The Three Types of Service Work

In Managing the Professional Service Firm, David Maister outlined three archetypes of client work:

Brains Projects

These are high-complexity, high-uncertainty problems that require top-level strategic thinking, creativity, and innovation. The client comes to you because you can solve problems that haven’t been solved before.Value proposition: “Hire us because we’re smart.”

Grey Hair Projects

These are problems that are difficult but familiar. They require experience, pattern recognition, and good judgment.Value proposition: “Hire us because we’ve done this before.”

Procedure Projects

These are routinized, repeatable tasks that can be clearly specified and delegated. Historically, these have been the bread-and-butter of scaled firms.Value proposition: “Hire us because we know how to do this efficiently.”

How AI is Reshaping These Categories

AI's rapid evolution in language, code, design, and structured problem-solving is upending these archetypes, with emerging startups leading the charge.

The Procedure category is already being overtaken by tools and autonomous agents. Take Scale AI, a startup that provides high-quality training data for AI models. It's platform automates data labeling and annotation - tasks that once required armies of junior staff at consulting or outsourcing firms - delivering efficiency at a fraction of the cost and time. Similarly, UiPath, a leader in robotic process automation (RPA), enables companies to automate repetitive workflows like data entry or invoice processing, directly threatening the revenue streams of firms built on procedural expertise. What once took a team of juniors now takes a single smart system, leaving traditional service providers scrambling to justify their value.

Grey Hair work is next in line, as AI begins to encroach on experience-based problem-solving. Harvey, an AI-powered legal tech startup, exemplifies this shift. Designed for law firms, Harvey automates contract review, due diligence, and compliance tasks—work that once relied on seasoned professionals' pattern recognition and judgment.

With $300 million raised in its Series D round in 2025, Harvey's ability to deliver pre-trained playbooks for familiar legal challenges is eroding the monopoly of “we’ve done this before” expertise. Meanwhile, Anthropic, behind the Claude AI model, offers businesses tailored solutions for complex but recurring operational issues, pulling ahead with its $61.5 billion valuation. These tools don’t just assist, they’re starting to replace the need for human experience in predictable domains.

But Brains work - at the edge of what's possible, navigating ambiguity, and making high-stakes decisions - remains resilient. No AI agents or startup has fully cracked this (yet), and that’s the opportunity. While AI can optimize or replicate, it struggles to invent in uncharted territory or build the trust required for bold strategic leaps.

This is where human ingenuity, taste, and foresight will shine, becoming even more valuable as automation commoditizes the rest.

The Shift: From Service Delivery to Strategic Partnership

The firms that thrive in this AI-driven era will move from being implementers to navigators, helping clients identify what work matters most. That means guiding clients to:

• Understand where to focus their time and resources
• Harness new tools and technologies effectively 
• Make product and design decisions that build loyalty and resonance
• Retain their humanity, uniqueness, and brand voice in an automated world

Where LCA Stands

At LCA, we're building the Brains firm for the AI era:

• We use AI not to replace creativity, but to amplify it, leveraging tools to free up space for bold thinking.
• We believe community, storytelling, and emotion will be the strongest differentiators in a world of perfect efficiency.
• We think trust, hospitality, and taste will matter more (not less) when execution is commoditized by new players

So What Should Firms Do Now?

1. Reposition Upmarket:
   Shift toward Brains-style work; strategy, innovation, new-market problem-solving. This is where AI can’t yet compete.
2. Invest in Relationships and Trust Assets:
   Your differentiator isn’t what you can do, but how well you understand your clients and their world, beyond what any algorithm can scrape.
3. Build Proprietary Intelligence:
   Productize your knowledge through playbooks, frameworks, or internal tools to stay ahead of AI-driven commoditization.
4. Genetically Modified Organizations - Inject AI into your DNA:
   The new GMOs will be ones that re-architect their DNA to include AI into the operational and executional fabric of the team. Not only should you be helping clients do this, but you must do this for your own organization.
5. Double Down on Emotional Resonance:
   In a world where AI makes efficiency table stakes, connection and feeling becomes a strategy.

The Service Firm of the Future is More Human, Not Less

As tools take over tasks, people will seek partners they trust. The best firms won’t just do the work, they’ll shape the work. They’ll make clients feel seen, understood, and ahead of the curve, even as AI startups like Anthropic and UiPath redefine the baseline.

At LCA, we’re here for that future, and we’re building it every day with some of the world's most exceptional companies.