2026 AI-First Service Firms

Artificial intelligence marks an exponential shift unlike any prior technology era. As organizations rethink how work gets done, traditional staffing pyramids are giving way to smaller, high-leverage teams powered by digital labor. With a few deep experts and AI-driven tools, enterprises can now build and scale solutions in weeks—not years—often outperforming far larger legacy organizations.

As services become productized and product teams adopt service models, legacy firms struggle to adapt without an AI-first mindset. In contrast, AI-native organizations operate with a greater span of control through decision automation, pairing human judgment with digital labor to achieve step-change gains in speed, efficiency, and performance.

The Future is Here: The Next AI-First Service Firms

Constellation Research conducted a search for the top AI-first service firms in the Fall of 2025. Through surveys, outreach, customer references, formal and informal briefings, and customer reference calls, Constellation has put together a dynamic list that will be updated annually. 

These AI-first firms show the following attributes:

• Percentage of digital to human labor: 10-20%
• Revenue per FTE: $100,000 to 200,000
• Deployed agents in production: 25 to 100

At the highest level, a class of AI Exponentials emerged in our research, and these firms achieved:

• Percentage of digital to human labor: >20%
• Revenue per FTE: >$ 200,000
• Deployed agents in production: >100

Legacy organizations caught between two S-curves must quickly decide whether to start from scratch and migrate, or to modernize their technical debt within their existing organizational structures. Organizations embracing an AI-first approach will make the key architectural shift needed to gain an attacker’s advantage. Leaders can expect future pricing models to shift away from per-seat pricing to outcomes-based models in this new era.  Moreover, future valuations will be built on the ability to compete with AI-first firms and the ability to scale human ingenuity and expertise with the scale of digital labor.