Put AI’s savings into the capabilities that win clients.
For most of the past three decades, professional services firms grew by building scale. They hired and trained large teams, opened delivery centers in lower-cost locations, and developed methods that let them take on bigger and more complex work than smaller competitors could. That scale was hard to match, and it carried real weight when clients chose a provider. A firm that could staff a large program quickly, anywhere in the world, had an advantage few rivals could answer.
AI is making much of that capability easier to match. Research, analysis, drafting, and coordination that once needed large teams can now be handled by smaller ones working with AI, and the same technology is available to a mid-sized firm, a new entrant, and the largest firm in the market. Scale still matters for complex, multi-year programs. Across a growing range of work, though, clients will find several providers able to deliver to a similar standard, often faster than before.
When delivery becomes easier to match, clients choose on something else. Some will choose on price. Most will choose the firm they trust: the one that knows their industry, has relationships with their executives, is present in their market, and has shown it understands the business problem in front of them. Those advantages take years to build and are hard for a competitor to copy, and they are built largely by marketing working alongside sales.
That makes marketing a decision about how the firm competes, and one that belongs with the CEO and the board. AI is also creating savings across the business. How much of that money goes back to margin and how much goes into the capabilities that win clients will shape which firms keep their pricing power and grow their share of the accounts that matter most.
See Which Advantages AI Makes Easier to Copy
Large teams and global delivery were the two advantages scale did the most to protect. Large teams let a firm place a small number of senior experts over many people doing the research, analysis, and production behind each engagement, and earn a margin on every hour of that work. Global delivery let it do the same work at lower cost in other locations, around the clock. AI now handles a growing share of that underlying work, wherever a firm is based, so both advantages count for less in a client’s decision than they once did. The methods a large firm spent years documenting are also easier for a smaller firm to build, now that AI can help capture and apply what its own people know.
A second change pulls in the opposite direction. As AI lowers the cost of building capability in any location, buyers are giving more weight to what is close to home: providers who understand local regulation and market conditions, who can put experienced people in the room with their executives, and who know the pressures facing companies in their industry and region. Rules about where data is held and who handles it are adding to that preference. In KPMG’s October 2026 survey of 1,400 CEOs, 59% said they are giving greater focus to data governance as part of their AI and data sovereignty strategies, and Gartner’s 2026 forecast expects sovereignty concerns to move about a fifth of current cloud workloads from global providers to local ones. Professional services is becoming more global in how work is produced and more local in how it is won.
Picture two firms bidding for a regional bank’s modernization program, both able to do the work equally well and on the same timeline. One sends a partner who has advised banks in that state for a decade, knows the CFO, and opens the first meeting with a view on a regulation the bank’s board is already debating. The bank chooses the firm whose partner already knows its business and its market.
For a board, the useful exercise is to sort the firm’s advantages into the ones AI makes easier to match and the ones it does not, and then look at where investment is going today. The second group is where clients’ decisions are increasingly made, and most of it can be built deliberately, through investment the board can see and measure.
“Professional services is becoming more global in how work is produced and more local in how it is won.”
Win Where Clients Still Choose on Trust
Price competition is what usually follows when clients see little difference between providers. Procurement teams compare rate cards, discounts become part of every renewal, and the savings AI creates are passed to clients as lower prices. Firms competing this way often grow revenue while their margin falls, even as the work itself becomes more efficient.
Trust gives a firm a different set of options. When a client believes a firm understands its business better than the alternatives, the conversation turns to the outcome the client needs, and price becomes one part of that decision. The firm can hold its rates as its own costs fall, so it keeps more of what AI saves. It is invited into more parts of the client’s business, and its share of each account grows over time. Both effects show up directly in the numbers investors use to judge a services firm: margin, and revenue growth from existing clients.
For CEOs and boards, that makes trust a financial asset with a direct effect on margin and growth, and marketing and sales working together is how a firm builds it beyond the personal relationships of individual partners. A reputation that depends on a handful of senior people can only win as much work as those people have time for. When expertise and relationships are built into how the firm goes to market, that trust extends to every account it pursues.
