It is the quarterly review with your biggest banking client. Before your team can open its deck, the bank's head of operations asks for five minutes.
He shows a tool two of his own people built with AI over two weekends. It clears part of the reconciliation backlog your team has been working on since spring.
He is pleased with his people. Nobody on your side of the table says a word. Everyone is thinking the same thing. What exactly is the bank paying us for?
The speed gap
Your clients are no longer waiting for their vendors to show them what is possible. Their own people use AI every day. A CIO who has watched his team build something in a weekend stops accepting a twelve-week plan without a fight.
Inside many services firms, senior leaders still run at the old pace. The steering committee meets once a month and the estimates rest on last year's assumptions.
In conversations and in DMs with senior leaders across IT services, I keep hearing the same worry. The smaller firms are adapting faster. The bigger ones carry more baggage, and every change needs too many people to agree before anything moves.
When a client sees his own team move faster than his vendor, the next renewal turns into a price conversation. That is how accounts start to slip, long before anyone loses one.
Why good leaders move slowly
The leaders I am describing are careful people. In banking, careful kept them safe for twenty plus years.
They were promoted for getting delivery right. Speed felt like risk. Reading about new tools felt like a job for someone more junior. So many of them wait for the firm to hand them a playbook.
The client has stopped waiting.
What a fast leader looks like
The leaders who are keeping pace have one habit in common. They use the tools themselves, every week, so they can talk about them without a technical team in the meeting.
They walk into each client review with one new idea the client did not ask for. Some ideas go nowhere. The client still sees a partner who is ahead of him.
Before they sign any plan, they ask one question. What would this take if we started today, with AI doing the first draft of the work?
My only point here is this. Your clients have already decided how fast the world moves. The leaders who match that pace keep their seat at the table, and the firm keeps the account.
Three questions for this week
When did you last bring a client an idea they did not ask for?
Which AI tool did you personally use this week?
What plan on your desk right now would look slow to your client's own team?
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Raju Panjwani | Founder of Live Masterminds, Inc.
I was a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley for 18 years. I now work with senior leaders in IT services and technology consulting, on becoming the leader the business now needs.