Most founders start their AI journey in one of two places: hype or skepticism. In this episode, Greg sits down with member Nick Anderson from OneAccord, who began as an AI skeptic and then crossed the line into belief after seeing what it could do inside a real services firm. Nick breaks down what changed his mind, what he built once he committed, and how he is using AI to transform both delivery and operations.
This podcast is the strategic overview. The Friday Role Model Session is where Nick will demo what he built and show how it works in practice.
What you’ll get from this session:
- The moment Nick stopped treating AI as noise and started treating it as leverage
- How a skeptic evaluates AI use cases without getting trapped by hype
- What Nick chose to build first and why that sequence matters
- How the build is reshaping service delivery, team workflows, and scale constraints
Why it matters:
- Skepticism is common, but waiting for certainty creates strategic lag
- The firms that win will re-architect delivery around AI, not just “add tools”
- A demo-backed build gives founders a concrete blueprint, not theorydy targeting professional services firms and most are not prepared
TRANSCRIPT
Greg Alexander: Hey everybody, this is Greg Alexander. Welcome to the ProServe Podcast, brought to you by Collective 54. If you’re in the expertise business, meaning that you market, sell, and deliver expertise for a living, this show is for you. We aim to help you do three things, and that is make more money, make scaling easier, and make an exit achievable. On this episode, we have a Collective 54 member and a buddy of mine, Nick Anderson, CEO of One Accord, and the theme for this call is moving from an AI skeptic to an AI believer. Because when I talk to Collective 54 members about moving from a labor-based firm to an AI-native professional services firm, they often say, hey, this sounds great, who’s doing it? So today, we have an example of somebody who’s doing it right now, and who’s on a very aggressive journey to remake his firm to become an AI-native professional services firm. And I’ve got a bunch of questions for Nick, but before I jump into those, Nick, just in case someone might know you, would you please provide an introduction?
Nick Anderson: Absolutely. You know, I’d love to say the most important thing about me, Greg, is that I’m husband to Ariana, and father to Abigail, Christian, Eliana, and Finn. They are the light of my life. I came in to be the CEO of One Accord about 2 years ago following a 25-year career in banking. That’s somewhat relevant to this conversation because bankers move at a glacial pace. So becoming an entrepreneur in the ProServe space, is relatively new to me. You know, call it two years, and I am… I’m a walking case study for the work that we do at One Accord. So, One Accord was founded 25 years ago by my partner, a man named Jeff Rogers. And I’m affecting the succession. So I’m the next 25 years, let’s say, which is a lot of the work that we do, and so that’s high level.
Greg Alexander: Okay, sounds great. So let me jump into the questions. So, Nick, you were a self-described skeptic of AI. What did that actually look like, and what were you telling yourself about AI before you changed your mind?
Nick Anderson: Yeah, so here’s the whole journey. I may have been one of the first million users of ChatGPT back in 2022. So I was AI curious, right? This thing came out, I want to learn about it, it’s really cool. Then, over, you know, 9 months, 12 months, I started getting a lot of phone calls and inbound from AI experts, and I just, you know, finger quotes in the air, promising all kinds of magic. The first use case was, we can create an AI voice agent that’ll do outbound sales for you. And I was like, this is brilliant! I’m curious, I’m excited, show me. Just total crap. And I’m like, there’s no way I’m gonna let that machine represent my brand. And the volume started to pick up. And so… and I was playing with GPT. I was seeing hallucinations, there were security risks, so I went from being curious and excited to skeptical, and I even went so far as to be cynical like, I would… I would label these people that were calling and emailing me the, you know, AI charlatans, right? They’re promising the world, but they’ve got nothing to back it up. And so I was just like, nope, we’re not touching it. And so I would say, you know, up until January, the retreat. Nick Anderson: That was my posture. Not touching.
Greg Alexander: So I started with that question because many of our members are there right now, where you were some time ago. Not as many as there once were, because I think we’re all becoming, you know, aware of its capabilities, and the tech has improved so much since then, but this takes me to my second question, which was, what was the moment that broke the skepticism or the cynicism? Like, was there a specific conversation that made you say to yourself, shit, I was wrong about this?
