Jason Mlicki (00:02.402)
So Jeff, I lost five bucks already to start the new year.

Jeff McKay (00:06.94)
You did. Are you a gambling man?

Jason Mlicki (00:07.33)
Not much of one, but but you want me to tell you how I lost five bucks. So I always take pride in my in my great my great predictions, because I’m always I’m always accurate on what’s going to happen. And I told my son that when Indiana played Oregon, whatever that was on the Rose Bowl, that Indiana had beat Oregon earlier in the year on the road and usually when teams play again, that flips.

Jeff McKay (00:13.907)
I do.

Jason Mlicki (00:36.95)
I said, so Oregon’s really talented Oregon’s clearly going to win this game. So I bet him five bucks and he said, no, Indiana is going to win. And I mean, it was close. It was close. think, I think, I think Indiana only won 48 to three or 48 to 10 or something. So, so, so my, prediction almost came right. So hopefully, hopefully you and I have assembled some predictions for our listeners or sort of trends, guess, trends for 26.

Jeff McKay (00:50.772)
Yeah, that was close.

Jason Mlicki (01:06.744)
Hopefully these are more accurate. Hopefully my knowledge of professional services is more accurate than my knowledge of college football, which I don’t think is a long story.

Jeff McKay (01:15.284)
clearly is not the case.

Your, your knowledge of college football, that would be, I suspect your predictions for the professional services industry are pretty strong. Being the Ohio state fan that you are. I have to say your college prediction.

Jason Mlicki (01:28.705)
You

Jason Mlicki (01:33.624)
Well, yeah, I, you know, when it comes to college football, in reality, I don’t, I don’t really watch enough to know what’s going on. So it was, you know, it was just based on history, but, but anyway, so that’s what we’re going to do today. So we are, we are, this is actually our first recording of, of the, the new year, enough. But, so we are going to, we’ve, we’ve assembled, think we ended up with seven. We started with what we probably started with 18.

think when we started this thing, had 18 trends that we identified.

Jeff McKay (02:05.086)
Yeah, there were quite a few.

Jeff McKay (02:09.63)
That’s a lot of trends.

Jason Mlicki (02:09.704)
And it was a lot of different things that we see going on. we threw a little bit of arm wrestling, got it down to seven.

And these, don’t know how to describe these, but they’re a mix of marketing things and just big picture business things that I think need to be on the minds of professional services firm leaders and marketing leaders. So why don’t you take us from the top here? Start us out with the first of seven. So what’s the first thing that firm leaders need to be aware of or have on their mind for the year ahead?

Jeff McKay (02:49.832)
Well, we’re coming out of the gate slow, I would think, with this one. Because in my mind, this is not as much a prediction as it is a foreshadow, if you will. And that is that there will be another AI scandal. So I’m not predicting the original one.

Remember we had that major one with Deloitte and Australia. But I do think we’re going to have another significant one. And if it’s not significant and makes the press, I think there are going to be these scandals that happen in firms because firms are not managing the rollout of AI to the degree they need to be governing it.

And it’s understandable. We’re in uncharted territory. We’re moving fast. There’s a lot of shadow AI that’s existing right now. know, firms are experimenting with it. And I think there’s just going to be another, and I’m using scare quotes and air quotes for scandal around the application of AI.

Firms are getting smarter, firms, clients are getting smarter about firms using it. And they do not want to be blindsided by AI garbage. And firms need to know that. So I think it’s a trend, but I also predict that we’re still gonna have another scandal because we’re just moving so fast.

Jason Mlicki (04:39.148)
And you’re in this case, you’re saying a scandal within the professional services industry where the Deloitte scandal, if I recall it correctly, was that AI had been used to do a whole bunch of research and fact finding that wasn’t really vetted. And strategic recommendations were laid out to, I think, I don’t know exactly who the client was. I don’t recall. strategic recommendations were laid out based on false data.

basically false information. And that’s what you mean by a scandal in this context, is something like that occurs. And it’s high profile enough that someone has egg on their face in the news media or beyond. And then the repercussions of that are on everybody. It’s like, well, wait a minute. If Deloitte’s doing this, what is everybody else doing or whatever?

