Episode 107 Transcript

Banoo Behboodi: Welcome to the Professional Services Pursuit, a podcast featuring expert advice and insights on the professional services industry. I'm Banoo, your host for today's episode, where we will continue to explore AI and what it means for the professional services industry. Who better to explore this topic than my guest today, Brian Sommer, an expert and consultant in the field and a software industry analyst covering the PSA space. Brian had a multi-decade run at Accenture and was their worldwide director of Software Intelligence, among other roles. He's also led a major client project for another Big Four firm and advised several other consultancies as part of his own firm's work. With that, I want to welcome you, Brian, to our podcast and thank you for your time.

Brian Sommer: Glad to be here.

Banoo Behboodi: Fantastic. Let's get started by having you introduce yourself, provide some insights into your career, who you are, and then we'll get going.

Brian Sommer: Let's just say I started off in life in a small town in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of no place, in the middle of Texas—an unlikely place to build a career around high-tech consulting, but it is what it is. In fact, when I got to college, I started my first consulting business there. For a while, I was doing radio station marketing work, marketing consulting work. Then I started doing litigation projects, and I still do some of those to this day. It's great consulting work from the fees.

In the middle of all that, I did about 20 years with Accenture. I started off in small offices and graduated up to world headquarters, where I made partner. After I left Accenture, I decided to do my own thing for a while. It's freeing and enabling not to have to worry about keeping a couple of hundred people fully chargeable every day. That's a nice load off your back when you don't have to worry about that. That brings me up to where we are today.

Banoo Behboodi: That's awesome. Thanks for that. With all of that experience and knowledge, you have determined five services anti-trends for 2026. We will be covering that today. You are going to walk us through each of those and questions to ask as you go through each for the Professional Services listeners, as they assess where they are and where they need to go for 2026.

Let's get started. Let's kick off with the first one.

Brian Sommer: All righty. Well, the first anti-trend I identified was: don't, for God's sake, sell AI-powered solutions in 2026 like you have in 2025. I've had a conversation with you and others that can talk about just how bad some of these presentations have been.

I've been sitting there as an industry analyst listening to a number of you, probably on this call, give talks either in software shows or with clients. It isn't pretty, to put it bluntly. One characteristic that really makes me concerned about a service firm is when I see somebody giving a presentation that clearly was predominantly built by artificial intelligence. They use some kind of generative AI tool to outline the subject, maybe even build the slides and put the deck together. They may have used a different AI tool to create some of the artwork in there. It's obvious that's what it is.

For those of you who think, what's wrong with that? The problem is the audience will know it's an AI-created product, and they're going to be asking themselves this question: this isn't new information. This is something that was stored in an LLM. This is something that's already out there. Why should I pay a premium billing rate kind of price for something that we could get ourselves just by asking a major AI tool?

The sales process is kind of screwed up at the moment. It's a great tool, and it can help you jump-start and build the presentation, but these things are so obvious when you're in the audience. You have to hear it. I'll talk a little bit more about what you do, but be prepared to know that the audience is already thinking that they might already know more about AI than this consultant does. When you use AI-generated presentation material, the answer is, yes, the client probably knows at least as much, if not more, about AI. That's what's coming off, and that's why you can't do these presentations the old way anymore.

Now the other problem is the content, besides being AI generated, it's usually around the same five or six points. Things like AI is going to change the nature of work. How many times have we all heard that story? Or AI is going to take away some jobs, or someone is going to talk about AI is going to create some jobs, or AI is going to consume all kinds of electrical energy and water, and that's going to create issues for society in general, in the environment.

There's a handful of topics that keep getting brought up time and time again. We're not moving the needle much. If you want to own the anti-trend here, come up with something unique, novel, interesting, and different from an AI perspective. Why not come out on stage or to a client and talk about the 10 things that you've learned doing AI projects at clients, and how you fix them or make sure they don't blow up in front of your clients?

