If you want to see what AI does to a business that sells expertise, look at what is happening in management consulting. McKinsey, BCG and the Big Four built their model on selling effort and analysis. In 2023 BCG ran a field experiment on more than 700 of its own consultants with researchers from Harvard and MIT. The ones using generative AI finished tasks about 25% faster and produced work roughly 40% higher in quality.
Legacy executive search sells the same thing consulting does, deep expertise wrapped around a lot of effort, and the same shift is now happening there as well.
Don’t get me wrong, effort and expertise are still the moat around a good search. What AI has compressed is the manual layer, which was never the part that made the difference anyway.
Without that, the expertise underneath it matters more, not less. There’s far less to hide behind now, and how you define value matters more than it ever has.
The research, the sourcing, the market mapping, the outreach. These used to take weeks of concentrated effort from multiple people, and that effort was a large part of what search firms have historically sold. It justified the fee, the team size, and the timeline. If the work was labour-intensive, you needed a firm with the resources to do it properly.
That has changed. The shift is partial and gradual still, but it is definitely happening. The tools available now mean that the effort layer of search, the part that used to require headcount and hours, is faster and more accessible than it has ever been. Some of it is still very manual and time intensive, but a lot of it isn’t. And the gap between what a tech enabled small firm can cover and what a large firm does through headcount has gotten smaller.
The question that creates for any client engaging a search firm is straightforward: if the effort is no longer the hard part, what are you actually paying for?
The process defence
The industry’s response to this shift has mostly been to add more process. More assessment stages, more frameworks, more documentation, more steps between the brief and the shortlist. From the outside that looks like thoroughness. From the inside, a lot of it is justification. It’s activity designed to demonstrate that the fee is earned through the volume of work done, not through the quality of the outcome it produces.
The number of steps in a process is not a reliable indicator of how good the hire will be. A well-run search with fewer steps and stronger judgment will outperform a heavily structured process where the judgment is diluted across a team of people who weren’t in the room when the brief was set.
Good process matters. Process as a product, where the deliverable is the framework rather than the outcome, is something else: a response to commoditisation rather than a fix for it.
The handoff problem
The other thing that changes when effort stops being the differentiator is the model most large firms are built on. The traditional structure has a partner who wins the work, a principal or director who manages the search, and a research team who does the sourcing and mapping. The person the client met at the pitch is often not the person running the search day to day.
That model made sense when the research was the bottleneck. You needed dedicated people on it because the volume of work was higher. But if the tools have compressed that layer, the justification for separating the person with the judgment from the person doing the work makes much less sense. The client is paying for the expertise of the person they met, but receiving the output of someone they haven’t.
We run every search founder-led, end to end. The person who sets the brief is the person who runs the search, assesses the candidates, and manages the process through to close. There’s no handoff because there’s no reason for one anymore. The tools that exist now mean a founder can operate at scale without losing coverage or quality, and the client gets the judgment they’re paying for at every stage.
What replaces effort
If effort isn’t the product, what is? Judgment and track record. Can the person running your search tell you, from their own experience, what good looks like for this specific role in this specific context? Have they placed someone into a situation like yours before, and did it work? Do they have a view on your brief that goes beyond what you’ve told them, and are they willing to push back if the brief is wrong?
Those questions are harder to answer with a framework or a process document. They require someone who has done the work personally, seen the patterns, and has the commercial instinct to know what a client actually needs versus what they believe they do. That’s not something you can scale by adding headcount, and it’s not something AI replaces. It’s the bit that matters more now that everything around it has gotten easier.
When the baseline capability becomes widely accessible, the gap between firms isn’t in what they can do. It’s in the quality of the thinking behind it.