macro-level research and Productised's practitioner-level observations, and examines what this means for the future of professional services.

Introduction

Every major technological shift changes the economics of expertise. The internet changed how expertise was distributed. Social media changed how expertise was discovered. Artificial intelligence is changing how expertise is delivered.

For decades, professional knowledge has largely been delivered through conversations, meetings, workshops, reports, presentations, and documents. Whether someone was a consultant, coach, strategist, advisor, accountant, marketer, or specialist practitioner, value was typically exchanged through direct interaction between expert and client.

Artificial intelligence challenges this model.

Not because expertise is becoming irrelevant, but because the mechanisms used to deliver expertise are becoming dramatically more scalable.

Anthropic's recent Economic Index research provides some of the clearest evidence yet that this transition is already underway.

Rather than relying on assumptions or theoretical models, Anthropic analysed thousands of real-world interactions and interviewed more than 81,000 Claude users to understand how AI is affecting their work.

The results provide valuable insight into how knowledge workers are adapting to an increasingly AI-enabled economy.

What Anthropic's Research Reveals

Productivity and anxiety are rising together

One of the most striking findings from Anthropic's research is the coexistence of optimism and concern.

Users reported substantial productivity improvements from AI adoption. At the same time, many expressed significant anxiety regarding long-term career impacts.

This apparent contradiction is understandable.

Workers experiencing the largest productivity gains are often those whose tasks overlap most closely with current AI capabilities. The more useful AI becomes within a profession, the more questions naturally emerge about how that profession may evolve.

The study found that perceived job risk tends to increase alongside observed AI exposure. Professionals whose daily work aligns closely with tasks AI can perform are often simultaneously the most enthusiastic users and the most concerned about future disruption.

This suggests that anxiety is not necessarily a sign of resistance. Rather, it reflects an awareness that meaningful change is occurring.

Capability expansion is outperforming simple efficiency

Perhaps the most important finding in the entire report concerns the nature of productivity itself.

When participants described how AI was helping them, the most common response was not that they were completing existing tasks faster. Instead, many described being able to perform tasks they previously could not perform at all.

Anthropic refers to this as scope expansion.

Nearly half of respondents who described productivity gains cited expanded capability as the primary benefit. Examples included launching businesses, developing software, creating products, entering new markets, and taking on responsibilities previously outside their skillset.

This represents a fundamentally different form of economic impact.

Efficiency improvements reduce the cost of existing work.

Capability improvements create entirely new forms of work.

For knowledge workers, the distinction is profound.

Experience still matters

Despite rapid advances in AI capability, seniority remains important.

Anthropic's research found that experienced professionals generally reported higher productivity gains and lower anxiety than early-career workers.

The likely explanation is straightforward.

Junior professionals derive much of their value from execution.

Senior professionals derive much of their value from judgment.

Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly capable at execution.

Human judgment, contextual understanding, relationship management, and decision-making remain far more difficult to replicate.

Rather than eliminating expertise, AI appears to increase the leverage of experienced professionals who understand how to apply it effectively.

Entrepreneurs are seeing some of the greatest gains

Among all occupational categories studied, entrepreneurial and management-oriented respondents reported some of the strongest productivity benefits.

This is particularly relevant for consultants, advisors, coaches, and professional service providers.

Unlike employees operating within fixed organisational structures, independent practitioners have greater freedom to redesign their workflows, create new offerings, and experiment with new business models.

As a result, they are often positioned to capture disproportionate value from emerging technologies.

What We're Seeing Among Coaches and Consultants

Over the past year, Productised.ai has conducted ongoing conversations with coaches, consultants, advisors, and subject-matter experts exploring how AI is changing their businesses.

While not comparable in scale to Anthropic's research, the observations align remarkably closely with the broader trends identified in the Economic Index.

Several themes consistently emerge...

Claude is becoming the preferred thinking environment

Many practitioners initially experimented with multiple AI tools before gradually concentrating their work within Claude.

The reasons vary, but common themes include writing quality, reasoning ability, strategic thinking, tone control, and the ability to produce outputs suitable for client-facing environments.

For many professionals, Claude has evolved beyond a productivity tool and become a core thinking environment.

