By: Rebecca Strafer
Daniel Cohen-Dumani built and sold a consulting firm, then watched a technology arrive that he believed would upend everything he had spent his career doing. His response was to switch seats.
In November 2022, within days of ChatGPT’s public launch, Daniel Cohen-Dumani reached a conclusion that most professional services executives would spend the next two years avoiding. The industry he had worked in for three decades was going to be disrupted, and no amount of seniority would exempt him from it.
“I’d rather be in the disruption seat than the disrupted one,” he says. Six months later, he gave notice. The following year, he founded Experio.
The decision carried weight because of what he was walking away from. Cohen-Dumani began his career as a young computer science graduate in Switzerland, consulting at the firm that would become Accenture. He later founded Portal Solutions, a technology consultancy in the Washington, D.C. area, and grew it from a team of one to 60 before its acquisition by a large accounting firm in 2017. He stayed on after the sale, leading digital transformation work inside a firm of 2,000. By any conventional measure, the comfortable move was to ride out the wave from a corner office.
Instead, he chose to build against his own industry’s inertia. The problem he picked is one he had watched defeat every tool thrown at it since the 1990s. Professional services firms cannot find what they collectively know. Expertise lives in departed employees, forgotten folders, and the memories of partners approaching retirement. Cohen-Dumani had built knowledge management systems for years and watched them fail, because they demanded discipline from busy people. Large language models, he realized, removed that requirement for the first time.
He describes the weeks after the launch with unusual candor for an executive retelling a career pivot. There was no business plan yet and no product thesis, just the recognition that the world had changed and a refusal to pretend otherwise. What he did have was pattern recognition earned over three decades. He knew exactly where professional services bled time, lost knowledge, and paid twice for the same lessons, because he had lived every version of the problem, first with his own team of 60, then inside a firm of 2,000 where he watched it grow twenty times worse. The technology that could finally fix it had just arrived. Right problem, right moment, right seat.
Experio, and its intelligence layer IQ1, turns a firm’s institutional knowledge into what the company calls organizational memory: the ability to ask a hard, specific question and get a cited, verifiable answer in seconds. A first-year associate, as he puts it, can know what the partner knew, the moment they need it.
The conviction that defines the company’s culture came from watching AI demonstrations impress a room and then collapse under a single question: says who? In professional services, Cohen-Dumani argues, an answer a partner cannot trace is an answer they cannot use, because their name goes on the advice. So he built the product, and the company, around receipts. Every answer arrives with its source document, the exact passage it came from, and a trail a skeptical reviewer can audit in one click. When the knowledge is not there, the system is designed to say so rather than improvise. Confidence is cheap, he likes to say. Receipts are expensive. He chose receipts.
His leadership philosophy runs against the current of AI hype, which is notable for a founder whose company depends on the technology. He tells clients not to trust AI, but to verify it. He is publicly skeptical that general intelligence is imminent, having looked, as he puts it, under the hood. And he pushes back on the fully-autonomous future his own industry’s vendors like to sell. His estimate is that AI will do 80 percent of consulting work while the judgment, empathy, and gut read that close hard conversations stay human. “Anyone selling you fully-autonomous expertise,” he says, “is selling the 20 percent that can’t be automated.”
He is just as unsparing about the obstacles inside firms, which in his experience are cultural before they are technical. The biggest blocker he encounters is not budget or data quality but the senior partner whose value has always been in being the only one who knows. Hoarding knowledge was rational job security for a generation, he acknowledges. In the AI era, it becomes the firm’s largest single point of failure. He also refuses the most common excuse for delay, the plan to start once the data is cleaned up. Thirty years of shared drives and inboxes will never be clean, he tells leaders, and modern systems no longer need them to be. Start with the mess.
That candor extends to how he advises fellow leaders. Buying AI licenses, he argues, is not an AI strategy. Deciding how the work itself changes is. Firms that bill by the hour face a business model question, not a software question, and the leaders still defending the hour in five years will spend the following five catching up.
Pressed on where the industry lands, he describes the professional services firm of 2030 in concrete terms. Smaller teams, not because people were cut but because a team of eight with the firm’s full memory does what a team of twenty once did. Juniors with veteran memory from their first week. Pricing tied to outcomes rather than hours, because the hours will have collapsed. Expertise held as a permanent, findable asset instead of walking out the door with each retirement. None of it strikes him as radical. Every piece, he notes, is already underway in firms that decided to move early. Having watched his industry adopt every previous wave late, under pressure and at premium prices, he believes this one rewards the builders.
Asked what he would tell executives who see their own disruption coming, Cohen-Dumani returns to the decision that started his second act. The rarest asset a founder can have, he says, is three decades of watching an industry’s problems from the inside, paired with the willingness to act on what you see. The wall is coming either way. The only real choice is which side of it you are standing on.
He shares his thinking regularly on LinkedIn, where his commentary on AI and the future of professional services has become a running argument against both the hype and the complacency in his field.
