5 New Rules for Tech Services Founders in the Age of AI

We’ve established that AI is enabling Customization at Scale, fundamentally changing the contract between tech services and product companies. This shift is also creating pressure from roles like Forward Deployed Engineers, as product companies move closer to work historically done by services firms.

This article lays out five new rules for tech services founders—not just to survive this structural shift, but to thrive in the age of AI.

Rule #1: Proximity to the Customer Is Non-Negotiable

Historically, deep customer closeness was the natural advantage of consulting firms. Over time, many services organizations traded proximity for scale—adding layers of account management, process, and abstraction.

Product companies are now reversing that tradeoff.

Forward Deployed Engineers pull customer intimacy back inside the platform, eliminating distance between product decisions and real-world usage. Closeness to the customer is a core strength, and you cannot afford to cede ground in the depth of your relationships.

This does not mean abandoning structure. It means designing systems, roles, and incentives that preserve and enhance proximity as you scale. Firms that allow delivery teams to drift away from customer context will lose relevance to organizations that remain embedded in the problem. To compete in this world, you must deeply understand how customers operate, what they need, and how to guide them toward better outcomes.

Rule #2: Develop a Sharp Focus — and Choose Your Battlefield Carefully

This rule comes straight from the product playbook. While product companies are expanding their scope by enabling more customization, services companies must do the opposite: become more focused.

Tech services firms that position themselves as the generic consulting arm of a product company will find themselves constantly competing with their partner’s Forward Deployed Engineers.

Your focus must extend beyond implementing a single technology. You need a clear definition of the value you create and the problem you solve. Platform partners remain critical, but instead of committing to one technology, you should commit to the intersection of multiple technologies that solve a customer’s problem.

Go deeper into a vertical than a general-purpose platform can. Add industry-specific insight, guidance, and context. Build relationships and case studies within that domain. The objective is to dominate the last mile of a specific vertical—using the platform as a floor, not a ceiling.

In the age of AI, sharp focus is what allows customization to scale without becoming commoditized.

Rule #3: Deliver Value, Not Hours

Building on the second rule, delivering value is now more important than ever.

Customers don’t care where product ends and services begin. They care about outcomes. In an AI-enabled world, effort is no longer a reliable proxy for value. Differences in how teams use AI can create 10x, or even 100x, variation in their ability to deliver results.

The rule is simple: own the value you create.

If you don’t, AI-driven efficiency will work against you. Teams that work 10x faster under time-based pricing models will simply shrink contract sizes rather than increase impact. To avoid this trap, delivery, sales, contracting, and pricing must all align around outcomes.

This requires a commercial overhaul moving away from the historical comfort of time-and-materials toward outcome-based models where both the client and the firm benefit from AI-driven efficiency.

Rule #4: Build a Product Company Inside Your Services Firm

As the cost of customization declines, the importance of internal IP and processes has never been greater.

Forward Deployed Engineers are effective because they are supported by software—internal tools, documentation, automation, and repeatable patterns. They do not rely on heroics.

Internal IP enables productization inside a services firm, turning experience, knowledge, and culture into tangible assets: systems, processes, and code. This creates a foundation for capturing and compounding improvements over time, allowing you to outpace competitors that rely solely on people.

The rule is not “become a product company.”
It is to operate like one internally—using software as leverage for your teams.

Well-designed IP allows services firms to make their value tangible, standardize execution, improve productivity, and maintain high margins, while strengthening partnerships with platform providers.

Rule #5: Abandonment Is a Part of Innovation

AI is accelerating the pace of change. Services firms have always faced pressure from commoditization, but as platforms mature, their tooling increasingly simplifies integration and delivers standardized solutions that compete directly with custom consulting work.

When a product company offers a standardized solution—even if it is less complete than a bespoke implementation—services firms cannot afford to diverge from the platform. Alignment matters more than perfection.

This means being prepared to continuously abandon your own IP in favor of platform-native capabilities. Abandonment is not failure; it is strategic discipline.

You must design with change in mind. Your IP should be modular, API-driven, and built with clear upgrade paths so it can evolve—or be retired—alongside platform improvements.

The goal is a mindset that treats your own IP as intentionally expendable, ensuring you are ready to retire custom solutions the moment a platform partner standardizes the function. In a world moving this fast, survival depends as much on what you let go of as what you build.

Building the Consulting Firm of the Future

The changes underway in tech services are structural, not temporary. AI is redefining how value is created, delivered, and scaled, and the old assumptions about how consulting firms grow no longer hold.

The firms that succeed in this next era will be intentional by design. They will stay close to customer problems, choose focus deliberately, deliver outcomes instead of effort, build leverage through internal software, and know when to abandon what no longer serves them.

At Vixul, we believe this future is defined by Customization at Scale — and it requires founders to rethink how their firms are built from the inside out.

That’s exactly what we’ll be exploring at VixulCon, where tech services founders and operators will come together to share insights, frameworks, and real-world lessons on building durable, differentiated consulting firms in the age of AI.

If you’re building a consulting firm for the future, we invite you to join us at VixulCon and be part of shaping what comes next.