Nick Anderson: Do I have a hard time admitting that I was wrong? Maybe. But how about this? The moment was really clear, and it was at the retreat, the Collective 54 retreat, and here’s what made that moment special, is that you and the team showed me Real time, something that worked, that people for years had been promising that never worked.
Greg Alexander: Yep.
Nick Anderson: So, that was the before and after. I could touch it, I could see it, I could ask the people that pushed the buttons the question. How does this work? And they can actually answer it. No BS, no fluff, no consulting… You know. You understand it worked. And so what I said… I think I said to Matt, definitely I said this to Zach. You guys showed me in 7 minutes? What people have been trying to explain for 7 months? And I was immediately a believer. Like, this worked. Yep.
Greg Alexander: Well, I mean, so hats off to you, because I remember that you were wondering if you were gonna, you know, get on a plane and spend the money to come to the retreat and all that, and and you kept an open mind, and you did it, and I’m glad it worked out. And it was easy for Matt Alexander and Zach Witonsky and Jeff Klaumann to show it to you, because they’re sitting in your seat. I mean, they’re building a boutique pro-serve firm themselves. So the use cases are very specific. Okay, so you left there, You went home, and you committed to doing this.
Nick Anderson: Oh, yeah.
Greg Alexander: What did you build first?
Nick Anderson: I’ve built the most simple one-shot agent in… when I say one-shot, like, I did it in one shot, in Copilot Studio. So we use Microsoft 365 for our, you know, tech stack, and I don’t want to go add 15 different applications to the tech stack. So, right now, I’m fairly committed to Microsoft Copilot Studio, although, as a part of our journey, we do have a Claude team account, and we’re learning and experimenting. That just comes into play for how we’re going to serve our clients. But internally, we are, for the moment, committed to Microsoft. So I built an agent that was an operations support agent. And so if I go back in time, 2 years ago, when I started, I said to, my chief of staff, Abby, every decision we make. I want you to document it in a Word document. So this is work from 2 years ago that becomes very relevant today. So, here we are today, we’ve got 150 pages of SOPs.
Greg Alexander: Because.
Nick Anderson: Every decision we made, we wrote down. And for 2 years, Abby’s been building this out. Now, she’s the only one that knows, and some… so, inbound phone calls, emails, I have an expense report, I need to do this, I need to do that, where do I do it? Abby is spending time on that. So, all I did, Greg, was created an agent that said, when a user prompts you with a question, go to the SOP document that’s in SharePoint, Agents and Copilot. And answer the question. And then provide links to the forms that they need. So the user can go to a chat prompt and get specific information internally. Now, when that worked in a one-shot. I was like, hallelujah.
Greg Alexander: Yep.
Nick Anderson: Then I tried to boil the ocean. That’s a different story.
Greg Alexander: But we’ll get to that, let’s stay. But I asked you that question, and it was somewhat of a leading question, because I already knew that story. You had shared it with me. But I asked it because I just… you know, you spent 25 years in banking. You’re not a technologist, neither am I. And sometimes when I talk to members that have similar backgrounds that you have and that I have, they’re intimidated, like, well, crap, I need to hire a coder and blah blah blah. It’s not true. I mean, you did it in, to use your term, one shot, and to your credit, Nick, you actually had the source material, you know, you had asked your colleague to document all these decisions. Sometimes people never did that in the first place, but… Right. So you’re doing it using Microsoft Copilot. You’re not hiring developers. You’re not hiring consultants. So, and you just… you just spent a weekend at your retreat in the Pacific Northwest called The Gorge. Which is your way to get away and clear your brain and to build things. So, I want to ask you about that, like, what is that… when I say build things, what is Nick’s process to build something using AI?
Nick Anderson: It’s… it is eliminating all of the distractions around me. So that I can focus on, I think… I think the right language here is vibe coding. So this is me prompting Copilot Studio, or… and or using a separate LLM, like Copilot, or Gemini, or Claude, to walk me through the process, and watching YouTube videos.
Greg Alexander: Yep.
