The AI tools are in. Now comes the hard part

In many cases, that has been the right call. The market is shifting. Clients expect more. Teams are asking why the work still takes as long as it does.

But you can feel it underneath.

Businesses are mistaking activity for advantage.

More tools, more prompts and more automations do not automatically create a more intelligent business. They create faster output. If the operating model underneath is fragmented, the business simply becomes fragmented faster. That is the part most leaders are now staring at: not whether AI works, but whether their business is built to use it.

The adoption number is not the value number

The Australian data tells the story plainly. The Thomson Reuters Institute’s 2026 AI in Professional Services Report found that generative AI use has nearly doubled in twelve months, now reaching forty per cent of the sector. Yet only eighteen per cent of professional services organisations track return on investment on their AI. Forty per cent do not know whether it is measured at all.

NAB’s April 2026 Embracing AI survey put property services AI adoption at sixty-nine per cent, the highest of any Australian small business sector. Yet only five per cent are classified as fully enabled, with the data infrastructure, workforce capability and strategic clarity to extract value at scale.

Adoption is widespread. Operational maturity is not.

The foundations problem nobody put in the brochure

AI adoption looks compelling from the outside. Inside the business, it can feel jarring. The moment a firm starts looking seriously at AI, it is forced to confront its foundations. The natural pushback: the business has run fine for years without examining any of this. Technology disruption is what ends that — it always has. The standard of service is being reset, and what held in a stable market becomes the constraint in a disrupted one.

That work — clean data, clear workflows, how decisions get made, where knowledge lives — is not glamorous. But it is where the advantage starts.

A firm can have a CRM, a marketing platform, a document system, a finance system, a workflow tool and multiple AI subscriptions, and still have no single view of the client, no clear view of revenue leakage and no consistent way of turning activity into action. Adoption without the foundational work does not reduce that complexity. It accelerates it.

Inside the rebuild

At Rethink Investing, this is the work that has shaped how we operate. We rebuilt our acquisitions workflow rather than upgrading it. The result was an eighty-six per cent efficiency gain on the tool itself. Over the six months that followed, we increased product in the pipeline by fifty-four per cent. The workflow within the operating model got sharper — and output per person rose with it.

AI came last. We started with the foundations, and it only entered the picture once they were solid enough to carry it. That sequencing matters.

Six questions before the next tool

For CEOs and managing directors, the starting point does not need to be technical.

What do our clients actually want from us? How do we deliver that value today? Where does that delivery break down? Where are our people spending time that does not improve the client outcome? Where are we creating knowledge that never gets reused? Where are we buying tools to compensate for a process we have not properly understood?

Those questions are fundamental because AI is doing more than changing productivity. It is changing what clients consider standard. Firms that cannot answer them clearly will be outpaced — not on tools, but on readiness.

Who wins from here

The firms that win will not be the ones that bought the most tools first. They will be the ones that did the work to understand their business deeply enough to use AI with purpose.

The wins along the way are concrete: faster decisions, cleaner handovers, better client experience, and a business that becomes easier to scale without adding complexity at every turn.

Clarity has to come first. Value follows from it. Not AI for the sake of adoption. AI as a way to understand the business better, deliver outcomes more clearly, and build the kind of operating model the next market cycle will demand.

You have signed off on the tools. Your team is using them. Now answer the harder question: what has actually changed about how your business runs?

Rebecca Maher is Head of Growth and Director of AI at Rethink Group, where she leads AI transformation across the group’s ten businesses. She welcomes conversations with MDs and business leaders working through the same questions.