AI for professional services is reshaping how boutique firms operate. But meaningful change doesn’t happen through sudden shifts—it unfolds through intentional, incremental exploration. Firms that keep moving will reach higher ground. Those waiting for perfect clarity risk being swept away.
Most professional services founders aren’t stuck because they lack talent. They’re stuck because fear is keeping them anchored to an operating model the market is already moving past.
How Pro-Serv Firms Can Use AI to Serve Small and Mid-Sized Clients Better (Without Becoming Tech Companies)
Everyone is on a different part of the AI Maturity Curve, and this guide aims to keep people moving to the next level. I get it, you’re drowning in work and your to-do list never gets shorter. You watch other firms moving faster, winning bids, delivering better work.
Every January, I find myself making some version of the same promises. This is the year we grow faster. This is the year we get more disciplined. This is the year the business finally feels like it’s running instead of being carried.
Lately, I’ve been revisiting some of the most basic fundamentals of professional services. Not because they’re broken, but because Era 3 is changing how fast firms can scale, and what gets exposed along the way. AI has made it possible to grow a firm faster than most founders ever imagined. Work that took weeks now takes days. Teams can do more with fewer people. Margins can expand quickly. On the surface, it feels like a new playbook.
Remember 2022? Even 2024? When you’d tolerate almost anything to keep a warm body in a seat? That senior consultant who hadn’t read a client brief in months but was “essential to continuity.” That project manager who turned every 30-minute check-in into a 90-minute therapy session but “knew all the stakeholders.” That analyst whose work needed complete rework every time but “at least they showed up.”
You have built something real with your hands, mind, and will. Few people truly understand what that requires. You do, because you lived it.
At some point in our careers, many of us who’ve found success in business are asked to give back by serving on a nonprofit board.
Becoming a nonprofit board member is both an honor and a recognition of one’s standing in the community. For charitable organizations, adding business leaders to their boards provides invaluable access to those leaders’ brainpower, resources and connections.
Last year, I had 539 one-on-one calls with founders and executives of boutique professional services firms. From QBRs to onboardings to sales conversations and diagnostic readouts. After that many conversations, one lesson stands out above the rest: the firms that thrived in 2025 were bold, and the firms that struggled played it safe.