When you start off a presentation like that, you're starting off with knowledge that probably isn't in somebody's third-party LLM tool. You're talking about something that's first person, something that you saw and witnessed at a client project, or you're talking about original research your firm did. If you can't give an AI talk without referencing a Harvard Business Review article, you probably don't know what you're talking about.

Think about where the primary research is, what you've done, what you're experiencing with customers, and what you can share that people haven't heard before. If you want to be a killer consultant in the AI age, talk about the unique things. Don't talk about the old, tired, shopworn cliché stuff we've been hearing for the last two and a half years.

Banoo Behboodi: We've talked about where Kantata is headed with our Kantata Expertise Engine, but we completely are aligned with you in terms of what the firms and professional services need to focus on—how they showcase their talent and expertise, not how they use AI. Coding agencies and IT may be able to use AI to code a program, but that's not what we're offering as professional services. We're offering people's expertise. If you use AI for that interaction exchange to establish, develop, and present your expertise, then that makes sense. I totally concur with your first item.

But let's get to the second one. I think the second one is dealing with the fact that we're not conceptually talking about AI. We've arrived. What is that?

Brian Sommer: The second anti-trend is don't just talk about AI. Talk about what is the real art of the possible with AI. Let me tell you, I've only heard one presenter in the last couple of years who’s actually admitted that they did this, which is rare. They took their client to Silicon Valley, basically, and took them around for two or three days. They visited with some of the big players out there to see what is the art of the possible. I've been doing that for decades. I bring the clients to where the heart and soul of some of the new cutting-edge technology is. When clients leave from the end of that experience, I had one where the chief operating officer filled an entire three-ring notebook tablet full of notes from the time he spent there with us.

It's important that you do this because I want you to think about the difficulty in selling an AI solution versus selling an old-school ERP product or an accounts payable software package. Everybody knows what an accounts payable package is going to do generally. They know the flow of how things are going to happen. The only real surprise is: this package has five ways to allocate a balance or line item; this other one can do seven ways. That's it. We are fighting over little functions and features for the old tech.

The new stuff is something beyond the experience base of the clients. They don't know what all could be done and they need to see it, feel it, touch it. You need to create an experiential sales process. You need to create your own AI center of excellence, and bring prospects into that to let them touch, feel, see, and experience how a new workflow looks when it's been completely reimagined and reinvented to handle the new agentic AI world of today.

It's that need to have an agentic deal that takes the pressure off you from telling people about generic AI topics. You can go straight into discussing how we change your industry to truly take advantage of artificial intelligence in every one of the flavors it has: agentic, algorithmic, generative, and so forth. I'm sure some clever tech companies are going to have a fourth kind of AI to talk about that you need to incorporate any day now.

Banoo Behboodi: That's about making it tangible. The actual professional services industry, the consulting firms, etc., probably have their own AI strategy on how they manage their own business internally. How does that fit into the third item?

Brian Sommer: I think for the third one, you need to be prepared to really tell in detail the big things, the big aha moments that happened in the AI transformation your own service firm is undertaking. If you can't talk about it from a first person perspective, you lose credibility points with a client or prospect.

Your own story needs to be a hallmark of the messages that you take into the marketplace. It's what gives you credibility. When you can say in our own firm, we caught a hallucination that an AI tool created, and that was going to create a massive embarrassment to the company and to the client. It's okay to admit that; it's okay to talk about these things because the prospect or the client wants to hear that you know what the problems and issues are. They can trust you and believe that you're going to be using that same kind of attention to detail to protect their firm as well. You ought to emphasize that.

There are other questions customers are going to have. For example, you need to be prepared to talk about your thoughts on how your pyramid is going to change. Right now, it's probably very broad at the bottom and very narrow at the top, but AI is going to take a whole bunch of the scutwork out of the middle and the lower ranks, where you've got staffers and managers tabulating data, collecting information, and doing summarization of data. AI is going to be able to do that.

