In this episode, John is joined by Sri Ganesan, founder of Rocketlane, a professional services automation platform built for customer onboarding and implementation teams. Sri is a serial founder – his first company was acquired by Freshworks, the first Indian software firm to list on the Nasdaq – and through Rocketlane he sees how hundreds of services teams actually work. He’s the third conversation in the mini-series, and the one that goes deepest on AI, though as he’d say, it’s really about leadership.

Sri’s starting point is blunt: the firms paid to bring AI to their clients are often barely using it themselves. He sees three levels of AI-enabled change – running the business, the admin around projects, and the work itself – and reckons almost everyone is stuck on the first two. The real prize, how the work actually gets done, barely moves.

What unlocks it, he argues, is hands-on leadership: a leader who builds something themselves soon learns what to ask of their team. And the payoff isn’t job cuts but growth – he points to a firm whose biggest projects went from two years to a few months, and whose services team doubled. His philosophy is “be the storm”: happen to your market, rather than letting it happen to you.

Beyond the three-levels idea, Sri and John discuss:

• Why “focus time” is the piece most teams are missing when it comes to changing how they work, and how a hackathon and a couple of readily available tools get them further than another directive to “use AI.”
• Why the future is selling outcomes rather than hours – and why clients are already asking “haven’t you heard of Claude?” when they’re quoted a timeline that seems too long.
• How to price when hours are no longer the cost: anchoring on the value delivered, and who keeps the benefit when the work gets cheaper.
• The “copy of my brain” idea – capturing what’s in a leader’s head so the team doesn’t have to come to them for everything.
• Where Sri still insists on the human touch, and the words – “quietly,” for one – that now give the game away when AI has written something.

If you lead a professional services firm and you suspect your own use of AI is shallower than it should be, this is a practical, slightly uncomfortable nudge – and a clear sense of where to start.

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Host: John Howard, Partner at Garwood Growth

Guest: Sri Ganesan, Founder of Rocketlane