If Firms Get More Productive, Who Gets the Raise?
I was on a call last month with a principal at a mid-sized AEC firm. Two of his younger engineers had figured out how to use AI to cut a modeling task from three days to four hours. He showed me the output, genuinely good work.
I asked what happened next.
He paused, then said the obvious thing happened. The team took on more projects. They "earned" more time to get more done.
Nobody got a bonus. Nobody got a day back. The firm quietly captured the entire gain and raised the bar on what a normal week looks like.
I don't think that was cynical. I think it was the default. Most firms aren't deciding to extract value off their people's ingenuity, they're just not deciding anything at all. And the default in professional services is always more output for the same cost.
This moment is different from past productivity gains, and a lot of leaders are missing why.
Many spent the last few years fighting a rearguard action on remote work: RTO mandates, attendance tracking, a sense that flexibility was a temporary concession. That was an opportunity lost.
AI gains are different. Nobody handed this to your people. They're figuring it out themselves, on top of everything already on their plate. That's not a favor you owe them, it's value they created that didn't exist in your business six months ago.
So, the question isn't whether AI will make your firm more productive. It will. The question is what you do with the gain.
Two paths:
Margin: take the hours back, hold comp where it is, let the new pace become the new normal. Easier administratively and since most competitors take it too, it buys you nothing strategically. Just table stakes.
Dividend: give some back as comp or bonus. Give some back as time an early Friday when the week's work is done. Tell people plainly that their initiative bought them something real.
Most firms will default to the first path, mostly because nobody in the room said the second one out loud.
That's the opening. Firms that deliberately share the gain, and say so clearly, stop competing for talent on salary. They start competing on something harder to copy: a reputation as the place that didn't take the win and keep walking.
Employer of choice isn't decided by your recruiting brochure. It's decided in moments exactly like the one that principal described and most firms won't even notice the moment happened. Employer of choice or employer of last resort is your choice.