AI in Whitecollar Services


13%
of US GDP is defined as Professional Services
30%
of Whitecollar Roles affected by AI
11M
Profesional Services Workers
AI in Whitecollar Services Thesis
AI represents a transformative tech enabler since the internet with underlying infrastructure continuing to improve alongside foundation models, the necessary data tooling, and reasoning. Traditional human-led industries that have previously failed to be automated, given challenges across unstructured and structured data and nuanced domain or tribal knowledge. These sectors will be reimagined with intelligent design and decisioning.
The professional services industry, contributing over 13% of US GDP, is particularly ripe for AI-driven transformation. AI's impact is expected to be significant, with estimates suggesting it could replace 2.4 million US jobs by 2030 and potentially affect up to 30% of white-collar roles.
As open source models catch up to closed models, we are especially interested in the unique combination of smaller, specialized models that outperform general LLMs to service industry-specific use cases. In particular, valuable data locked up in enterprises that have previously been silo’d or offline can create extremely valuable data moats, evolving from today’s “copilots” to fture “coworkers”. We’re especially interested in industries that face unique headwinds and challenges, such as an aging workforce or compressed talent pools that create adoption tailwinds.
What are these industries?
Defined by the BLS as “NAICS 541000 - Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services”, these workers can generally be grouped into the following categories:

Opportunities we’re excited about
Within each of these services subsectors, we’re highlighting a few areas of whitespace opportunities and select requests for startups.
Accounting and Financial Operations
- There is an exodus of accountants leaving the field in the last two years (down 16%) with low interest from emerging graduates. After many prior attempts in the market, AI can supercharge human and services-based accounting firms to intelligent automation in bookkeeping, categorization, accounting, tax, and audit, expanding to other adjacent financial operational areas like expense management and reconciliation. As this is quickly becoming a crowded market, we’re looking for startups that have unique thinking on distribution and subsectors of the market (specifically SMB).
AI Underwriting
- New platforms will transition from legacy rules-based to dynamic underwriting that has traditionally been reliant on human expertise, prior underwriting experiences, and contextual data. These copilots can provide risk based assessments and recommendations to operators, applying to use cases like lending, insurance, credit, and real estate.
- Existing portfolio companies in this area: Pylon Lending, Keyway
Architecture, Engineering and Construction
- The construction industry represents 14% of the U.S. GDP but suffers from legacy tools and manual processes, leading to errors, rework and waste. Contractors face a talent shortage and greater emphasis on margins. Building design automation is particularly ripe for AI. Through faster and more coordinated design across stakeholders can save the AEC value chain significant time and cost savings, especially in specialty trades like Engineers in Structural, Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing.
- Existing portfolio companies in this area: Higharc
Legal Services
- AI-powered tools can quickly sift through vast amounts of legal data, providing more comprehensive and accurate results in a fraction of the time it would take a human. New platforms will streamline contract review, document drafting, legal research, and historical precedents, allowing lawyers to focus on more complex tasks. We’re interested in platforms that can potentially predict outcomes and become a services provider directly.
The AI Marketer
- As LLMs and agents become primary consumers of content on the web, we see the future of content-driven marketing and SEO becoming more programmatic and commoditized. However, with the automation of content creation through design, messaging, and strategy across customer segments, future marketing teams will allocate budgets to platforms that can intelligently optimize ad spend across platforms according to organization’s goals. The AI Marketer will create the strategy, execution, and delivery of campaigns, providing clear insight into ROI and bypassing traditional PR and advertising/growth agencies.
- Existing portfolio companies in this area: Fermat Commerce