The world of professional services is changing whether the firms themselves want to embrace that reality or not. For years, many of the professional service firms used staff to do the work, managers to review the work, and partners to maintain relationships and acquire more work in the simplest of terms. 80% of the work on the deliverable was done by the staff person, 15% was done by managers, and 5% was done by the partners.
Each person in the chain had a billing rate that corresponded with 3x to 4x their hourly salary plus benefits. The fee for the client could be fixed or hourly. However, under either pricing model, the billable hour played a role in determining the fee.
AI will completely change the model moving forward. If you provide AI with a strong workflow and the proper amount of context, AI will produce a deliverable that is equal to or better than a human expert in a fraction of the time. Does this mean that you can totally take humans out of the equation?
The answer to that is no in most cases. Even though studies have revealed that AI will surpass humans in creating qualified deliverables, the deliverable still needs a professional to review the work, edit the work, and quality control the work. After all, AI is not a CPA or Attorney and I cannot envision a time in my lifetime where two AI agents are arguing cases before the Supreme Court.
The harsh impact of AI will be felt by the independent professional service firms and their clients that cannot afford the required technology to compete with the larger firms. We have decided to change that by building a comprehensive and proprietary tool that will help the independent firms and their clients compete with the big boys.
On January 4th, we will release our first version of the Strategic and Trusted Advisory Partner system that will allow firms to work with their clients in many areas that they have never worked in before. A CPA firm could have their clients complete a context template and use AI to produce a marketing plan for example. Their ability to gather that context and feed it into our AI model is easy to do.
The problem that most CPA's alluded to in this example will face is that they have no idea what good looks like when it comes to a marketing plan. Does that mean that they should not use our technology? No, we are developing a network of experts that can tell what good looks like when it comes to a marketing plan. This approach will speed up the time that it will take for the CPA firm to compete while only consuming the specialty resources that they need.
We will preview various portions of our STAP system over the next month. We are also looking for your help in creating a permanent name for this powerful system. Please submit your naming ideas by December 17th if you would like to participate. Eight finalists will be chosen by our team and each finalist will receive a free six month subscription to the system. The winner, chosen by our naming committee will receive a lifetime subscription to our system. Voting can be completed by sending me a DM or emailing me at bkerrigan@excelerating.com.
I look forward to sharing more each day as we count down to our release date.