Scribe Or Operator? The AI Architecture Question Most Professional Services Firms Are Getting Wrong

InnovationScribe Or Operator? The AI Architecture Question Most Professional Services Firms Are Getting WrongByRaju Malhotra,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)May 28, 2026, 09:45am EDTRaju Malhotra is Chief Product & Technology Officer at Certinia where he leads product strategy and AI innovation for professional services. gettyA study conducted by Service Performance Insight titled "The Impact of AI on Professional Services" found that nearly 90% of current AI initiatives in professional services sit at "level 1" or "level 2" maturity—use cases that assist individuals or add modest automation inside existing workflows. Only about 10% of firms have reached "level 3," where agentic systems orchestrate work across core platforms and reshape operations at scale. (As a disclosure, Certinia licensed the research to make it available to the public at no cost but had no influence on the methodology, data collection or conclusions.)​That gap has a structural explanation. Most firms are deploying a more capable autocomplete feature, and the architecture behind that approach and true agentic AI are fundamentally different.Two Kinds Of AI Tools​The first kind of tool is a “scribe." It handles natural language tasks well: meeting notes, document generation and executive summaries. But it has no awareness of the commercial, financial and resourcing structures that govern how a services business actually runs.An operator, on the other hand, is an agentic system that reasons within the rigid, deterministic constraints of a services organization where margins depend on accurate revenue recognition, contract compliance and precise deployment of talent. An operator executes action, validates its outputs and handles the downstream consequences across the operational architectur...