By Robert Cesafsky
In the past two years, the professional services industry has spent billions of dollars on AI. The return on investment for most organizations remains elusive. Leaders are frustrated. Boards are skeptical. And the dominant explanation—that AI just needs more time to mature—is starting to wear thin.
Here’s the harder truth: Most organizations are failing at AI because they’ve misdiagnosed which problem they’re trying to solve.
Across virtually every professional services organization I’ve met with in the past year, I see the same error playing out: Leaders treat AI as a single capability to be deployed across the business. In reality, their business requires two fundamentally different kinds of AI—and conflating them is killing their returns.
The Two Operations Hiding Inside Every Services Organization
