Editorial
Research Report
Mind The Agentic Action Gap: Stop Losing Money With AI Agents
Recently, I had coffee with my friend Bryan.
We were talking about how AI has helped transform his business from a bespoke services firm into a vertical SaaS company that can serve exponentially more people — without exponentially increasing headcount.
That conversation stuck with me. Because at my own company, we’re in the middle of similar structural questions. Not “How do we use AI to work faster?”
But how do we use AI to build growth systems that tell revenue teams the next best move? That’s a very different conversation. And it’s one I think every services company should be having since, as AI agents start to scale, the answers that clients want to their questions is just a chatbot away.
Table of Contents
- Most Services Firms Don’t Have a Labor Problem
- The Shift: From Craft to Codification
- The Real Unlock: Decision Infrastructure
- From Advice to Operating System
- Vertical Is the Advantage
- The Inflection Point
- From Reactive to Proactive Growth
- The Takeaway
Most Services Firms Don’t Have a Labor Problem
They have a structure problem. For years, the professional services playbook has been simple:
- Win client
- Diagnose problem
- Deliver custom solution
- Repeat
It works, until it doesn’t. Because bespoke work scales linearly, and Bryan felt that deeply. For seven years. Revenue grows with headcount. Complexity compounds faster than margin. Eventually you hit the ceiling:
- Burnout rises
- Revenue becomes unpredictable
- Quality depends on heroics
- Institutional knowledge lives in people’s heads
This isn’t a talent issue. It’s an infrastructure gap that Bryan realized as he was trying to scale. The companies that break through don’t just “productize services.” They identify structural friction and systematize it. AI makes that possible in ways that weren’t realistic five years ago, heck even a year ago.
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The Shift: From Craft to Codification
Every service firm has patterns. You’ve seen the same client bottlenecks. The same growth stalls, operational blind spots, messaging failures and internal misalignment. The question is: Have you codified those patterns?
Or are you rediscovering them on every engagement? For most professional service companies, that rediscovery loop is what kills scale.
The leap from services company to vertical product company happens when you:
- Extract your repeatable insight
- Turn it into workflows and decision frameworks
- Embed it into software
- Tie it to measurable outcomes
AI accelerates all four steps. It allows you to:
- Analyze historical engagements at scale
- Identify recurring signals
- Automate parts of execution
- Generate dynamic recommendations
- Connect fragmented data systems
But the magic isn’t in generating content faster. It’s in building feedback loops that learn from the experiments you conduct and take those learnings to make better decisions.
The Real Unlock: Decision Infrastructure
What Bryan and his business partner, Tim, ultimately built wasn’t “AI-powered content.”
They built infrastructure around credibility. That’s the bigger pattern. AI becomes transformational when it moves from output generator to decision engine. The companies getting this right are leaning into building AI-enabled growth systems that:
- Integrate CRM data
- Ingest campaign performance
- Analyze buyer signals
- Surface engagement gaps
- Identify expansion triggers
- Detect churn risk
- Recommend the next best move
Not dashboard or static reporting, but guided evolution so that you can make your next decision with confidence. Imagine a revenue team that doesn’t just look backward at attribution, but wakes up to a system that says:
- These accounts are heating up
- This segment is stalling
- These stakeholders are disengaging
- Here’s the message angle to test
- Here’s the channel shift to make
- Here’s the campaign to double down on
That’s the difference between reactive marketing and proactive growth. And that’s where services firms can become vertical product companies.
From Advice to Operating System
The future of services isn’t: “We’ll advise you.” It’s: “We’ll build a system that operationalizes the advice.”
There’s a massive difference. Advice scales with people. Systems scale with infrastructure. The firms that win will:
- Use AI to model patterns across clients
- Identify repeatable inflection points
- Build playbooks that adapt dynamically
- Package those insights into vertical-specific engines
That’s how you move from custom consulting to category-defining products.
Vertical Is the Advantage
The opportunity isn’t horizontal AI tools, it’s vertical intelligence.
Generic AI can write emails.
Meanwhile, vertical AI can understand:
- The buying cycles of wealth managers
- The compliance constraints of financial advisors
- The retention dynamics of mortgage brokers
- The expansion triggers inside PE-backed B2B
That specificity is where defensibility lives. It’s your moat. You already have the pattern recognition. AI just helps you crystallize it.
The Inflection Point
Every service company hits this moment. You can continue scaling through people. Or you can scale through systems.
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That’s the crossroads Bryan found himself at — and where Tim’s perspective changed the trajectory. Tim wasn’t a consultant parachuting in with opinions. He was a client, as CEO of a digital infrastructure company in the accessibility space that scaled to $100M ARR.
Bryan understood the craft. He had lived the nuance and the pain of trying to scale Bespoke offers. Tim saw the architecture.
Where Bryan saw high-touch execution, Tim saw repeatable patterns.
Where Bryan saw coordination complexity, Tim saw infrastructure gaps.
That combination is what unlocked the shift. AI doesn’t eliminate craftsmanship.
It forces you to decide which parts of your craftsmanship belong inside infrastructure — and which parts should remain human judgment.
That’s uncomfortable. It means:
- Extracting IP from people’s heads, books, videos, articles and podcasts
- Turning instinct into frameworks
- Standardizing what used to feel artisanal
- Saying no to revenue that doesn’t fit the system
- Investing in product thinking instead of just delivery
Most firms hesitate right there, because productization feels like dilution. But it’s the opposite. When you embed your best judgment into systems, you don’t lose craftsmanship — you scale it. And if you don’t build that infrastructure yourself, someone else will.
Related Article: This Is What Work Looks Like in a (Not So) Future World
From Reactive to Proactive Growth
The biggest shift I see coming isn’t automation. It’s evolution speed.
Revenue teams today are reactive:
- Campaign underperforms → adjust
- Pipeline drops → scramble
- Competitor wins → reposition
AI-enabled growth systems flip that dynamic. They surface pattern changes early, recommend moves before revenue dips, connect marketing activity to sales action in real time. That’s not marketing support. That’s growth infrastructure.
The Takeaway
If you run a services company, ask yourself:
- What friction do we solve repeatedly?
- What signals do we recognize instinctively?
- What decisions do we make over and over?
- What would happen if those decisions were systematized?
AI is not your competitive advantage. Codified judgment is. The companies that make this leap won’t just improve efficiency. They’ll redefine their category.
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