Who Decides What You Do With the Time AI Gives Back?
By Mitchell Schuckman, PCC | Founder, The Schuckman Group
I was a young tax associate the first time I worked a foreign tax credit calculation. I prepared it. A manager reviewed it and sent it back with just about everything wrong that could be wrong. I fixed it and got something else wrong on the next pass.
That went on for months.
Eventually the calculation stopped being the point. I understood why the numbers worked the way they did well enough to sit with a client and explain how their circumstances were affecting the credit, and what they could do differently to plan for a better result the next year. None of that came from a manual. It came from doing it wrong enough times, on my own time, until it finally stuck with me.
AI is already taking that slow part away. A young associate working the same calculation today may not need thirty tries to get the right answer. Five might do it, or one. What disappears with the repetition is time. That time doesn't just vanish. It becomes capacity. The question underneath the articles everyone else is writing about AI and apprenticeship learning models isn't clear: who decides how that found capacity gets used.
The Pull Toward More Output Is Strong
I don't believe that every firm spends the capacity on more output. I know the temptation tends in that direction, because output is what firms already know how to measure and bill. And, it's easy to manage. Just manage headcount in order to make sure everyone's utilization stays high.
But trimming the team and then filling every surviving hour with more assigned work is not a strategy. It's the absence of one. The people left standing become just as replaceable as the people who weren't, because nobody used the freed time to build the thing that would have made them harder to replace in the first place.
What Happens After You Survive the Cuts
I'm coaching someone in professional services right now who is watching this happen around him. People near him have been let go. He hasn't. He's simply being asked to take on more, faster, with AI doing a bigger share of the technical work than it used to.
He's not worried about keeping up. He can keep up. What he keeps asking me is harder: if doing more of the AI-assisted version of his old job is all that's being asked of him, what happens to his value the next time AI takes on even more work and the firm looks for more hours to cut? Producing more of the same thing faster was never going to be the answer, and some part of him already knew that before he sat down with me. He just hadn't had to answer the follow-up question yet, which is what he's supposed to do instead.
The Calculation Was Never the Product
Here's what I didn't understand as a young associate. The calculation was never the product. It was the receipt. What a client was paying for was someone who understood their business well enough to tell them what the number meant and what to do next. AI can produce the receipt now. It still can't tell which few things in a client's situation are worth acting on, and that was always the valuable part underneath the calculation.
Value creation looks like noticing something in a client's numbers that nobody asked you to find, and bringing it to them before they ask. Innovation looks like proposing an idea that wasn't on the engagement letter, because asking the right questions let you see an opportunity before the client did. Relationship looks like being the first call a client makes about something outside your specialty, because they trust how you behave more than what you know.
None of that gets built by working faster. It gets built the same way the calculation did, by doing it, getting corrected, and doing it again, until understanding what a client actually values becomes as automatic as the technical work used to be. That's the pivot I made with the person I'm coaching: understand what the client values beyond the deliverable, and take deliberate steps to bring them that. My hope is that more firms start funding that kind of practice on purpose, instead of leaving people to find the time for it on their own.
I didn't know any of this when I was getting foreign tax credits wrong for the first time. I just knew it took a while, and that the manager correcting me had decided the time was worth spending. AI doesn't have to change that. It only removes the repetitive part, and that's exactly why we still have the time to decide what to do with it.
Mitchell Schuckman is the Founder and CEO of The Schuckman Group LLC. He is a Professional Certified Coach credentialed by the International Coaching Federation and the author of I'll Tell You a Great Story. theschuckmangroup.com
Note on privacy: Names and identifying details have been changed. The experiences described are drawn from multiple client engagements and do not represent any single individual.