Y Combinator recently put out a call for AI-native services companies.
Thrive Holdings dubbed themselves “Long Humans.”
Search funds, VCs, and growth equity platforms are all racing to fund the next generation of companies that fuse generative AI with traditional services businesses. The common examples keep showing up in the same places such as accounting, IT services, and legal.
We couldn’t tell you back in 2022 that we saw exactly where the technology was headed.
But we had complete conviction that traditional services like executive recruiting were heading toward digital futures, and we wanted to be part of that transformation. The advances of the last few years didn’t change our direction but instead accelerated it dramatically and let us serve customers in a more valuable and more efficient way.
Here’s the thing, though. Almost the entire dialogue around AI and services is framed around one question: how much of what humans do today will AI replace?
We think that’s the wrong question. It’s the easiest one to observe, which is why everyone asks it… but it’s not the one that determines who actually wins in the AI era.
The Better Question: Information, Judgment, or Trust?
The right, better question is all about where that service’s value actually comes from. Because when you look closely, almost every service breaks into three very different kinds of value and AI disrupts each one completely differently.
Information Services – where AI largely replaces
Here the value is primarily access to information and the correct application of it. Think:
- tax preparation
- compliance
- basic accounting
- contract review
- documentation
- insurance underwriting
- a lot of MSP support work
Historically, customers hired experts because those experts possessed scarce knowledge. AI breaks that equation, because knowledge becomes effectively free, updates continuously, remembers perfectly, and scales infinitely. In these services, humans increasingly become reviewers rather than producers.
Judgment Services – where AI augments
Here, the information was never the hard part. The hard part is deciding. This is your executive search, investment banking, strategy consulting, executive coaching, complex legal work, venture investing.
Our company, Hunt Club, is an executive recruiting firm. Executive recruiting offers a prime example of Judgement services. A client almost never walks in with the correct hiring problem. They walk in saying “find me a CRO.” The real work is discovering that they actually need different compensation, or different stage experience, a different org design, or maybe not a CRO at all. That reframing is where the enormous value gets created. AI can generate possibilities all day long but the consultant determines which possibility is actually right.
Trust Services – where AI enhances, but humans stay central
These businesses ultimately monetize relationships. What comes to mind are services like wealth management, high-end recruiting, M&A advisory, commercial real estate, executive medicine, and family offices.
The client isn’t buying information here. What they’re buying is trust and confidence. They’re looking for high accountability and advocacy. Someone who shares the risk. Someone who will answer the phone at midnight. AI doesn’t replace that. It increases the leverage of the people who already have it.
Hunt Club as a Case Study
Recruiting is a useful case because the workflow splits so cleanly across all three layers.
The winning firms won’t automate recruiting. They’ll automate everything except the moments where humans create disproportionate value and pour the freed-up time back into those moments.
This has been the core tenet of the Hunt Club AI strategy since 2022. When we set our AI direction, we grounded it in our goals as a company: to cultivate trusted relationships and deliver a world-class customer experience. That led us to two outcomes we cared about above all else:
Notice what’s not on that list.
We did not (and still do not) start from internal optimization and efficiency. We’re not obsessed with how long a task takes or how many people it requires. We’ve just been obsessed with deploying a better experience and a better product for the customer. When that produces efficiency as a byproduct, great. But efficiency alone is not the bar you should aim for… unless your goal is a race to the bottom.
Why You Can’t Just Duct-Tape AI onto a Legacy Firm
The traditional model of search is built around individual ownership. Recruiters run their own book of business. Knowledge is siloed. Process lives in people’s heads. And even when a firm wants to change, the structure fights back. Partners and comp models aren’t incentivized to share, network data never gets captured, and collaboration in this environment slows people down. Here, nothing truly compounds. Not the data, not the insight, or the results.
We believe you have to build AI from the ground up.
If you were starting today, you’d build a fundamentally different kind of firm. One where the system, not the individual, creates the edge. Where every interview becomes structured insight and recruiters get smarter with every search. Where warm intros are tracked and routed intelligently instead of dying in someone’s inbox.
What This Does for the People and the Business
Again… none of this is about removing humans. The focus is really on redistributing where they spend their energy.
Speed of course comes out of all of this naturally. Faster sourcing, faster calibration, faster decisions. But speed was actually never the point. It’s the outcome of a system that removes friction at every step.
Why This Matters Now and Where I’d Bet
A couple of forces make this urgent rather than theoretical.
Roles are getting harder to fill and companies want operators who spike in one area but flex across business models, stages, channels, and cultures. The average long list at most firms has doubled or tripled in the last decade, meaning a firm now needs to maintain two to three times the relationships to serve clients well. You can’t do that in a spreadsheet.
And the buyer is changing too. There will be a cohort of customers who want to buy with almost no human interaction — to still understand exactly how a service works and drives impact, and only talk to a person when they have to. Services companies need to prepare their processes for that reality. But there will also remain a cohort for whom the white-glove, high-touch relationship becomes more critical, not less. The beauty of getting the AI foundation right is that it lets you serve both because the same investments that enable self-serve also free your best people to double down on white-glove service for the clients who want it.
So here’s my actual prediction: AI increases the value of exceptional consultants.
Average consultants become less valuable, because AI gives everyone a competent answer. Great consultants become more valuable, because they now spend almost no time gathering information and almost all of it exercising judgment. The distribution of outcomes widens.
Which is where I think PE and VC may initially misprice services. A lot of investors are underwriting AI as if labor simply disappears. In reality, labor gets redistributed. Instead of a 100-person firm becoming a 10-person firm, it more likely becomes a 60-person firm where every professional is dramatically more productive and focused on the highest-value parts of the workflow. Margins improve not because humans vanish, but because every human operates with far greater leverage.