Jeff McKay (05:32.424)
Yeah, and there are really those two levels, right? We can taint the entire industry with the big scandals from, you know, the big visible firms, but we can also do damage to our individual firm brands. You know, if this happens to us, because CEOs talk to one another. And who wants to have the reputation as the AI crap firm?

Right? You want to avoid that in any way that you can. So I think, you know, there’s two things to think about. One is, do you have the governance in place to prevent it? And in the event that you can’t prevent it, do you have in place the damage control in order to fix it?

So it doesn’t become a wildfire running out of control.

Jason Mlicki (06:33.582)
Yeah, I’ve noticed at the start of year, you and I’ve talked about this prospect and clients alike are asking me for more explicit, you know, language around how we’re using AI. Like 12 months ago, nobody really cared if I brought up AI and how and what we were doing with it. just, their eyes kind of rolled over and really wasn’t important to them, but now they want specific information into exactly what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. So.

I like that you use the word governance because I think that’s really… And for a small firm like mine or even a mid-sized firm, I don’t think you end up in the news if you do something like this, but you do damage your reputation if it happens and you weren’t aware of it. to your point, I saw a survey the other day that said, I think in this particular survey, it said something like 15 % of companies weren’t using AI at all.

I highly doubt that that’s true because really what’s going on is people in the organization are using it all the time. Just senior leaders aren’t aware of it. So they have a massive blind spot if they don’t believe anyone’s using it. okay, I like that one. It’s a good one to start on. think the second one that we identified was, and I’ll use that the, the, it ended up.

because it started in little different place and I’ll explain where it started, we, know, all professional services firms are becoming services as software firms. So there’s sort of this shift away, not to say away from services, but towards more subscription-like experiences, expectations from clients that there’s something underpinning the relationship that’s deeper than just the relationship. Access to…

a proprietary system or access to a real-time AI tool of some type increasingly is becoming sort of just expected, I think. We see a lot of clients that are looking to build underlying data sets, and we’ll have more on this later, but where there’s something, there’s some foundational IP underpinning the work that is done.

Jason Mlicki (08:53.934)
that the client has some sort of privileged access into as a result of being a client.

Jeff McKay (09:01.277)
Well, when you think about professional services, they really are made up of people, process and technology. And AI is impacting all three of those and firms know, or I should say clients know that AI is compacting that difference between what technology capabilities are.

and what the current processes are. And AI, particularly AI agents and technology like that is what’s consolidating that. And that’s all gonna be software driven. A lot of those processes will no longer be manual. So it’s intuitive and logical that…

Firms need to be productizing those types of solutions into services. Or excuse me, into software. Services as a software.

Jason Mlicki (10:14.222)
Yeah. Which I mean, we actually almost merge these two together. I’m going to jump out of order here from the list, the way we structured them. But, you know, the dovetail on that is this increased focus on productization, because I do think what I want to say about that is it’s. And we have, I think the way we actually word it is productization gets more aggressive. And what I wanted to extend upon what you said was I think you’re not only going to see more productization of IP and

data sets into AI agents and tools that clients can use for sort of real time interaction with the firm and its knowledge set in some meaningful way. But I think you’re going to see more and more firms move to packaged, priced, named service product bundles, offers. I just think you’re going to see more and more of that. It’s funny, I had a call with a mid…

I, middle market accounting firm, this was like maybe back in November and she was, were inquiring about our, our agency and our services. And when I talked to them, we talked a lot about where they were, what they were trying to do and how we might help. And one of the things they were sort of shocked by was that I wasn’t trying to shove an offer down their throats, that there wasn’t like a pre bundled productized service that we were forcing and saying, this is, this is our.

our proprietary offer that we have, because that sounds like what they were getting from other agencies. They were getting sort of like this kind of like, our program, our program is XYZ, our program is this, and includes this, this, and this. And so there’s just a lot of that kind of thing happening right now. And there’s probably a, in this case, I’m casting it as it was a good thing for us, right? Because we were coming off as like someone who was more kind of

bespoke customized solutions kind of thing. We’re really listening to your needs. But I think there’s definitely going to be a more aggressive push for more of that from firms everywhere. And some of it goes back to something you always talk about, which is friction in the buying cycle. Really digging in and listening to somebody’s problems and coming back with a custom solution just for them.

