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PROMPT is six commercial disciplines that decide whether AI pays off for a professional services firm or quietly becomes a cost. Each one below comes with a question about your own firm. They take a minute between them.
P. Purpose, not tool
Start with the commercial outcome. Where is partner time going on work that AI could improve? What could the firm do that it cannot do now, such as testing a pitch against several personas before the meeting?
Most firms are already paying for more AI than they use. The task is deciding which tools earn their place, where they overlap, and what the firm actually needs.
Pull quote
Can you name the commercial outcome each AI subscription is meant to produce?
When I ask this, most firms list the tools straight away and take longer over the outcomes. That gap is usually where the money is going.
R. Right voice, right personas
The setup matters more than the prompt. Train the tool on the firm’s tone, its personas and the language of its market.
A general purpose AI produces general content. A well briefed one produces something a senior reader might actually finish.
Pull quote
If you handed the firm’s AI tool to a new joiner this morning, would what came out sound like the firm?
Competent and generic is the usual result. It is a setup problem rather than a tool problem.
O. Own your process
Ad hoc use gives ad hoc results. Build AI into the work that repeats. Proposal drafting. Client listening synthesis. Pitch preparation. Market briefings. Content review.
That keeps the firm’s thinking inside the system rather than with whoever happened to open the tool that day.
Pull quote
Where is AI used the same way every time, by everybody?
Most firms have AI users before they have an AI process. The two look similar from outside and behave very differently.
M. Master prompting
Prompting is a real skill and most people overrate their own. Good prompts produce useful work. Weak ones produce filler that somebody then has to fix.
Two things matter more than people expect. The output should sound like a person rather than a machine. And the best prompts are spoken, not typed.
Pull quote
Who in the firm is genuinely good at this?
Worth knowing, because the gap between a good prompt and a weak one is wider than most people expect, and it rarely maps to seniority.
P. Partner, not author
AI works best as a sounding board. Stress test an argument before a client meeting. Read a proposal back from the client’s point of view. Sharpen a persona until it tells you something you did not already know.
The firms getting value have decided what to hand over, what to keep, and how to use AI as a thinking partner rather than an output factory.
Pull quote
When did somebody last use AI to argue against a position the firm had taken?
It is the use that pays best and the one that occurs to people last.
T. Test before you trust
Every output needs a review loop before it leaves the firm. Factual accuracy, tone, confidentiality.
Firms that skip this step pay for it eventually, and they rarely pay for it quietly.
Pull quote
What happens to an AI-assisted document before it goes to a client?
In most firms the answer is whatever the author decides. That works until it does not.
Where that leaves you
Three patterns come up more than any others.
Most firms find the first two questions the hardest. They are paying for tools before deciding what the tools are for. It is the most common position by some distance and the cheapest to fix, because the answer is a conversation rather than a purchase.
Some are comfortable with the first four and not the last two. Those firms are using AI well and have not yet made it safe or sharp, which is a better problem to have and the one that catches people out publicly.
A few are comfortable with all six. For them the question is no longer which tool. It is what the firm can now do that its competitors cannot.
Most discussion of AI in professional services is still about which tool to buy. The firms getting value moved past that question some time ago.
Mary Cloonan is the founder of Marketing Clever, a strategic marketing adviser to accountancy, law and advisory firms across the UK, Ireland and the US.
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