Fund Growth Capability With What AI Saves
AI is creating savings across services firms, and marketing and sales are among the first places they appear. Content that took weeks to produce can be drafted in days, research that went to outside agencies can be done in-house, and campaigns that once filled a quarter can be planned and launched in weeks. Software, production, and coordination costs fall as the same team takes on more.
When a function becomes faster and less expensive to run, budget planning tends to treat the difference as savings to return. Returning all of it to margin improves this year’s results. Putting a deliberate share into growth capability builds the trust, relationships, and market presence that protect margin and grow revenue in the years that follow, and that matters more as delivery gets easier to match.
AI also makes that choice more affordable than it has ever been. Capabilities that once needed a major budget request, and years to show results, now cost far less to build and keep running, so a modest share of the savings goes much further than the same amount would have a few years ago. The same savings that fund the investment also lower what it costs.
That split is a strategic decision, and it deserves to be made by the CEO and board, with a clear view of what each part is expected to return. Left to the annual budget cycle, it is usually settled by default.
When I built a marketing analytics and insights capability inside a global enterprise, it had to fund itself on a flat budget. Every new capability depended on finding efficiencies and savings elsewhere in the function, year after year. The CEO, CFO, and CMO agreed to that arrangement at the start, which kept the savings from being taken back in each budget cycle, and steady progress and results kept their support. The same approach works well for funding AI inside an existing marketing department today, with AI’s savings paying for what comes next.
100+ Claims. About 20 Ideas.
BCG analyzed more than 40 technology providers and over 100 of their positioning claims. More than nine in ten lead with the same AI capabilities.
Build the Capabilities That Keep Paying Back
The capabilities worth funding are the ones that become more valuable the longer a firm invests in them. A campaign stops producing results when its budget runs out. Expertise, relationships, and knowledge of clients keep working, and each year of investment builds on the last.
Expertise clients can see before they hire the firm comes first: a clear point of view on the issues facing each industry and region it serves, published and brought directly to the executives dealing with those issues. Next come relationships across each client’s leadership team, built through programs that give executives a reason to spend time with the firm’s experts, so the firm is known well beyond the few people who hired it last time. Underneath both is a shared, current picture of every priority client and market, held in the firm’s Intelligence Layer, so marketing and sales see the same signals and act on them together as one Growth Engine.
AI makes each of these practical at a scale that once needed far larger teams. It can help experts turn what they know into material tailored to each industry and executive, keep track of who is engaging with the firm across every client, and bring what sales hears in meetings back into the picture marketing works from. The experts and relationship owners stay at the center, and AI extends how far their knowledge and time can reach.
These are also the capabilities that make a firm local wherever it competes. Industry knowledge, executive relationships, and an understanding of each market are what clients look for close to home, and a firm can build them deliberately in every region it serves.
Bring Marketing Into the Board’s Growth Review
Boards review growth every quarter, usually through revenue, margin, pipeline, and the largest opportunities in play. Marketing is more often discussed in the budget review, as a cost to manage. Bringing it into the growth discussion gives the board a view of how the firm is building the advantages clients now choose on, alongside the results those advantages produce.
That works best when marketing reports in the board’s own terms: the revenue, pipeline, and account growth it contributes to, measured the same way sales and finance measure them, with a CMO who works as a peer to the head of sales. The board can then follow the AI savings put into growth capability through to the results, including whether the profit the business earns on each new dollar of revenue is rising.
The practical step is to put marketing on the agenda of the next board growth review, with three items for discussion: which of the firm’s advantages are becoming easier for competitors to match, the share of AI savings the leadership team proposes to invest in growth capability, and the results the board should see from it over the next two years. Each conversation after that builds a clearer picture of whether the firm is investing in the reasons clients will choose it.
About John Fildes
I grow the top line by connecting marketing to business strategy. By leveraging powerful positioning, content marketing, and client insights, I help organizations drive qualitative and quantitative results at scale.
I've built an amazing network of incredibly talented people over the years. What I've appreciated most is those who have invested in me, mentored me, and helped me become the talented professional I am today. I pay it forward by doing the same for other high performing professionals and entrepreneurs.
Learn More: Growth Leader | Business Builder | Leadership Multiplier
All views are my own and not those of my current or prior employers.