Jason Mlicki (12:33.464)
takes a lot of time and increases friction. And a lot of times clients don’t want that either. They just want to say, I think I’ve got this problem. You’ve got a solution for this. Give me that. Give me that bundle. Give me that offer. And so they want to move faster. And so it’s sort of client driven oddly enough, even though maybe they were better off in the old model. I don’t know. So there’s probably more. There’s a lot more underlying that. What did I miss?

Jeff McKay (12:58.013)
You covered it well.

Jason Mlicki (13:02.978)
Yeah. The other piece of that that I see happening too on this productization piece is almost like AI customization. think you’re seeing a lot of firms where there’s these large language models, right, that are pretty generic in terms of what they can do and how they can be deployed. And even the AI

companies themselves don’t necessarily know how to apply their software to the unique needs of specific industries. And that’s sort of the space in between where firms live, where I think there’s tons of opportunity for them to create true proprietary products on top of existing software tools that are customized to the very unique needs of different industries and different problem sets. So it’s sort of the space between where there’s a ton of value to be had.

I think you’re going see lot more of that. You’re going to see industry-specific AI products coming out of firms. You’re going to see market offers and product bundles. And you’re going to see more of the stuff we talked about at the start of this, kind of a services as software AI agent cocktail or something along those lines.

Jeff McKay (14:17.159)
You know, one of the major risks associated with this trend is most firms don’t know how to develop and manage products. And this is going to be a challenge for them.

Jason Mlicki (14:29.229)
Yes.

Jeff McKay (14:33.907)
Um, and they’re going to need to be much smarter about how they allocate capital and invest in, these. Um, it’s not going to be the wild west like it is with a fungible service, you know, out of a successful client engagement, you know, trying to productize, you know, um, the learnings from, from an engagement. This has to be, you know, very intentional about.

how these products are being created and what their applications are, you know, to client issues. And most firms are not good at that. You know, we had Isha Armstrong on talking about that very thing, and I encourage people to listen to that episode. But firms are gonna have to build the muscle around productization.

Jason Mlicki (15:29.794)
Yeah, we’ve worked with a number of firms that have tried to launch SaaS products over the last 10 or 15 years. And I would say more often than not, it’s a failure. And it’s not, in my experience, it’s not a failure of product. It’s not necessarily that they build a bad product. It’s that they don’t understand the business model around that product and what to do with it. And then because they can’t figure it out as quickly as they thought they could, they sort of give up. They don’t give it enough time.

So after about two, three years, it’s not getting the traction they thought. They thought this was going to be easy. Revenue was going to recur. It was just this beautiful diamond in the corner. And it gets a lot harder than they thought it was going to be. And then they sort of check out and move on and say, well, this didn’t work. But they just didn’t really have the model in place yet. And they didn’t give it enough time to get there. At least that’s my opinion. Not always the case.

But that’s certainly been what we’ve seen.

Okay, what’s next?

Jeff McKay (16:39.665)
I think, and we’ve talked about this a little in other episodes, that given how AI and large language models work, the new oil, if you will, the valuable resource, is going to be proprietary data.

Jeff McKay (17:04.039)
that knowledge within the firm that comes from all of those engagements that firms are working on and or, or I should say, and proprietary research on markets.

Jeff McKay (17:25.777)
I think that’s this relying on generic stuff is not going to get you where you need to be.

Jason Mlicki (17:35.692)
Yeah, it’s interesting. There’s a couple of layers to that that I find.

Jason Mlicki (17:42.606)
really interesting. know, one that comes to mind and I’ll just give an example and this will actually leech into another prediction I sort of have, but David Baker, know, David C. Baker, who’s a consultant that serves the agency community and has for, I don’t know, going on 25 or 30 years. He has this thing he talks about. I’ve never been experienced it, but he’s, he does these, business reviews for small to midsize agencies all over the world. And every time he does a review, he does,

A talent profile. does an assessment of all the people, like personality profiles and all the people inside the firm. Right. And then he builds, he’s built over time, a database of like, I don’t know, something like 35 to 50,000 completed assessments for various roles within any business or any agency business in this case. So when you hire him, you’re getting, not only you’re getting his, his unique take on what you should be doing as a business leader.

