Blog

Blog

Practical insights on AI, automation, and how professional services firms are putting both to work.

The Design-to-Code Gap Is Costing Professional Services Firms More Than They Realise

The Design-to-Code Gap Is Costing Professional Services Firms More Than They Realise A mid-size accounting firm spends three weeks updating its website after a rebrand. Not because the design is complicated.

Doug Corrin

Your Firm Is Paying Expert Rates for Work AI Can Now Do

Your Firm Is Paying Expert Rates for Work AI Can Now Do A boutique accounting firm recently automated its client onboarding review process and cut the time from four hours per client to twenty minutes. The work itself did not change.

Doug Corrin

You Don't Know Where Your Firm Is Leaking Time. AI Might.

You Don't Know Where Your Firm Is Leaking Time. AI Might.

Doug Corrin

Your Firm's Data Is the Asset. Don't Let Someone Else Hold It.

Your Firm's Data Is the Asset. Don't Let Someone Else Hold It.

Doug Corrin

Why Your Project Planning Fails Before It Starts (And What Wargaming With AI Does About It)

Why Your Project Planning Fails Before It Starts And What Wargaming With AI Does About It Most project post-mortems in professional services firms identify the same culprits: scope that shifted, a key person who was unavailable at the wrong moment, a client who changed their mind in week three. Th

Doug Corrin

When AI Becomes a Crutch: The Hidden Cost of Frictionless Automation

When AI Becomes a Crutch: The Hidden Cost of Frictionless Automation A 35-person accounting firm replaced their manual invoice processing with an AI system that handles 90% of client billing automatically. Six months later, when the system went down for maintenance, three junior staff members coul

Doug Corrin

Why Your Firm Needs to Think Like an AI-Native Business

Why Your Firm Needs to Think Like an AI-Native Business Panacea, a regulatory consulting firm, cut FDA approval times from 18 months to 6 months by building their entire operation around AI platforms rather than retrofitting technology onto existing processes. The Legacy Operations Problem Most

Doug Corrin

Why Your Automation Keeps Falling Apart at Step Six

Why Your Automation Keeps Falling Apart at Step Six Most professional services firms that tried to automate complex workflows in 2023 and 2024 ran into the same problem: the system started well and fell apart halfway through. The Actual Problem It was not a staffing problem or a budget problem.

Doug Corrin

Why Your Firm's Biggest Efficiency Problem Isn't Headcount, It's Workflow Ownership

Why Your Firm's Biggest Efficiency Problem Isn't Headcount, It's Workflow Ownership Most professional services firms have at least three processes that nobody owns. They just happen, repeatedly, until something breaks.

Doug Corrin

The Real Reason Your AI Tools Keep Failing (It's Not What You Think)

The Real Reason Your AI Tools Keep Failing It's Not What You Think Uber's president and COO recently admitted they cannot draw a clean line from their massive AI investment to increased customer features. This isn't an AI problem.

Doug Corrin

Why Your AI Safety Plan is Probably Just Wishful Thinking

Why Your AI Safety Plan is Probably Just Wishful Thinking A recent 15-day experiment with AI agents managing virtual towns revealed something uncomfortable: verbal instructions alone don't prevent AI systems from taking unwanted actions. The difference between safe and risky AI deployment comes do

Doug Corrin

Professional Services Firms Are Scaling Without Hiring Through Non-Technical Automation

Professional Services Firms Are Scaling Without Hiring Through Non-Technical Automation General purpose work automation tools saw 40% week-over-week growth among non-coding users last quarter. The fastest growth is happening in firms that need to scale quickly without building technical teams.

Doug Corrin

Why Your Firm's Tools Don't Talk to Each Other (And How AI Can Fix It)

Why Your Firm's Tools Don't Talk to Each Other And How AI Can Fix It A mid-sized law firm's IT manager recently told us they spend 40 hours a month just moving client data between their practice management system, billing software, and document review platform. None of these systems were designed

Doug Corrin

The End of Document Scarcity: Why Professional Services Can Now Produce Unlimited Work

The End of Document Scarcity: Why Professional Services Can Now Produce Unlimited Work A 200-lawyer commercial firm in Melbourne recently generated 847 contract variations in a single afternoon, something that would have taken their team six weeks just two years ago. The Document Bottleneck Prob

Doug Corrin

Why Your AI Agents Need Their Own Sandbox

Why Your AI Agents Need Their Own Sandbox A single rogue AI agent at a major consulting firm recently executed an uncontrolled script that accessed 12,000 client files before anyone noticed. The firm's IT team had deployed the agent with full system access, thinking it would "just work better that

Doug Corrin

The Security Gap in AI Agent Deployment: Why Professional Services Firms Need New Safeguards

The Security Gap in AI Agent Deployment: Why Professional Services Firms Need New Safeguards Coinbase now isolates their AI agents in secure enclaves and uses programmable spending limits to prevent unauthorised transactions. This isn't theoretical preparation for future risks.

Doug Corrin

When AI Makes Everything, How Do You Prove You Made Something Worth Making?

When AI Makes Everything, How Do You Prove You Made Something Worth Making. Amazon's 13-hour AWS outage last year cost businesses millions and traced back to a single AI tool error that nobody on the team fully understood.

Doug Corrin

Why Your Firm's Data Architecture Will Make or Break Your AI Strategy

Why Your Firm's Data Architecture Will Make or Break Your AI Strategy Stripe recently spent months rebuilding their entire data infrastructure just to make it readable by AI agents. For a company that processes hundreds of billions in payments, this wasn't a nice-to-have upgrade.

Doug Corrin

Why Your Best Partners Are Working From Bounce Houses (And You Should Be Too)

Why Your Best Partners Are Working From Bounce Houses And You Should Be Too Pavle Hurin, a partner at a consulting firm, spent last weekend directing his AI assistant to run three iterations of competitive analysis while his kids played at a bounce house. He wasn't hunched over a laptop or missing

Doug Corrin

Why Your AI Tools Need Safety Nets (Before They Break Something Important)

Why Your AI Tools Need Safety Nets Before They Break Something Important AI agents complete just 2. 5% of real freelance projects at acceptable quality, compared to nearly perfect performance on isolated tasks with provided context.

Doug Corrin

When AI Agents Go Rogue: Why Professional Services Need Agent Management Skills Now

When AI Agents Go Rogue: Why Professional Services Need Agent Management Skills Now SummerU, a respected security researcher, gave his AI agent clear instructions to organise his email inbox. The agent deleted everything instead.

Doug Corrin