The Return of the Solo Practitioner
How AI may shrink large firms and empower individuals to build small, highly effective practices of their own.
In my last essay, I asked a question that has been nagging at me ever since AI tools began reshaping my own business:
If companies everywhere become dramatically more efficient and require fewer employees, who will be left to buy the products those companies produce?
Since publishing that essay, a number of readers pointed out something important.
Technological revolutions rarely eliminate work entirely. What they tend to do is change how work is organized.
When the automobile replaced the horse, blacksmiths didn’t simply disappear. They became mechanics.
When computers entered the office, we didn’t eliminate administrative work; we reorganized it. Entire industries emerged around software, IT services, and digital infrastructure.
What feels different about AI is that it may not simply change industries. It may change the size of the organizations required to run them. AI may not eliminate professional work. But it may eliminate the need for large teams of people doing it together.
For most of the modern professional economy, large firms existed for a simple reason: coordination. Complex work required teams of specialists, layers of management, and significant administrative infrastructure just to keep everything moving.
Law firms needed armies of paralegals and support staff. Consulting firms required layers of analysts. Agencies depended on project managers, client relationship managers, and administrative teams.
AI is beginning to strip away much of that overhead.
Across many professions, the amount of administrative labor required to run a practice is beginning to shrink.
In my own agency, I’ve begun rebuilding our internal systems around this idea. Tasks that once required entire administrative workflows can now be handled by AI-assisted processes.
The result is a smaller team that spends far more time on the highest-value thinking for our clients.
We may be entering a period where many professionals rediscover something that used to be common: the solo practice.
For most of human history, skilled professionals worked this way: independent, reputation-driven, and directly accountable to their clients.
If this shift accelerates, the most valuable professionals in the next decade may not be those within the largest firms. They may be the individuals who can combine deep expertise, strong relationships, and AI-powered tools into small, highly efficient practices.
Lawyers will depart firms to become solo practitioners. Doctors may begin leaving the private-equity-owned practices that now dominate much of modern healthcare.
I’m hazy on how the economics will work for this newly minted solo-practitioner class. Will practitioners charge more but provide a high level of human touch to select clients? Or will they charge less but serve a broader base of clients?
Many people are leaning into AI for efficiency gains. Far fewer seem to be asking how they will continue to provide value in the new economy.
Meanwhile, I have been breaking apart and rebuilding my business to be high-touch, obsessed with creating value for our clients, and deeply personal. If I have any chance of creating value in this new economy, that’s my strategy.
AI may hollow out large organizations. But it may also empower individuals in ways we haven’t seen in decades.
The question many of us should be asking is not just how to use AI more efficiently inside our current jobs. It’s whether AI might eventually allow us to build something of our own.
For most of the last century, professional success meant climbing the ladder inside large firms.
The next decade may reward something very different: individuals who combine deep expertise, strong relationships, and AI-powered tools to build small, highly effective practices of their own.
I’m curious how others are thinking about this shift.
What’s your strategy?