If you don't have a viable, realistic story on what you're thinking about doing differently with your mid-management and entry-level people, you don't have credibility with clients or prospects. You also have to be able to talk about how you're going to develop the next generation of leaders in your company if you don't have a large pipeline of people coming in from the entry levels and moving their way up the apprenticeship process.

Clients want to hear about this because they are fascinated and equal parts terrified of the same changes happening to their firm. They want to talk with a kindred spirit, someone who's going through this and has thought it through in great detail. That's the kind of insights they want to hear from you, and that's who they will trust with a big fee, big-ticket AI project for them.

Banoo Behboodi: That’s where, again, going back to the credibility, I know within Kantata, when we meet with customers or prospects, one of our biggest teams that is busy is our ops team because we use Kantata ourselves. They want to hear how we use it, what's the success rate, and how we are applying our AI capabilities to managing operations. Coming back to that point of gaining credibility by really being able to show real examples and successes and failures, both are interesting to our customers. Going further, how do we differentiate that in this world of AI? How does that work?

Brian Sommer: Service firms can differentiate on that by having a team that, to use that French word, is nonpareil. No one can beat the team they've put together. They can do it on cost, but that's a bad place to be because it's a never-ending race to the bottom on who has the cheapest price.

That leaves one other item open: who has the best intellectual property. If you can get two out of the three, then you're just killing it in the service space. If you have great, unparalleled people and great intellectual property, no client is going to turn that down. They don't care that you're charging a premium price for that because they're getting the real cat's pajamas here on the greatest talent and product they get.

The new differentiation is going to be really around a lot more on the intellectual property. Do you as an integrator or consultant have access to, let's call them, proprietary workflows, processes, process designs, and the like that reflect not the client-server age or the cloud age, but what these things look like in an AI-powered world? Have they been radically rethought and reimagined? If so, can you bring that visually, textually, and share that with customers and prospects? That's key.

Second thing is, have you got some very tailored LLMs—large language models—that work with AI tools? These are smaller LLMs usually, but they have great industry specificity. Can you bring something like that in there? A client can get access to the general AI tools like ChatGPT. What they can't get is that industry-specific information. Has your firm done anything to either create them or lock that content up so that your firm is the go-to place to get that IP? That's where the differentiation battles will be fought for the next couple of years.

Banoo Behboodi: I'll bring up expertise engine because I think the focus is you wrote a piece on this as well. That is the focus we have: focusing on professional services and using the language models for professional services within a particular firm to drive the insights they need, driving their expertise, etc. as they build up their talent, the talent moves on, basically building the machine that can retain that and help the customer drive outcomes and be able to measure those outcomes. That said, let's get to the fifth item because I think that's bringing it all together.

Brian Sommer: What brings it all together is to really rethink your value proposition, what it is that you're bringing to the prospects and the customers. I once did an experiment for one of my clients. I've had several big consulting firms as clients, which is interesting. I showed up with a slide where I put the taglines, marketing line items that you see, like "so-and-so, the source for talent excellence" or something. I put 11 of them up there, including my client's, all in a random listing. Can you pick out your firm's brand messaging here? Only about 10% picked the right answer. They were picking their competitors' messaging because they all sound the same.

In fact, many companies for years have relied on these very shopworn things: We only hire the best people, or we're industry experts. It's all this generic, sounds-the-same stuff you would hear all the way around. It didn't matter whether you were selling audit, tax, legal consulting, or something else; they all say the same thing: We only hire from the best schools. We only hire the best people.

Now, when we live in a world where your competitors can get access to the same large language models and use the same AI kinds of tools, it makes you wonder: Do you have any competitive advantage or any competitive differentiation? You have to focus on coming up with great intellectual property that no one else has. You either need to lock it up legally, contractually, or exclusively for your firm, or you need to leverage that and create something new and unique for yourself.

All this leads to one question: How can you command a premium billing rate in the AI age? That is going to be a hard question that firms will have to address with a lot of soul searching. Maybe it's time to take a dose of your own medicine and do some strategic planning for your firm for the AI age.

