Laurel Signal: Where Time Becomes Intelligence

Every day, your team completes thousands of activities  through emails, document reviews, meetings, analysis, and research. Laurel transforms these activities into a brand new data set. The aggregation of daily activity data tells the real story of how work actually happens, but until now, that story has been largely invisible.

Engagements that looked profitable turn out to have lost money, employees seem busier than the utilization metrics suggest they should, while high performers burn out quietly. AI tools are rolled out without knowing whether they save time or simply add noise, and a meaningful share of billable work never gets captured.

Laurel Signal makes these stories visible and actionable.

Signal is a work intelligence platform that turns everyday work activity into objective insight, helping you understand how work truly gets done and what outcomes that time investment drives.

You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure 

Professional service firms are being asked to deliver more value with greater predictability, heightened by the lingering questions of if/when/how AI will make its way into client work, yet most decisions are still made without clear insight into how work actually happens. 

The reality is expensive. Our data shows that about 30% of work never makes it into a timesheet, and 11% of that time should have been billed—adding up to roughly $26,000 in lost revenue per professional every year.

At the same time, firms are making high-stakes decisions about pricing, staffing, and AI investments without reliable visibility into how work actually happens. Traditional systems rely on after-the-fact reconstruction through manual reporting, creating a growing gap between how work is done and how it’s recorded, leaving firms to operate on assumptions rather than facts.

Meet Signal 

Today, we're launching Signal—and it couldn't come at a more critical moment for professional services.

Signal replaces reconstructed work with objective measurement.

Built on Laurel’s robust multi-modal activity collection, Signal automatically captures patterns of work across digital activity and turns it into clear, measurable intelligence without relying on manual entry, guesswork, or subjective reporting.

For the first time, firms can move beyond asking, “How long did this take?” and start answering a more meaningful question: What did this time actually produce?

By treating time as a foundational input, Signal helps firms understand both efficiency and effectiveness by connecting how long work takes to what that time delivers. That shift changes how leaders think about delivery, profitability, and performance.

Signal delivers this intelligence across four critical areas:

1. Profitability You Can See 

Signal makes the true cost of work visible in real time so firms can manage margins proactively.

• Auto-capture 99%+ of billable activity—including the hours that typically fall through the cracks—preventing forgotten time and lost revenue
• Gain visibility into the true cost of delivering every project and which clients are actually profitable, not just which ones bill the most
• Use real delivery data to justify pricing, identify under-scoped work, and negotiate fixed fees with confidence
• Spot margin erosion early so you can reallocate resources before profitability slips

2. Measuring AI ROI with Precision

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.

• See whether specific tools actually save time and create leverage by measuring their real impact on how work gets done
• Get the data needed to justify investments and double down on what works
• Compare work patterns before and after AI adoption to identify what's actually driving value

3. 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.

• Forecast the true time, effort, and staffing required for future engagements using historical activity data
• Spot redundant tasks and workflow bottlenecks that burn hours without adding value
• See how work actually flows through teams and identify what top-performing teams do differently
• Standardize and optimize workflows across the firm based on proven patterns

4. Talent Insights & Workforce Sustainability

Signal delivers talent insights that help build healthier, fairer teams by making work visible and measurable at both the individual and firm level.

• Identify after-hours work, intensity patterns, and workload imbalances so leaders can intervene before burnout leads to attrition
• Benchmark top performers and ground performance, growth, and promotion decisions using objective insight into how time is actually spent
• Provide individuals with accurate, suggested timesheet entries and a clear view of personal time use without manual reconstruction

How Signal Creates Time Intelligence 

Unlike traditional analytics tools that depend on manual inputs or siloed metrics, Signal perpetually and automatically captures what actually happened, not what people remembered to record. It follows a simple, deliberate sequence designed to deliver value quickly and get smarter over time.

• Collect: Automatically capture daily work activity across the tools professionals already use.
• Label: Use AI to organize that activity into projects, workflows, and skill areas.
• Surface insight: Reveal patterns and opportunities across profitability, productivity, and people.

By giving individuals visibility into their own work first, Signal ensures trust at the source. Over time, these real work patterns compound into a firm-wide dataset. And because it’s built on real historical patterns, Signal doesn’t just explain the past; it helps firms forecast workload, model scenarios, and plan staffing, making it predictive, not just descriptive 

The Power of Time Intelligence

Professional services firms deserve the same operational clarity that other industries have relied on for decades. You should know not just what your team delivered, but how they delivered it, at what cost, with what tools, and with what impact on your people.

By connecting how work gets done, what it costs, and who's doing it, Signal gives leaders a clearer picture of how their business actually runs. That visibility makes it easier to price work confidently, invest in AI wisely, deliver predictably, and support teams sustainably.

That’s the power of time intelligence.

Learn more about Signal