A CEO's playbook for mastering the AI shift in services businesses

Ask a CEO what keeps them up at night these days, and the answer isn’t the usual suspects like competition or supply chains. It’s the two letters reshaping every industry: Artificial Intelligence (AI).

For services businesses, though, an AI strategy isn’t as simple as rolling out the latest software. It takes a total rethink of how you harness your people, your data, and your customer relationships. The stakes couldn’t be higher: get AI right, and it’s a chance to unlock exponential growth, efficiency, and entirely new ways to serve customers. Get it wrong, and you risk falling behind competitors, losing talent, and breaking the trust of those you’re trying to win.

To get a real-world perspective on this, I recently sat down with Jay Laabs, CEO of the consulting firm Spaulding Ridge. His perspective is particularly insightful because he sits on both sides of the table: his firm successfully scaled its services business using the same modern systems they implement for their clients.

Here’s his direct, unfiltered view on what it really takes to win in this new era.

DJ Paoni: Jay, the hype around AI is everywhere — headlines, boardrooms, even casual conversations. What do you think is the most misunderstood aspect of AI's impact on a services business that leaders need to get right, right now?

Jay Laabs: It’s that AI's biggest impact affects the external customer expectations that are now permanently and rapidly being elevated. The real opportunity is to see AI as a 'force multiplier' for your talent. You can empower your people to do more of the high-value, human-centric work. Honestly, the biggest risk is just doing nothing. The performance gap between firms that are strategic about AI, and those that aren't, is widening every day.

Paoni: I couldn’t agree more. If you’re not thinking about it today, you’re already behind. Jay, you’ve highlighted the opportunity, but there’s a big challenge leaders run into, and that’s the data foundation. This isn’t a new challenge, but the urgency seems far greater now to work from a single source of truth before AI can really deliver value…

Laabs: AI without a solid data foundation just makes bad processes happen faster. I’ll tell you a little about our journey. A few years ago, Spaulding Ridge was growing so quickly. Which was great, but we hit an inflection point. The tools we were using to manage our customers’ service journey no longer met our needs, and we knew we needed something more robust to continue to keep our processes running smoothly, scale efficiently and serve as our foundation for AI-enhanced processes and service delivery. Implementing a more modern Professional Services Automation (PSA) solution — which, after a comprehensive evaluation, turned out to be Certinia PS Cloud — was a turning point. It gave us the clean, structured data we needed to unlock AI-driven value, in an efficient way thanks to being built right on the Salesforce platform. A complete view of the customer is a prerequisite for building a predictable business and capturing opportunities opened up by AI, and that starts with a unified operational backbone.

Paoni: Right, you can't build a business on guesswork. What are the metrics you're actually watching to know it's paying off, and to ultimately justify these technological investments to your board?

Laabs: The business case enables profitable growth and scaling the business with less incremental headcount. The clearest sign of success is delivering better outcomes for clients, which directly impacts our retention and expansion. Since we implemented a unified approach, we’ve driven our resource utilization up significantly and hit our realization targets faster. The ultimate value is building a more resilient and predictable business, because our decisions are grounded in trustworthy data. The visibility we gained is also key for us to continue growing sustainably. It allows us to pair unique insights with the skill requirements of upcoming opportunities, helping us make the right hiring decisions at the right time.

Paoni: Let's get tactical for a minute. One of the biggest drivers of customer satisfaction, and ultimately profitability, is how smoothly the handoff is from sales to delivery. From your experience, what organizational structures or systems have best supported that transition for your clients?

Laabs: It’s a huge area of opportunity for customer satisfaction and profitability. A lag right at the start can erode the trust you just built. Previously, it wasn’t unusual for it to be a two to three day process for a customer’s project to get kicked off. In our experience internally and for the customers we serve, we know that the root cause is almost always a lack of a shared system. The solution is to get on a unified platform where scoping and resource allocation are part of one seamless motion. For Spaulding Ridge, fixing this cut our handoff time by three days, which our customers definitely noticed and loved.

Paoni: It’s fascinating how one operational fix can ripple through the business. It clearly improves the customer experience, but I imagine it has a significant effect on your people, too. Beyond just keeping talent, how has this helped you be more strategic about talent development?

Laabs: It's always been a real struggle for services firms to track the growth of talent from junior to senior levels. When you can connect data from your core operational platform to other systems, like an LMS, you suddenly get powerful insights. You can see how your people are being developed, in addition to who is utilized. That lets us make sure people are getting the right project experience to build their skills, which is critical for the long-term health of the business.

Paoni: So looking ahead, what about managing all this new tech at our fingertips? How are you thinking about the long-term governance of AI to avoid what I've heard called 'agent bloat' or the next wave of technical debt?

Laabs: That's the right question to be asking. Many companies are still paying off the 'technical debt' from the last wave of automation. It would be a huge mistake to repeat that with AI. We have to treat every new AI capability like a product with a real lifecycle. That means having a strong governance framework now so today's AI agents don't become tomorrow's tangled mess.

Paoni: What about the finance leader's perspective? With cost measures top of mind, how do you advise them on balancing the excitement of AI with the need for control and accuracy?

Laabs: You have to use the right tool for the right job and earn trust. For example, generative AI is fantastic for summarizing insights. For compliant reporting and auditing, you need deterministic systems you can count on. The goal is to integrate them. When you automate the routine financial processes with trustworthy AI, you free up your finance team to become the strategic business partners they need to be.

Paoni: When you boil it down, if a CEO is serious about transforming their services business with AI, where should they focus their energy? What do you see as the primary role of the CEO in leading this kind of change?

Laabs: It starts with a clear, top-down strategy that avoids the 'shiny object syndrome' and focuses on solving real, high-impact business problems. The key to getting people on board is to champion the tangible wins; showing teams how these tools save them time and free them up to do more interesting work. As leaders, we have to foster a culture where it's safe to experiment and learn, empowering our teams to get ahead of the curve.

My conversation with Jay validated that the path to becoming an AI-powered services firm is a strategic journey, requiring a C-suite commitment to building a solid data foundation and leading the cultural shift toward a new way of working.

Ultimately, the paradox of the AI era is this: technology isn't the hard part. The real challenge, and the greatest opportunity, is having the leadership discipline to fix your foundation and culture first.

To hear the full "on the ground" discussion we recently held with leaders from Certinia, Salesforce, Spaulding Ridge, and 3Cloud that inspired this Q&A, you can watch the on-demand recording here.