The Time to Save Time: AI Integration in a High-Performance Professional Service Firm

Sammanfattning

Purpose: AI is positioned in management research as a time-saving augmentation, a promise that should resonate most strongly with firms whose culture is built on time efficiency. Yet that very orientation may be what makes the technology hard to absorb. Through a single-case study of a small professional service firm integrating AI, this thesis examines how that tension unfolds in practice. We ask: How does a high-performance culture organized around saving time shape members' engagement with AI as a time-saving technology in a small professional service firm? Methodology: This qualitative, interpretive single-case study draws on symbolic interactionism and employs a self-ethnographic configuration in which one of the authors works at the firm. We conducted 11 semi-structured interviews with members across all roles and analyzed the material abductively through sorting, reducing, and arguing. Theoretical Framing: The thesis brings the augmentation discourse, which positions AI as a time-saving technology, into conversation with literature on the demands of AI integration. It approaches this conversation through temporal structuring and the distinction between clock-time and process-time. These dynamics intensify in high-performance professional service firms, where time serves as both the unit of value and the basis for evaluating members. Contributions: The study finds that the firm's temporal logic shapes members' engagement with AI in ways that reproduce the very conditions that make sustained integration difficult, producing a self-defeating loop that the culture cannot resolve from within. What makes these firms excellent at client delivery is what makes AI integration structurally difficult to sustain.