Welcome to The Folio Dispatch – where we share how we're building the future of professional services. Whether you're a forward-thinking funder, a frustrated fee-earner, or just someone who thinks timesheets should be illegal, you're in the right place.

Each month, we'll bring you the latest from our journey to eliminate the up-to-40% of time your firm wastes on non-value-added activity (aka admin, management, etc.). Yes, you read that right. Between a quarter and a half of your life. Gone. On timesheets, expenses and progress reports. Let that sink in.

Professional services firms are facing their "Netflix moment" – and most don't even realise they're still running a Blockbuster.

Here's the brutal truth: The traditional professional services model is broken. While partners debate billable hours, the industry is being hit by a perfect storm of changing client expectations, margin pressure, and talent wars. Meanwhile, firms are hemorrhaging up to 40% of their productive time on middle-to-back-office busywork. Think timesheets, expenses, reconciliations, project admin and "are we on plan?" checks. That's not a typo – it's a tragedy.

Think about it: For every four professionals you hire, one of them is essentially a very expensive administrator. In what universe does that make sense?

We've spent decades in professional services (yes, we've filled out our share of timesheets at 11:59 PM on a Sunday), and we know this isn't just an efficiency problem – it's an existential one. The firms that survive won't be the ones with the fanciest offices or the longest client dinners. They'll be the ones that embrace AI to build a fundamentally different operating model.

But here's where it gets interesting: Most "AI solutions" in our space are essentially ChatGPT wrappers that help you write better LinkedIn posts or take meeting notes. That's like using a Ferrari to deliver pizza – sure, it works, but you're missing the point.

Agencies need a reality check: in law alone, average billable time still sits around a third of the workday (Clio, 2024), while leading PS firms benchmark close to 70% billable utilisation (SPI, 2025). Better tooling — and better design — can claw that time back for clients, quality and margin.

Our view: the real prize is automating the "unsexy" work — accurate time, clean expenses, compliant billing, and proactive client hygiene — so your highest‑value people spend more of their day creating value, not pushing forms. And – here's a radical thought – deploying agents that proactively ensure your clients are actually happy with your work.

At Folio, we're building the only AI-native, integrated platform designed specifically for professional services. Our goal? Drive that 40% overhead down to zero. Because in 2025, if you're still manually categorizing expenses, you're not running a modern firm – you're running a museum.

Oct 1: Pre-Launch Date

2: Beta Partners

∞: Problems Solved

🎉 Pre-Launch Countdown Begins!

Mark your calendars: October 1st, we're going live with our first cohort of customers using Folio Payments! After months of beta testing, refinement, and probably too much coffee, we're ready to show the world what intelligent expense management actually looks like.

🤖 See You at AI-CON

We're heading to AI-CON to spread the gospel of AI-native professional services. If you're there, find us – we'll be the ones not talking about chatbots.

🧠 "Zero-based Interaction Design (0IX)"

Why agent IX feels more like hiring than shipping

Designing agentic systems is closer to designing a colleague than a dashboard. They need short‑term and long‑term memory; to learn preferences; and to switch modes: ask (clarify), act (do the job), audit (show their working), and adapt (shift channels, alter timings). Good AI interaction design follows battle‑tested guidance on when to take initiative, how to recover from errors, and how to earn trust over time.

Practically, that means forgetting everything associated with GUI-based interaction design and starting from a zero-base. Instead of page layouts and click-throughts, it means modelling memory (what happened today vs. what should always be true), building personality (adapting behavioural traits over time) establishing relationships (exposing confidence and controls), and giving people clear ways to correct and teach. We've not really had the ability to design human-like interaction with software until now, so this is new. We call it "Zero-based Interaction Design (0IX)".

We'll publish more on this next month, but read the following as a great primer: Microsoft's Human‑AI Interaction Guidelines and Nielsen Norman Group's AI UX best practices.

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🎯 "It's Not the Model. It's the Context."

The vertical AI playbook

Here's a contrarian take: For vertical AI startups like us, the LLM arms race is irrelevant. Current models are already brilliant enough – what they lack is detailed organisational context to support their execution. They don't know your agency's quirks, your client's preferences, or why Sarah from accounts always submits expenses on the last possible day.

So rather than trying to out-GPT GPT, we're building the 'action-in-context' layer that makes AI actually useful for agencies: Who are your staff? What are your projects? What's the budget? When is the deadline? This isn't sexy AI research that gets published in Nature – it's the unglamorous plumbing that makes the magic happen.

🎓 "AI and the Vanishing Graduate Job"

For generations, young graduates could rely on entry-level roles as their way into the workforce. Now, research shows that foothold is slipping—particularly in industries most exposed to AI. A widely cited study from Stanford University's Digital Economy Lab finds steep employment declines among 22–25-year-olds in software development and customer service since late 2022, with AI adoption the most likely driver. Harvard and US Federal Reserve researchers report similar patterns, while PwC expects to recruit a third fewer graduates by 2028. With 60% of students now pessimistic about their career prospects, building genuine pathways into the jobs of the future is no longer optional—it's essential.

Our beta program for Folio Payments and Folio Benefits is wrapping up, and the feedback has been... well, let's just say our Slack channel needs a "humble brag" emoji.

Folio has radically reduced our human effort for managing expenses, subscriptions, and spend in general. We've been able to invest less effort and cost on these processes and divert that to business development. — Alastair Grey, Managing Director, Veriteer Ltd.

Our employee benefits programme is now best-in-class. Feedback has been incredible, and we basically don't have to do anything to manage it. — Thomas Boyd, Ops Lead, The Customer Bureau

Of course, beta testing revealed plenty of "opportunities for improvement" (corporate speak for "things we should have thought of"). But that's exactly why we beta test – to make sure when we launch, we're not just good, we're game-changing.

🚀 Tech Update: Introducing Folio

What is Folio?

Think of it as your business's central nervous system – an intelligent platform that connects your finances, team, and operations into one cohesive workspace, powered by AI that actually understands your business.

The Problem We're Solving

Most businesses juggle 5-10 different tools: one for accounting, another for project management, separate systems for team communication, document storage, and business intelligence. The result? Data silos, manual work, and missed insights that could drive growth.

How Folio Changes the Game

We've built an integrated platform that brings everything together while adding a layer of business intelligence that learns from your operations:

💰 Smart Financial Operations – Adopt the Folio account and card, automatically categorise transactions, process invoices, and get AI-powered insights into your financial patterns

👥 Unified Team Management – Organise your people with role-based access, track projects with intelligent task hierarchies, and maintain all your business relationships in one place

🤖 Your AI Business Partner – Chat with an AI that remembers your conversations, analyses your documents, and provides contextual advice based on your actual business data

📊 Automated Intelligence – Policy engines that automate workflows, detect patterns in your operations, and surface actionable insights you might miss

More updates coming soon – our engineers are too busy coding to write about what they're coding just now.