You’re also getting his unique take on what he’s learned from this 30,000 data points. Suddenly he’s this work that he’s been doing for years suddenly now is significantly more valuable in this new reality because he’s sitting on top of this gold mine that nobody else has. Literally nobody else has this. and what can he do with that? Right? All of sudden there are all these things that he could do with that if he so chooses. And it creates this, incredible magnet effect to it.

where it’s like, well, okay, if I’m going to hire David or I’m going to hire somebody else, does that somebody else have this incredible repository that he sits on top of that, gives you a real Indy real-time indicator into the exact types of people you need and the exact types of roles in your organization? Probably not. And I think that a lot of firms, either they, they have that and they don’t see it. they haven’t thought about it that way, or they don’t have it. And it’s like,

you need to start building it, right? You can’t wait any longer. If you’ve kind of thought in the back of your mind, that’s a good idea. We should do something like that. Now is kind of the time you have to do something like that because going forward, that’s going to be the real point of separation because anybody can come in and give good advice on how to organize your firm or build your strategy, but not everybody can walk in with that, right?

Jeff McKay (20:10.781)
That’s a great example. I really like that. And it’s built into the way he works. It’s not like an add-on. It’s part of the methodology, the rhyme and reason to his consulting approach. And I suspect many firms have that. When I was at Hewitt, know, Hewitt was an outsourcer of benefits.

Jason Mlicki (20:19.598)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff McKay (20:39.365)
sat on a huge amount of health care and 401k data that led to incredible insights.

Jason Mlicki (20:51.864)
And how much of that data makes it into the marketing of the firm? 0.01%. How much of that data makes it into the client relationship? 0.1%, right? So if you’re lucky. So on some level, it’s sort of like AI is actually creating an opportunity to do something with these data. I guess that’s actually a plural. Data is plural.

decades that you’ve probably done nothing with, but would be super valuable to you, your clients, your prospects, potentially, if you do the right things with it. Yeah.

You know, other piece of this that I like, originally it was, I had this written as data and point of view together were kind of like the marriage. you said, well, no, Jason, it’s really just the data. but to me, the point of view is, you know, Dave Patniak, who’s been a guest to the show and a friend of the show always likes to say that, you know, when you find an, finding an insight requires learning something no one else knows. So can create a solution. No one else can. And so again, it’s like that proprietary data.

that nobody else really has access to that enables you to discover something that no one else knows so that you can create something else can. So I think that is sort of like the other aspect of this. It’s like the data is the asset. The point of view is what you do with it and the solutions.

Jeff McKay (22:17.331)
Yeah.

Jeff McKay (22:27.399)
Yeah, you have to create it and then you have to exploit it.

Jason Mlicki (22:30.86)
Yes. Yes.

Jason Mlicki (22:37.792)
Okay, let’s jump ahead here a little bit.

Jason Mlicki (22:46.158)
I’m going jump to the last one on the list. I want you to talk about it because it’s I’m going out of order. I don’t know. They’re running together. But I think we’re on four. I think we have three left. So number seven out of our list, there’s a seven total. So we’re doing number.

Jeff McKay (22:54.026)
you are? Which one are we on?

Jeff McKay (23:11.323)
you want me to just throw it out there? I thought you had some big thought provoking question you were gonna ask me about this.

Jason Mlicki (23:13.164)
I want you to throw it out there.

No, I do not. I do not.

Jeff McKay (23:23.603)
okay. So, I think that, there’ll be a new partner track, the way people look at talent and how it gets promoted, what gets rewarded is going to change. I’ve written about this quite a bit on my blog, but I believe that the, the partner, the leader, the successful consultant of the future.

is going to be the one that is the thinker, seller, and doer of work. The delineation between those three and the specialization is… I won’t say it’s going to go away, but the prioritization of it is definitely going to change, and it’s going to be a more well-rounded person that provides…

more integrated thoughts, more high level thoughts because AI is commoditizing the low end.

Jason Mlicki (24:32.397)
So does utilization go way altogether? mean, do people stop fixating on it and measuring it and it becomes less relevant?

Jeff McKay (24:38.835)
I don’t think utilization will ever go away because in a professional services, people and their hours are the inventory by which they’re measured. But I do think there needs to be new performance measures built around these new thinker, seller, doer type of roles.