Ideas are developed there. Strategies are refined there. Client work is drafted there. Frameworks are designed there...

Yet despite this growing dependence, much of the resulting value remains trapped within conversations.

The challenge is no longer generation

The challenge is integration.

Most practitioners no longer struggle to generate useful outputs from AI.

The real difficulty lies in turning those outputs into repeatable systems that can be used consistently across lead generation, client onboarding, service delivery, retention, and growth.

In other words, the bottleneck has shifted.

The problem is no longer creating insight.

The problem is operationalising insight.

The biggest wins are redesigns, not efficiencies

The most significant examples we encounter are rarely simple time-saving stories.

Instead, they involve practitioners fundamentally redesigning how value is delivered.

A consultant creates a diagnostic assessment that identifies opportunities before the first call.

A coach develops an AI-powered planning experience that generates personalised recommendations for every prospect.

An advisor transforms a manual onboarding process into a structured experience that produces tailored roadmaps at scale.

These examples are not simply faster versions of existing workflows.

They represent new delivery models.

This aligns closely with Anthropic's findings regarding capability expansion.

The practitioners creating the most value are using AI to expand what their business can offer, not merely accelerate what it already does.

The Emerging Delivery Layer

If AI has already transformed how expertise is created, the next phase may involve transforming how expertise is delivered.

Historically, experts have relied on a relatively small number of delivery formats:

• Meetings
• Calls
• Workshops
• Reports
• Presentations
• Documents

AI introduces a new category.

Interactive expertise.

Experiences that collect information, analyse context, apply frameworks, and generate personalised outcomes in real time.

Rather than replacing practitioners, these experiences allow expertise to be delivered more consistently, more scalably, and often earlier in the customer journey.

The result is a shift from expertise being consumed only through conversation toward expertise being experienced through products.

Why the Claude Ecosystem Matters

The significance of Claude extends beyond model quality.

Anthropic appears to be building an ecosystem increasingly centred on professional knowledge work.

The company's investment in economic research, long-context reasoning, structured workflows, and technologies such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP) signals an ambition to become foundational infrastructure for knowledge workers.

This matters because ecosystems create leverage.

The most valuable platforms are often not those with the largest feature lists, but those where professionals spend the majority of their time.

If Claude continues to become the primary thinking environment for coaches, consultants, advisors, founders, and specialists, the surrounding ecosystem will become increasingly important.

Tools that integrate directly into that environment may benefit from reduced friction, stronger adoption, and deeper workflow integration.

The opportunity is not merely to use AI.

It is to build alongside the environments where AI-enabled work is already happening.

Implications for Coaches and Consultants

The implications of these trends are significant.

Over the next several years, professional service firms are likely to face increasing pressure from two directions simultaneously.

First, AI will make generic knowledge easier to access.

Second, clients will increasingly expect personalised experiences rather than generic advice.

These forces create both risk and opportunity.

The risk is commoditisation.

The opportunity is differentiation.

Practitioners who successfully package their expertise into repeatable systems, frameworks, assessments, diagnostics, and personalised delivery experiences may be able to increase reach without sacrificing quality.

Those who rely solely on traditional delivery models may find increasing competition from AI-assisted alternatives.

The challenge is not whether to adopt AI.

The challenge is how to integrate it into a defensible service model.

Conclusion

Anthropic's Economic Index provides one of the clearest signals yet that AI is reshaping knowledge work. The dominant story emerging from the data is not replacement. It is expansion.

Professionals are using AI to increase capability, broaden scope, and create new forms of value. Among coaches, consultants, and advisors, we are seeing similar patterns emerge. The practitioners achieving the greatest gains are not simply becoming more efficient. They are redesigning how expertise is delivered.

As AI becomes embedded within professional workflows, the competitive advantage will increasingly belong to those who combine human judgment with scalable delivery systems.

The future of expertise is unlikely to be purely human or purely artificial.

It will be a combination of both.

The winners will be those who learn to make their expertise more accessible, more personalised, and more scalable through AI-powered experiences.

The question is no longer whether AI will change professional services...

The evidence suggests that it already has. The question now is who will adapt first.