They Already Asked AI. They Need More Than That from You.

By Mitchell Schuckman, PCC | Founder, The Schuckman Group

A few months ago I was doing a client satisfaction check-in for a small trusts and estates boutique, the kind of outreach a consultant does on behalf of a corporate client. I asked Angela, the CFO at a large family office, how things were going with her attorney. She paused, then told me something I have not stopped thinking about since.

Angela said, "I'm not sure my attorney realizes this, but before I ask them a question, I already ask my AI tool the same thing. I usually already have what I believe is the answer. When they give me the same answer with some wordsmithing, I'm disappointed, and I begin to wonder why I have an attorney at all."

That was concerning, and not just for the firm I was working for.

Since then, I've been surprised how many other clients, across a variety of professional services, told me some version of the same thing once I started asking. Clients are not asking their service providers blind questions anymore.

Everyone Reached the Same Place

Service providers are under tremendous pressure to use AI too, and they gravitate toward it for efficiency. When a client arrives with a position already formed and the firm responds with its own AI-assisted answer, both sides land at roughly the same baseline. The client paid for a service and received confirmation of something they already knew.

That is not a technology problem. It is a positioning problem. The firm mistook speed for value, and the client noticed before their service provider did.

Go Further Than the Baseline

Clients are not asking whether AI can produce an answer quickly. That’s the baseline. What they are asking, whether they say it directly or not, is what their service provider, with experience and judgment, sees that they and AI did not.

The service providers who will win over the next several months and years are not the ones avoiding AI, and they are not the ones hiding behind it either. They are the ones using it to reach the same baseline the client already reached very quickly, so the actual engagement can start somewhere beyond that.

This is where I put AI to work as a collaborator. I use it to compare industries, test partially formed thoughts, or argue the other side of my own position so I can tighten up my perspective. I even ask AI to come up with things that stretch my thinking. Out of ten insights AI hands me, eight might be things I believe the client already knows or could easily find on their own. But one or two are worth drilling down on. That’s where I focus, and that’s how I derive benefits for my clients.

Where You Actually Add Something

The next time a client brings you a question, assume they have already answered it for themselves with the help of AI. Resist the instinct to hand them a nicer version of the same thing. Get to their baseline fast, confirm you are standing where they are standing, and then do the part only you can do. Tell them what they haven't yet considered. Tell them what a person who has done this a thousand times would do differently.

This is how you create value for your clients.

Beware of Getting Less for Less

Creating value this way requires a conversation firms are just learning how to have with their clients. It means telling a client you are spending less time on their work, and telling them in the same breath that the time you are spending is worth more than it has ever been.

The prep, the drafts, the compiling, that time is shrinking. What replaces it is time spent on judgment, pattern recognition, identifying opportunities and flagging risks. And that time comes from your most experienced people.

An hourly rate assumes time and value move together. Once AI cuts the hours, that assumption stops working. If the fee structure does not change with it, the economics and incentives stop working for all parties.

Move to fixed fees wherever you can. A fixed fee ties the fee to what the work is worth, not to how long it took to produce it.

It Starts With a Mindset

Professionals who are builders in the coming years will be the ones who understand that value comes from deeper insight, from judgment under pressure, from reducing risk a client cannot see on their own, from identifying the opportunity that creates attention-getting returns.

That is a mindset shift before it is a pricing shift. The old game was getting things done faster. Now that's table stakes. The new game is getting it done at a level the client could not have reached on their own, using human intellect and AI collaboration as the method.

Angela's AI tool gave her answers that were just as good as her attorney's. That was the problem. She never told her attorney why she was disappointed. She just started wondering why she had one. Most professional services firms are still racing to be faster, and their clients already stopped caring about that.

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.