And I don’t know if that’s a, I don’t think there’s one performance measure that solves the problem, but, revenue generation, you know, revenue per employee we’ve talked about on other podcasts, I think starts to get elevated, in terms of the evaluation. It’s more macro, but.

I do think that the performance measures will change.

Jason Mlicki (25:41.94)
And you think that that means that there’ll be an expectation of senior people that they are doing more than they used to? You know, that there’s less leverage in the model now or the leverage has moved. The leverage has moved from people to AI and AI tools a little bit. It’s shifting a little.

Jeff McKay (26:03.569)
Yeah, I think a little of both. There’ll definitely be leverage with AI that used to be lower on the pyramid. But I do think the doing somewhat changes because now it’s big thinking is the doing. So.

Yeah, I think it’ll be a little bit of both.

Jason Mlicki (26:34.894)
I like that one a lot. do like this idea that, and I’m hypothesizing, but I’m hypothesizing like in a larger firm, there’s this idea that, you know, someone’s getting promoted because they’re highly billable. They’re highly utilized. They’re really good at deploying and utilizing and building teams and not saying that that’s not important, but to your point, if all of a sudden you’re deploying products and services and

digital employees or however you want to call it, the expectations need to shift a little bit in terms of what it means to be successful.

really interesting.

Jeff McKay (27:17.063)
Yeah, you could easily see. I like the way you describe that because if the pricing model changes and you’re no longer paying for the hour, but by the outcome, and AI agents are managing those outcomes and the thinker, seller, doer is managing the agents, then it becomes how much outcome are you producing and how much revenue does that equate to?

so I like to describe that.

Jason Mlicki (27:48.972)
And when you take that, well, when you take it full circle to the productization trend that we talked about and the services and software trend as well, what happens is what are you selling? You might be selling access to the agent. How do you price that? What’s the value of that access? Is it based on usage? Is it just based on pure value to the business? And then the partner that is overseeing that.

right, making sure that that agent is deploying correctly and giving the client what the client actually needs. And it’s accurate going very back to the beginning of this conversation that you started with, avoiding some massive AI gaff. Clients relying on this agent that your firm built under your lens of your brand and said was great. That’s giving them false information. And, you know, maybe it’s even based on all the proprietary data we talked about, right?

All these things kind of connected together.

Okay. Um, we have a couple left and, uh, one for me, I actually was the first thing I wrote when I started the new year. I just see a resurgence of brand. Um, I see this as a pivotal year for firms to reinvest in the brand, um, in ways they haven’t. And I don’t mean that we talked, we did an episode on this. I don’t mean going back to, you know, branding 20 years ago where we’re fixating on.

the elevator pitch and we’re fixating on the brand identity and the brand guidelines and not saying that, know, visual identity and all that stuff isn’t important. But what I am saying is that just the way clients buy has definitely changed dramatically in the last 30 ish months. AI has radically changed the digital portion of the buying experience. And I’ve kind of described it as clients retreating into walled gardens, right?

Jason Mlicki (29:49.582)
the walled garden being Chat GPT or Google Gemini, and not coming out of those walled gardens. So all the discovery and stuff they used to do online to support their in-person relational buying activities has all completely changed. And it’s changed the nature of what you do as a marketer and how valuable it is. I kind of.

came up with this notion that it’s sort of like the content marketing era that we lived in when publishing was valuable. You published because you were building search engine authority so that you could rise in rankings and so that you could get found. That’s not really nearly as valuable as it used to be. But what is valuable now is going to be repeatable attention. Like how do you actually get permission to have a regular relationship with your prospects?

again. And that to me comes back to brand comes back to reinvesting in the brand, building distinct assets, whether it’s, you know, some of the stuff we’ve talked about foundational IP and research based data that no one else has that clients can get access to through a marketing experience, whether it’s branding the tactics, you know, we’ve been pushing our clients to think much more purposefully about all of their marketing efforts as media assets.

Right? You know, your newsletter is an asset. Your podcast is an asset. Your event is an asset and all of these things need to be branded and they all need to have their own experience around them. That draws people in and makes them want to be there, not just stumble upon you on the internet or something. so I just think that those investments need to happen. And so it’s sort of like the things that you’ve been doing in the content era, I’m not saying are things you should stop doing. I’m not saying you should stop like, you know,

writing articles or producing podcasts or building points of view, no matter how you put them in the marketplace. But the way you think about what you’re doing needs to shift a little bit because you’re not playing the search game anymore. You’re playing a different game. So it’s going to be more about, I’ve used this line a lot. In the content era, clients could stumble upon you without knowing who you are.

