AI investment is accelerating, but the biggest opportunity isn't helping individuals work faster. It's helping entire firms operate better.
During a recent workshop, Andrew Bone, VP Product and Co-founder at Dayshape, joined Brant Hollenkamp, Microsoft's Professional Services Industry Leader, to explore how professional services firms can move beyond AI experimentation and create greater operational impact.
Read on for five of the key insights or watch the full on-demand workshop, Beyond the AI noise: Where AI drives real ROI in professional services.
AI has moved from innovation teams to the boardroom.
That's one of the biggest shifts Brant has seen across Microsoft's customers over the past year. Executive conversations are no longer centered on AI adoption or what's possible. Instead, leaders are asking different questions. Where is AI creating value? How do we demonstrate ROI? And how do we use AI to strengthen competitive advantage?
"The technology is pretty well proven. Today we're having conversations with leaders around outcomes, value creation, competitive advantage, and ultimately how to drive growth."
Recent ADP research referenced during the workshop found that 88% of accounting firms remain in the exploration or early experimentation phase of AI adoption.
Yet firms are already looking ahead. Our own research found that 39% of large professional services firms plan to invest in AI for scheduling and capacity modeling, signaling a shift toward applying AI to the operational challenges that shape firm performance.
Andrew is seeing a similar trend across professional services firms. AI has made it easier than ever for individuals to build useful tools, agents, and workflows. The harder challenge is turning those individual successes into firm-wide adoption.
As Andrew explained:
"AI makes it much easier to build something useful. It doesn't necessarily make it much easier to drive adoption. That requires change management, advocacy, training, and leadership."
The AI conversation is evolving. The first wave focused on helping individuals work faster. The next is about helping entire firms operate better.
As Brant explained, AI assistants have helped address the "productivity gap" by making everyday tasks more efficient. But as organizations become more mature in their AI journey, the opportunity shifts from productivity to operations.
Andrew sees that shift happening across professional services too.
"The more interesting question is what happens when AI starts helping entire firms operate better."
Rather than simply helping people complete the same tasks faster, Andrew believes AI has the potential to fundamentally change how firms plan, resource, and deliver their work.
He highlighted two opportunities where AI can make the biggest impact.
The first is operational insight. Firms already hold rich operational data, but it's not always available to the right people at the right time. AI can democratize access to that information, surfacing risks and opportunities as they emerge rather than waiting for reports or dashboards.
The second is operational action.
"Don't just bring me a problem. Bring me a solution. The same applies to AI."
Rather than simply identifying issues, AI can recommend practical next steps, helping firms make better operational decisions while keeping people firmly at the center of the process.
As Brant summarized:
"The goal isn't to automate decision making. It's to improve decision making."
Andrew is already seeing this approach deliver measurable results.
One Big Four audit practice used Dayshape Advise to allocate new graduate hires.
It's a practical example of AI augmenting human expertise rather than replacing it, helping firms make better operational decisions at scale.
If the opportunity is so significant, what's holding firms back?
For Brant, many organizations are asking the wrong question. Rather than having an AI problem, they often have a data and connectivity problem.
"The fuel that really makes AI work is the data that you're connecting to."
AI can only deliver meaningful insights if it has access to trusted data and the business context behind it. That means thinking beyond individual AI tools and considering the wider technology ecosystem, from finance and HR to project management and resource management.
Andrew challenged another common assumption.
Many firms feel they need perfect data before they can successfully adopt AI. In reality, AI can also help improve data quality by identifying inconsistencies, highlighting missing information and spotting issues that would otherwise go unnoticed.
"Rather than thinking we need great data quality, then we can put AI over that, you can also use AI as a way to help improve the data quality."
Strong foundations matter, but they shouldn't become a reason to delay. The firms making the greatest progress are strengthening their data, systems, and governance while building AI capability at the same time.
The organizations creating the greatest value from AI aren't treating it as another technology initiative.
They're embedding it into how the business operates.
Looking across Microsoft's customers, Brant highlighted four characteristics that consistently separate the firms pulling ahead:
Andrew sees the same pattern emerging across professional services firms.
The challenge isn't a lack of innovation. In many firms, individuals are already building impressive AI tools and agents. The harder part is taking those innovations beyond isolated use cases and driving adoption across the wider organization.
"It needs a collaborative effort to really drive things from being something that's super valuable, to being used to its maximum benefit across the whole firm."
AI doesn't become transformational when it's deployed. It becomes transformational when people change how they work.
That's why the firms pulling ahead are investing just as much in people, process, and governance as they are in the technology itself.
Andrew closed the workshop with a challenge for professional services leaders. Think bigger about where AI creates value.
The first wave of AI has focused on helping individuals become more productive. The next wave has the potential to reshape how firms plan work, deploy people, and deliver for clients.
As Andrew concluded:
"Think bigger about where AI can create value... Helping individuals work faster is, in a way, missing the point of how AI can fundamentally change the way a business is run."
For professional services firms, that means applying AI where it has the greatest operational impact, from planning and resource management to delivery and decision making.
The opportunity isn't simply to work faster. It's to build a better performing firm.
These five insights are just a snapshot of the conversation between Andrew and Brant.
Watch the full on-demand workshop, Beyond the AI noise: Where AI drives real ROI in professional services, to hear the discussion in full, explore practical examples, and learn where AI is already creating measurable value across planning, resourcing and delivery.