AI is not an efficiency decoration: Rethinking how we build

These are powerful questions any founder-led, high-growth company needs to ask. But does applying AI to existing thought processes, workflows and tools solve the matter?

There are numerous things to consider:

• Choosing the right AI models and staying on top of them
• Picking up new outreach tools and data sources
• Testing and piloting
• Glueing things together while the old is meeting the new
  

Every exploration generates data to learn from and as the evergreen saying goes: “action produces insights”.

The bottleneck for code or various business operations isn't so much about the model anymore, as long as you utilize the top LLMs.

Prioritizing rebuilding how the company runs, instead of asking the team to decorate what already exists, is what shifts the company into the richer-context agentic era.

Prioritizing rebuilding costs

A growing company with happy customers has every incentive to protect what works. Rebuilding the operating model means questioning roles, habits, and decisions that got you there. It means a stretch where the firm looks slower from the outside while a new foundation is built. Not all leadership teams can stomach that. Building companies delivering services and products requires constant renewal, today more than ever.

For Agileday, the artifacts of prioritizing have seen many forms:

• A full-blown, versioned strategy renewal, with research, visualisations, and presentations
• A prospecting tool prototype, connected to a handful of data sources, with a dashboard of scored companies and people
• Constant prototyping of AI and agentic power integrated in our product
• Shared tips and tricks on how to tap into the powers of Claude Code to help operate and run the business
• Internal tools that help Customer Success teams onboard clients better, among many others
  

All this velocity and curiosity-driven exploration in teams reveals something invaluable. It exposes operational ambiguity that can stall growth in the agentic era. The findings are unanimous: to succeed in the agentic era, companies need to redefine ambiguous roles, skills, ownership, tasks, handovers, shared knowledge graphs, and permissions. 

But here comes the trick: spaciousness for continuous exploration should be decoupled from that work as creativity and learning can’t and shouldn’t be formalized.

Rebuilding in agentic era touches every company

The same findings are evident across industries, including the professional services and consulting sector. Greenlighting work that doesn't show large-scale efficiency gains for weeks or months takes more conviction than signing a software contract. Realizing that AI and agentic-era business is so much more than another technological efficiency gain can't be a rented conviction. The real conviction is the actual decision to be great in the future, too, and to stay relentlessly curious.

I have watched the AI conversation up close for a few years now, working hands-on with companies and across the wider operator world. Almost every story that looks like a technology story is a rebuilding story wearing an efficiency-gain costume. The team that ships five times faster did not find a secret model the rest of us missed. They were handed the keys, encouraged to rebuild the engine, and given cover while the new form was taking shape.

How to enable rebuilding ethos

If you are currently pondering these matters, here is a little test that can be helpful when mapping out where your team is right now. Hand a capable person a hard problem and listen to their first question.

• If they ask "what tool should I use?", you have a feature on your hands.
• If they ask "what would we build if we started today, and will you let me build it?", you have someone who can help rebuild.

The second person is rare. When you find one, do not buy them more software. Get out of the way and support the rebuild while it is still fragile. Some adults are needed in the room too.

The artifacts and learnings from curiosity-driven work in H1 2026 at Agileday have tremendously helped us shape the product direction and rethink how we build in the future, always close to our customers. The key to greatness in the future is collaboration, and hence Agileday works closely with professional services leaders who are hungry to stay great too.

The new agentic business paradigm is a marvelous learning journey. Working with agents means we need to build shared knowledge graphs, or "company brains", to help both people and agents surface the needed context without doing detective work. Continuous willingness to re-evaluate what tasks can be given to agents and what remains the human layer of work, becomes the default operating model in most companies.

We keep building and experimenting here at Agileday, very excited about the agentic era of professional services.

If you want to connect to chat about these topics, you can reach out to me directly riku.uski at agileday dot com.

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Hi, I'm Riku Uski. I work at Agileday as Head of Growth Operations, bringing 20+ years of curiosity from tech, consulting, growth, GTM, and AI to help us expand and take our amazing product to the leading companies in the professional services and consulting industry.