Sequoia Capital, one of the most influential venture firms in the world, recently published a piece that puts a name to something many of us in professional services have been sensing. They call it “Service as a Software.”

The name takes a minute to land, but the concept behind it deserves attention from every B2B leader, especially those running mid-market professional services firms.

The basic idea: AI is no longer just helping your people work faster. It is starting to do the work itself. And according to Sequoia, for every $1 a company spends on software, it spends $6 on services (Sequoia Capital, “Services: The New Software,” March 2026). That $6 market is where AI is headed next.

This Goes Beyond Tools

For the past couple of years, the AI conversation in most firms has centered on tools. Which platform should we use. How do we get the team to adopt it. Should we try this chatbot or that one.

Those are reasonable questions, but they are no longer the most important ones.

The more pressing question is: how much of what your firm delivers is truly strategic, and how much is tactical execution that follows a known pattern?

That tactical layer is exactly what AI is learning to handle on its own. Content calendars. Standard reporting. Initial research. Data processing. Compliance checks. First-draft analyses. Not as a helper sitting beside your team, but as the one doing the work.

When that shift takes hold, you are no longer selling a tool that makes your people more efficient. You are selling an outcome that used to require a team to deliver. That is a different business model entirely.

Why Mid-Market Leaders Should Pay Attention Now

If you are running a mid-market company, this might feel like something that only matters to the Googles and McKinseys of the world. You have a business to run. Your team is stretched. You are still trying to get people to use the AI tools you already purchased.

I hear versions of that from companies every single week.

But the large firms are already well past that stage. McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI report found that 88% of organizations now use AI in at least one business function, and professional services leads all sectors in generative AI adoption, with implementation rates climbing from 33% in 2023 to 71% in 2024 (McKinsey, “The State of

AI in 2025,” November 2025). A separate McKinsey survey of 200 C-suite executives found that more than 80% are already running agentic AI pilots, with some progressing to scaled deployments (McKinsey, “Reimagining the Value Proposition of Tech Services for Agentic AI,” 2025).

You may not compete directly with a McKinsey. But you do compete with firms that are watching what McKinsey is doing and figuring out how to apply it at their scale. That is where the real competitive pressure will come from for mid-market companies. Not from the giants, but from the peers who figure this out first.

The Framework Worth Paying Attention To: Intelligence vs. Judgment

One of the most useful ideas in Sequoia’s analysis is the distinction between intelligence tasks and judgment tasks.

Intelligence tasks are the ones AI can increasingly handle. Processing information, generating outputs from defined inputs, following patterns, crunching data at scale. If you think about it, this is where a lot of entry-level and mid-level professionals spend most of their day.

Judgment tasks are different. They require context, experience, and the ability to read a room, understand what a client actually needs versus what they are asking for, and make a call when the answer is not obvious.

AI will keep getting better at judgment. But for the foreseeable future, that is where experienced professionals create the most value. The strategic thinking. The relationship. The “I’ve seen this before and here is what actually works” perspective.

The question every firm leader should be asking: across your business, how much of your team’s time goes to intelligence tasks versus judgment tasks? And what would it look like if you handled those two categories very differently?

This Is Not About Replacing People. It Is About Rethinking the Work.

I want to be clear about something, because this is where a lot of the fear comes in. This is not a story about letting go of your team and hoping AI fills the gap.

We have lived this ourselves. Over the past year, we completely transformed how content gets produced across our client engagements. Work that used to take multiple people and several rounds of revision now happens faster and at a higher level of quality. AI handles the heavy lifting. Our strategists bring the direction, the judgment, and the quality control.

The people did not go away. The work they do changed. And the results got better.

That is the real opportunity. It is not about having fewer people. It is about having your people focused on the work that actually moves the needle, while AI takes on the work that is important but does not require decades of experience to execute. McKinsey’s research supports this: enterprises believe 15% to 30% of current roles’ work could be handled by AI agents within the next three years (McKinsey Enterprise CxO Agentic AI Survey, 2025).

Three Questions Worth Sitting With

1. Where is your team spending time on work that AI could handle?
   Take an honest look at the day-to-day. How much is truly strategic, and how much follows a pattern that could be defined and repeated? That pattern-based work is exactly what this trend targets.
   
2. What does this mean for your next hire?
   If AI can take on more of the tactical execution, maybe the next person you bring on is not another generalist. Maybe it is a senior strategist who knows how to direct AI-powered workflows. That is a very different investment, and it changes your capability quickly.
   
3. How are your competitors thinking about this?
   Because they are thinking about it. The firms that weave AI into their delivery model as a core part of how they serve clients will deliver more value at a lower cost. And the global AI in professional services market is projected to grow at a 32.4% CAGR through 2030 (BPM, “Professional Services Industry Outlook 2026”). That is not a trend you can afford to sit out.

The Bottom Line

Service as a Software is a concept still being defined. The smartest technologists in the world are still working through how to make this reliable at scale. But the direction is clear, and the pace is accelerating.

For mid-market B2B companies, the play is not to panic or chase every new tool. It is to start thinking strategically about where AI belongs in your business model, not just your daily workflow. And it helps to have a partner who understands both the technology and the business context well enough to guide you through it.

Sequoia gets this right: the firms that combine deep domain expertise with AI-powered delivery will not just survive this shift. They will lead the next era of professional services.

That is a conversation worth having now.

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