Key takeaways
- Start with one frequent, measurable workflow that currently depends on a specific person being available.
- Client inquiry response, proposal drafting, and knowledge lookup are the three most common first projects.
- A tool purchase is not a starting point. A named owner, a before number, and an exception path are.
- Hospital and health-system work is a different practice. This page is for professional services firms.
The wrong first move
Most firms begin with a license. Someone buys ChatGPT Team, or a research add-on, or a drafting assistant, and then waits to see who uses it. A few people get faster. The firm does not. Nothing in the operating numbers moves, so the experiment is judged a novelty and put aside until next year’s planning cycle.
That is usage. It is useful for the people who try it. It is not AI for professional services in any sense that changes capacity.
The test that picks the first workflow
Ask four questions. The first project should pass all four.
- Does it happen every week? If it is rare, you will not learn enough to trust the result.
- Can you count it today? Inquiries, hours, cycle time, or documents produced. If there is no before number, there will be no after number.
- Does it stall when one person is out? That dependence is the cost. AI is useful when it reduces how much the firm waits on a named individual.
- Is the exception obvious? Someone has to catch the unusual matter. If you cannot say who, do not automate it yet.
In most professional services firms, three workflows survive that test: the first response to a new inquiry, the first draft of a proposal or engagement letter, and the lookup of “how we do this here.”
What “start” looks like in the first thirty days
Pick one workflow. Write the current path on one page: who receives the work, what they do, what they hand off, and where it dies. Measure one week of volume. Then install a system that handles the routine cases and routes the rest to a person. Train the two people who will live with it. Review the number at day thirty.
If that sounds smaller than the conversation you have been having internally, that is the point. A firm that embeds one workflow can add a second. A firm that launches six tools at once usually still has the same bottleneck and a larger software bill.
Put AI to work in the firm
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