Jeff McKay (32:01.981)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (32:13.302)
In the AI era, increasingly, I think you need to create reasons for them to want to find you. And that comes down to investing in the brand and things that you can own, unique, ownable assets.

Jeff McKay (32:26.611)
Yeah, I would take that even further and in two impacts that I see happening as a result of this. The first one, and we’ve already seen this trend happening, but I think it’s going to go even further. And that is problem definition for clients. Clients already, you know,

do 70 % to 80 % depending on what research you look at have completed the buyer’s journey a significant amount. Well, I think with AI, their self-diagnosis is going to be even more frequent and probably even more solidified by the time they reach out to a firm. And they’re going to say,

we’ve defined our problem. We don’t need any assessments. We don’t need you to do anything. We’re looking for somebody that can help us with X problem. And they’re going to have such high confidence in their problem definition that firms are going to have to just respond.

to that self definition of problem, which is interesting. And we kind of talked about this from a competitive dynamic the other day when McKinsey or some other strategy consulting firm has come in historically and defined a problem for a client. And then they go out and find a vendor to help them solve that problem.

Jason Mlicki (33:41.134)
Yeah.

Jeff McKay (34:08.027)
that vendor has to respond to what McKinsey has said is the problem. And nobody wants to play on that field.

right? Because then you just become a vendor and an order taker.

Jason Mlicki (34:22.284)
Yeah. It’s funny, as you were talking, my brain was firing on two dimensions. One was the reframe. You know, so much of business development over the last 20 years has been about it all rooted in the challenger sale, right? Dixon and Adamsons work, but it all rooted in this idea of the client comes in with the perception of their problem and their solution. And often the first step in the, for the professional seller is to reframe and say, well, have you thought about it this way and look for

a better way to really frame the problem because often maybe the client has misdiagnosed the problem, right? But in this new reality, maybe the reframe looks different. That’s the first thing. Maybe it’s not reframing that they’ve defined the problem and solution wrong. Maybe it’s reframing the belief that they should go straight to solution right away. And that makes me think of the conversation that we had with Maria Bolden when she was at Gartner.

And we talked, remember when we talked about success and the idea that in the sales process, one of the pieces of this isn’t just helping the client pick, pick, hopefully pick you, but helping ensure the likelihood that they’re going to be successful. And so when they come in, like you said, and they’ve done 95 % of the work and they’ve got the problem framed and the way they see it framed through mother use with AI, and this is solution and let’s go. Maybe the reframe is we’ll slow down guys.

just because you figured it all out doesn’t mean you’re going to be successful. We need to figure out how we’re going to be successful. And we may have to do some things that you don’t think you need to do in order for that success to take hold. Some of the assessments, the things that you think aren’t important, but actually they’re critically important to success, not critically important to this moment right now. So that’s a really great one. I had never thought about it that way, but I just think that you’re going to see a whole shift in how we sell.

Jeff McKay (36:19.987)
Yeah, which to me is the second part of this equation. And going back to your comment about not brand as visual identity and elevator pitch, but brand as reputation shaped by behaviors. And to me,

that makes that brand preference attribute of Simpawtico even more important because it’s going to be how do I work with this firm in resolving this problem and it’s those people that can reframe as you just said in a way that resonates with clients.

where clients aren’t feeling like, well, you just told me I’m stupid and I’m completely off or whatever the case may be. But that I, I see myself collaborating and working with you on this problem because we are in sync. have the same worldview. You’re easy to do business with. I think it’s going to be even more important in this new era.

