I spent Memorial Day weekend the way a lot of people in the US do: going to barbecues and parties, hanging out with friends. AI came up over and over across those few days. People know I work in this industry, so they kept asking what I thought and whether AI was going to completely change the way they work.
I've spent more than 30 years in professional services marketing. Some of that time was in-house at firms, including a run as global director of digital marketing at KPMG. The rest has been on the agency side, where I built and ran Good2bSocial, an agency that serves professional services firms across the country. In that time, I sat through two big technology waves that rewrote how firms find clients and how their experts build reputations: the arrival of the commercial internet and the rise of social media. Both were massive in their own way.
Neither one comes close to what AI is doing right now.
I kept thinking about those weekend conversations and decided to write this article today. They are the same conversations I am having every day with the people who hire my company, including agency leaders and in-house marketers at large professional services firms. A lot of them are scared. Most of them won't say so out loud yet. You can hear it instead in the questions they ask me about how to adapt, how quickly to move, and how to make sure their jobs survive the next 18 months.
Forget the hype on LinkedIn. Forget the conference-stage version of the story.
Anyone who runs an agency that serves professional services firms already knows what is coming.
Clients are calling. They used to ask what new services were available. Now they ask why they should still pay the same retainer when "ChatGPT can do most of this." That is the quote, in some variation, that more than a dozen agency leaders have shared with me this year alone.
The truth of the claim is beside the point. ChatGPT cannot do most of it without a human who knows what they are doing. The perception has moved, though. Clients are walking into renewal calls armed with a tool they believe replaces a chunk of the work they used to pay for. They want a discount.
So agencies are getting squeezed.
The good ones are responding by rebuilding their service models. They use AI to produce first drafts in hours instead of days. They are moving from hourly billing toward outcome-based pricing. They are putting their senior people on the strategy and judgment calls that clients really pay for. The ones who hope this will blow over are losing accounts.
That is what is in my inbox most weeks. This is the most existential moment I have seen for B2B marketing shops in a generation. The real threat is that firms which refuse to rebuild their service model will be priced out by competitors who already did.
The in-house picture looks different. It is not any easier.
The marketing teams I talk to inside firms are being asked to deliver more content, more campaigns, more lead nurture, and more BD support with the same headcount they had half a decade ago (sometimes less). Their partners read a Bloomberg Law piece about AI productivity gains over the weekend, then walk into the CMO's office Monday morning expecting miracles within the quarter. Those same marketing teams were never given a real budget for AI tools or proper training on how to use them. Most are still chasing approvals on a content calendar from Q1.
The tools they do have access to are mostly the problem. Almost none of them are built for professional services.
Generic enterprise AI tools have no real grasp of life inside an AmLaw 200 firm or a Big Four practice. They do not understand client confidentiality. A client alert and a thought leadership piece look identical to them. They do not know the firm's tone or the partners' preferences. They have no clue which experts to flag for which trending topics. Professional services marketers are out there using horizontal tools to solve vertical problems, which is a bit like being handed a Swiss Army knife and being told to perform surgery.
I hear you. I know how exhausting all of this is. The partners are pressing you to "Use Copilot" while the budgets you really need stay nowhere on the horizon. You are still expected to deliver miracles with the equivalent of a flashlight and a rubber band.
The pace of AI is going to keep accelerating from here. People are already exhausted. The heaviest stretch of this change is still ahead of us. The agencies and firms that adapt, whether they go fully AI-native or simply AI-enhanced, will be fine. The ones that refuse will disappear.
That is not a prediction I make lightly. I have seen smaller versions of this in professional services marketing before. The agencies that dismissed the commercial internet in the early 2000s are no longer in business. The firms that dismissed social media in 2011 are still trying to catch up. This change is bigger than either of those. It is also faster.
The same logic applies to the individual marketer.
Working in professional services marketing today, agency or in-house, demands that you put time in every single week to use these tools and figure out where they help versus where they hurt. Marketers who are spending 30 minutes a day with AI right now are stacking skills that will look like an unfair advantage in 18 months.
Yes, I run an AI consultancy, so writing "learn AI or fall behind" is self-serving. I would be lying if I pretended otherwise. I am writing it because I have a long memory in this industry. What is unfolding now does not look like a passing trend.
Your experience is worth more today than it was when you started. AI is extraordinarily good at generating output. It is extraordinarily bad at judging whether that draft is right, on-brand, or appropriate for the moment it lives in. The model has no sense of whether a partner would be embarrassed by a sentence, whether a client will read a piece and feel respected or pandered to, or whether silence would have served the firm better than any post at all.
Those are calls only you can make.
The marketers and agency strategists who evolve through this period, rather than getting flattened by it, will be the ones who learn to direct AI with discipline and good taste. Directing means knowing what to ask, knowing how to ask it, and spotting the moments when the model is wrong with great conviction.
That work draws on judgment, taste, and a long career of watching what works and what falls flat. You do not replicate any of it with a prompt.
For anyone reading this and feeling shaky right now, the path forward is to start small. Pick one part of your job you do every week: a recurring report, a content brief, a media monitoring summary, or a draft pitch. Rebuild it with AI as a working partner. Repeat the exercise with another workflow seven days later, and then a third one the week after. Six months from now you will be a different professional than the one reading this article.
The path forward is to use these tools every day and stay rigorous about verifying their output. The strategic calls about what to publish, what to kill, which partner to put forward, and when to stay silent are the parts AI cannot do for you. Your judgment becomes more valuable in this world because everyone will soon be producing drafts while very few will be producing good calls about which ones deserve to exist.
I have seen this industry go through real change before. People feared the internet would replace business development. That fear never materialized. People feared social media would replace earned media. That fear was overblown. People worried that content marketing would gut professionals' personal reputations. That, too, turned out to be wrong.
This change is bigger, and it will demand more of you. The best professional services marketers become irreplaceable in this environment, because what is left after AI drafts the first version is the strategic call: what to publish, what to spike, which partner gets the byline, when to hold the firm's fire.
So I am asking you to be active right now. Pick one workflow this week. Get curious about how the tools handle it. Stay rigorous about what they give back. Whatever fear you are carrying about being behind, set it down. You are exactly on time to begin.