Banoo Behboodi: Is that going to be dependent on them having to almost change their commercial models to be able to articulate the outcomes they're driving for their customers? That differentiation has to lead to outcomes for their customers, and the outcomes have to be unique and differentiating from their competitors. Is that partly how they look at it?

Brian Sommer: They have to provide, I would say, uniqueness to customers if they want to get premium pricing. You can't sell generic stuff and expect a top dollar price for it. Everybody else has got this. If you're just using the same AI tools that everybody else is, then you're going to be producing pretty much the identical solutions. This has been a problem that's been going on in the industry for decades, because so many pure consultants, if you will, lost their way, got seduced by implementing standard application software packages. They went from being thought leaders to configurators and people that just put in some integrations, converging some data. Even that work has been commoditized by AI tools now. Finding out what really will generate high dollar, great value solutions for people is key if you want to succeed going forward.

Banoo Behboodi: Brian, I typically end with a personal question, but in this case, I would rather materialize your expertise even further by leaving the audience or the listeners with some tangible questions that they should consider as they assess the next steps.

Brian Sommer: I can think of two things you might want to ponder that are even bigger and longer term than what we talked about on the call so far. I'll leave you with a great quote from one of the great leaders I used to work with. Let's get these first two things. You can't ignore how rapidly things have been evolving, changing, and innovating, particularly the speed with so much of this AI stuff has just steamrolled out of the market. The way Kurzweil wrote about change when he wrote about the singularity, he's talking about change. Humans seem to think change is linear when it's actually curvilinear, exponential, and logarithmic. If this much change has happened related to AI in the last two to three years, I want you to think about how much you're going to have to redo all of this again in two to three years, because we're going to have possibly artificial general intelligence and other massive innovations coming next.

If you're listening to this and you're thinking, "Brian’s just trying to scare us," whatever. I'm trying to tell you, there's a log rolling effect going on here. You better get in front of it, then find a way to get off either to the sides or go faster than the other things that are happening.

The best and long-term most successful firms will be the ones who are already planning for the future of AI, not the AI that's already here today. The first thing is, what are we going to do from an ever quickening change in innovation perspective? How is that going to change our service firm?

The second point is, what does all this do to any potential M&A plans that your service firm is contemplating? Do you really want to go out and buy another body shop or a bunch of people, or would you rather change and instead buy a database provider or somebody with a lot of information or a library of resources? It's time to radically rethink what we need or how we grow, both organically and inorganically. You may not want to go out there and buy your biggest competitor today because they may be a liability for you tomorrow.

These are two big, longer-range questions to ask: the M&A one, and the accelerating pace of change and what that's going to do.

With that, I would just tell you that the best advice I used to get was from George Shaheen, a CEO at Accenture for a long time. He used to come around to all the different offices around the world and remind the partners with this phrase: "We have to have the courage to change in spite of our past success." If that's one piece of advice I'd give the listeners on this podcast, you've got to do that. You have to be able to stand up in front of your peers and tell them, "Look, I know we're fat, dumb, and happy and raking in lots of money right now, selling whatever it is we're doing, but that's going to change." Don't build a fortress of capabilities around old tech and old thinking, because that's just going to get commoditized down to nothing, and the billing rates will fall off.

We need to be at the spear point of where the change is going to be, and that's where we get the best premium pricing longer term. If we keep reminding ourselves of that, I think you'll be in good shape going forward. Is that enough for this morning?

Banoo Behboodi: Yeah, I love it. Thanks for being on with us. I love your candidness. I love the fact that you've said it like it is and invited the listeners to get ahead of things by asking themselves challenging questions. Thank you for sharing your expertise and being with us today.

Brian Sommer: I'm happy to do it. I look forward to seeing how this ends up getting packaged up. I don't know how you can do this; there's probably some AI involved. Who knows?

Banoo Behboodi: We’ll know more. As always, thanks for listening. If you have any follow-up questions for myself or Brian, we would love to hear them. Send us an email at podcast@kantata.com; we would be happy to get back to you. Have a great day.

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