Jason Mlicki (37:19.736)
Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (37:40.726)
Yeah. Interesting. All right. We’ve got one left. And actually, I’m kind of glad we left it for last because I think it’s the most big picture one. And there’s sort of two, there’s a part A and part B of it. I first laid it out there and I basically wrote, just think, I think Accenture is going to separate in the race for AI spend. I think reinvention is going to take hold the same way that some of their prior kind of like,

high performance programs did, but with the same way that those did that kind of turned to be sort of a catapult for the firm. I think you’re going to see them get some separation between their peers and get more of the high spend. mean, know, Francis told us they were the first to 2000 deployments. Was that what it was? I’m trying to remember. And so I think that you’re just going to continue to see that separate. think you’re going to see also, and this is part A of the two part, you’re going to see sort of

Like we’ve seen in other industries, of the magnetism of the big firms kind of expand, and they’re just going to continue to kind of scoop up a lot of what’s out there in the room, whether it’s organic growth or inorganic. But that kind of like idea that markets are shrinking down to a handful of firms or handful of companies in certain industries, I think is going to continue to play out here. And I think Accenture is going to be the

the one that really separates.

Jeff McKay (39:14.759)
Yeah, when you looked at CB Insights in our episode where we talked about AI agents and the investments that firms in the industry were making, it was hard to not see Accenture cornering the market in the AI tech stack. I mean, it was really impressive. That coupled with

Jason Mlicki (39:21.645)
Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (39:33.506)
Yeah.

Jeff McKay (39:39.816)
You know, the two episodes that we did on reinvention and how that is not a marketing campaign, but the DNA for how Accenture is thinking about AI and its impact on business. I think you’re spot on. And if I had to place a bet, I would place it on Accenture.

They always seem to get it right in the end. I it can be messy, but they get it right in the end. guess an ancillary to this, big boys keep getting bigger and taking market share. I do think, and we discussed this with Chris Barbin and Michelle Swan, that there are going to be AI native firms that are going to come in. They’re going to take market share. And for

middle market firms, if you’ve got the big boys on top, you know, taking share, you’re going to have AI native firms taking share on the bottom. So you’re going to be pecked at from from above and below. And it’s going to be critical that firms be aware of what the competitive set is, how it’s evolving, and how they’re responding to that.

You’ve mentioned multiple times the research firm. What is it? Bridge?

Jason Mlicki (41:09.378)
Yeah, Bridgetown guys, it’s Bridgetown guys.

Jeff McKay (41:11.227)
Rich, yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s an excellent example. And they’re taking a big chunk out of research firms.

Jason Mlicki (41:19.884)
You would think, I don’t know for sure, but you would think there would be. And you think across everything that a firm does for clients, right? All the different activities it takes to render advice or implement on a project or whatever you do for a living. There’s so many sub-steps in that. so many, I think a lot of those sub-steps are under attack, right? The way you’ve done them historically is now under attack, maybe for the first time.

or certainly in the biggest way it’s been. And so I do think you’re right. I do think that there is a whole soft underbelly to the, even to the large firms that is under attack from this new wave. And it’s going to change the nature of the firm, the nature of the work, the competitive landscape. It is going to change all of those things. So it’s gonna be a fun.

an interesting time, really.

Jeff McKay (42:23.699)
Aren’t you glad that you’re a consultant to professional services firms and not having to deal with, well, I guess you are dealing with this, but very different for those firms that have some size to this versus smaller firms like ours that can respond much more quickly and easily. It’s a challenge.

Jason Mlicki (42:48.332)
Yeah, it’s a challenge. mean, it’s one of those things where somebody you talk about this all the time. Some of it just comes down to culture and mindset. know, it seems like there’s firms that don’t look at this as a challenge. They just see opportunity. They just look around, see opportunity, opportunity, opportunity. And those firms are doing great. And it’s the firms that see it as a challenge that are struggling because they’re looking at the wrong end of the pipe or whatever you want to say.

Well, you know.

try to hold us to account. So what we need to do is at the end of the year, we need to do a reflections piece on this and say, hey, how right were we? Were these seven things, did they really turn out to be true? Or were we out over our skis? Were we too soon to call it? Are we placing bets like my son does in Indiana, who seems to have a forward-thinking view of what’s going on? Or based on his dad’s past-focused view of Oregon as a…

prior power. don’t know. So, man, this was a fun one. Yeah, it was.

Jeff McKay (43:53.107)
Place your bet over under. What’s the over under?

All right, buddy. Well, it’s been a fun discussion.

Jason Mlicki (44:03.96)
See you next week.

Jeff McKay (44:05.332)
See you buddy.