We're in the last days of 2022, and ChatGPT has been live for exactly one month. It hit 1 million users in five days. The adoption trajectory is unprecedented. Every AI vendor is now scrambling to figure out how to ride this wave.

Here's my prediction for 2023: AI won't become a strategy tool or a customer-facing tool. It will become an operations tool. And that's actually the most important place it could land.

Why Operations? Because That's Where the Pain Is

Professional services firms have been trying to optimize themselves for decades. Lean principles, Six Sigma, the usual suspects. But there's a hard ceiling on efficiency when the bottleneck is human time and human judgment on repetitive work.

That's where AI hits. Not on strategy (too nuanced). Not on client-facing work (too risky). But on the 30% of your team's day that's pure process work: intake, intake, scheduling, note-taking, summarization, template adaptation, initial research, follow-up tracking.

For the first time, you can automate that without losing the judgment that matters.

The 2023 Adoption Curve

I think we'll see three waves in 2023:

Wave 1 (Jan-Mar): Individual adoption. Your team members discover ChatGPT and start using it on their own. A junior associate uses it to draft emails. A partner uses it to summarize market research. It's ad-hoc and unmanaged. This is already happening.

Wave 2 (Apr-Aug): Business integration. Smart firms will start building ChatGPT into their workflow. "Before you send this email, run it through ChatGPT for a second draft." "Paste the meeting transcript here to generate action items." It becomes part of how you work, not a separate tool.

Wave 3 (Sep-Dec): Competitive advantage question. By the end of 2023, the question won't be "Should we use AI?" It'll be "How is our firm different because we use AI?" Firms that have integrated it well will have faster processes and happier teams. Firms that haven't will start to feel slower.

Why This Matters for Strategy

Most consultants talk about AI as this grand transformation tool. We're going to reimagine your business model. We're going to create entirely new service lines. We're going to use AI to predict which clients will churn.

Maybe. Someday.

But here's what will actually happen in 2023: firms that use AI well will simply be better at execution. Your client intake will be faster. Your team will be more responsive. Your internal processes will be smoother. You'll have fewer bottlenecks.

That's not glamorous. But it's real money. And it's sustainable.

What This Means for You in January

If you're a managing partner or operations director, here's what I'd do:

Start the conversation: Get your leadership team together. Don't wait for a consultant. Don't wait for a vendor to sell you something. Just talk about where your biggest operational friction is. Where does your team waste the most time on stuff that's boring but necessary?

Run a pilot: Pick one of those pain points. Run it through ChatGPT or another AI tool. Measure the time saved. Show your team the results. Let them feel it.

Think about workflow integration: How could you build this into how your team actually works? Not as a separate tool to log into, but as part of the flow. "Run this through AI before you send it." "Generate a first draft with AI, then edit." This is where the real productivity unlock happens.

Set boundaries and policy: Get your compliance team involved. Make sure your team knows what information can be shared with AI systems and what can't. This is not optional.

The Firms That Win in 2023

The winners won't be the ones with the fanciest AI strategy. They'll be the ones that:

These firms will move faster, have happier teams, and have lower cost per unit of service delivered. In a competitive market, that compounds.

My Bet for 2023

By the end of 2023, the firms using AI well won't call it "AI" anymore. It'll just be how they work. That's when you know you've won — when the tool disappears into the process and nobody thinks of it as special anymore.

I'm betting that's your firm, not your competitor's.