Every year, professional services firms make million-dollar decisions about pricing, staffing, and AI investments — often without objective data to back them up. Today, Laurel launched Signal to change that.
Professional services firms have operated for decades without objective insight into how work gets done, making important decisions based on manual time entries and gut feel. AI adoption has made this untenable. When AI compresses hours of work into minutes, time-based business models absorb revenue losses instead of capturing productivity gains.
Signal solves this measurement crisis. Unlike traditional reporting tools that depend on subjective inputs, Signal captures and analyzes real work patterns — delivering a level of visibility impossible with manual reporting. It unifies data across time, profitability, and operations into a single view, providing a holistic understanding of where value is created and where effort is lost.
Signal starts with the individual. Professionals get a clear, accurate view of how their own time is spent — without the burden of manual reconstruction. By giving people visibility into their work first, Laurel ensures the data is trusted at the source. Signal then aggregates these real work patterns across teams and the firm to surface insights leaders can act on.
The Signal launch comes on the heels of Laurel's acquisition of Braid. Braid – developed by a team of former Facebook and TikTok engineers and backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Initialized Capital — was critical in building Signal, because it can unify revenue, engagement, and business activity data across platforms. Braid’s data aggregation and workflow intelligence capabilities allow Signal to transform how professional services firms understand the relationship between time, value, and revenue, offering not just billing and operational analytics but strategic guidance on pricing and workflow optimization.
Measuring AI ROI
Signal measures whether AI tools are saving time or just sitting unused. By comparing work patterns before and after AI adoption, Signal identifies which tools create leverage and which create noise — giving firms the data they need to justify investments and double down on what works.
Capturing Lost Revenue
Signal automatically captures more than 99% of billable activity, including the hours that typically fall through the cracks. Firms gain visibility into the true cost of delivering every project and which clients are actually profitable — not just which ones bill the most.
Smarter Pricing and Forecasting
Using historical patterns, Signal predicts how much time and staffing future projects will actually require, making fixed-fee pricing more defensible. It spots redundant tasks and workflow bottlenecks that burn hours without adding value, and shows how work actually flows through teams.
Talent Insights and Workforce Sustainability
In addition to firm‑wide operational and financial metrics, Signal delivers talent insights that benchmark top performers and illuminate workload and burnout patterns, enabling leaders to build healthier, more resilient teams.
"2026 is the year of AI accountability," said Laurel CEO Ryan Alshak. "Firms have deployed tools to stay competitive, but most can't answer basic questions: Is this investment paying off? Where are we losing money? How do we price work when AI makes us faster but not more billable? Signal gives them answers."
"Laurel gives us objective visibility into how work actually happens — something traditional timekeeping simply never delivered,” said John Roman, Jr., CIO at The Bonadio Group. “With Signal, we’re moving beyond compliance-driven time entry to real operational insight, helping our teams work more efficiently while bringing clarity to our true cost of delivery and project visibility.”
Signal is available today to professional services firms worldwide. To learn more, visit www.laurel.ai/signal.
About Laurel
Laurel is the world’s first AI time platform for professional services firms. The company's AI transforms how organizations track, analyze, describe, and optimize their most valuable resource: time. By automating work time and connecting time data to business outcomes, Laurel enables firms to increase profitability, improve client delivery, and make data-driven strategic decisions. Founded in 2018, Laurel serves many of the world's largest accounting, consulting and law firms. For more information, visit www.laurel.ai.
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