Nick Anderson: I’ll play 20 seconds, I’ll pause it, I’ll go…enter something into Copilot Studio, I’ll test it, I’ll play 20 seconds. So, my weekend away eliminated distractions, I had access to the tools that I needed to build things, and the tools are LLMs, including Copilot, Claude, Gemini, and YouTube, because there’s so many resources out there, and it’s time. So, if I frame it this way, 5 college credits.For a standard course, is about 220 hours. 75 hours of classroom, 150 hours of study. So if I want to take a college course on how to build an agent. I gotta give myself about 200 hours to learn this. So, for me, I can do that in 20-hour chunks if I just get away and focus. That was one of the reasons I was skeptical and cynical, because I knew the time investment that was there. I’m not going to be the one building agents in my company long-term. But I must know how this works so that I can advise clients, that I can manage the business internally, and that I can allocate those resources when we get to that place where we may hire someone that owns you know, our Copilot Studio, our instance of Clay, our Zoho CRM. There’s… there’s a new role in this company 12 months from now.
Greg Alexander: Yep. Well, it’s a great example because you’re leading from the front. You know, you’re doing it yourself first, and there’s a learning curve that we all have to go on. And you’re willing to do it because you got quick wins. Like, you could clearly see that if I spend an hour on XYZ, I’m gonna get something that justified the time investment, so you’re leaning into it. And that’s the thing that I would encourage all members, is that you gotta lead from the front, you gotta become fluent in these things yourself. And a guy like Nick, 25 years in banking, doesn’t write code, but now he can write code, because he can vibe code. Like, that’s the breakthrough. Okay, I want to switch gears now to how you’re serving clients with this. And I read an article that you recently wrote that I thought was brilliant. You know, many of us in the industry call it human in the loop.
Nick Anderson: Hmm. You have flipped that, and you’re calling it AI in the loop, which I thought was great. Could you explain that, please? Yeah, there’s… there is no circumstance under which someone is going to hire me for a multi-six-figure contract if the human is in the loop, right? If they’re hiring the AI to do the work.
Greg Alexander: Like…
Nick Anderson: Not gonna happen. And I just acknowledge… I acknowledge that knowledge is no longer the currency. It’s wisdom and contextual experience, and it’s, you know, knowing where to hit the hammer on the furnace to turn the thing on, if we get that analogy, right? So, we are, we’re a professional services business. We serve professionals, and we do that with technology as a tool. So AI is in our loop, not the other way around. I’m not willing to concede the client relationship to AI and then put a human in the loop. This is my… it’s just the way I make sense of our approach here.
Greg Alexander: Yep. Which I think makes a ton of sense, given your business. I mean, for those that don’t know Nick. You know, he installs, very often, executive teams in businesses. Sometimes full-time, sometimes fractional. You know, it’s not like he’s advising from afar. He’s installing teams to actually execute. So, in a business like that, and we have many of those businesses inside of Collective 54, extracting the human is ridiculous. Like, you can’t do that. But what you can do, which is what Nick has done is put AI on the hip of the human, and make the human that much more capable Which will result in an improved business outcome for the client, which, you know, will result in a business outcome for Nick, so everybody wins in that case. So, I just wanted to talk about that, because we have a lot of folks that are in that, you know, fractional space, for lack of a better term, and AI is still relevant to them, because you’re not replacing the human, you’re injecting AI with the human.
Nick Anderson: We’re making, you know, we’re making our consultant… I’m making Steve Naska twice as productive.
Greg Alexander: Yep.
Nick Anderson: I just… and I… when I… when I left the retreat in, in January, I had this thought that, you know, me saying to the world, well, one accord is going to serve clients without AI, is like saying, well, I’m just gonna do business without email. Or it’s like an accountant saying, well, I’m gonna do… I’m gonna work… I’m gonna serve clients without Excel. Yeah. They just… you just can’t do that, and very soon, no… no professional services business is going to be able to serve clients without using the technology that we call AI.
Greg Alexander: Yep. You know, when you mention the word wisdom and context, those two words, they’re so important, and I’ll just use an example to highlight these. You know, when we launched in Collective 54, our AI offering, which we call membership tiers, Era 1, Era 2, Era 3, we had a lot of members saying, well, what do I need Collective 54 for? I can just use AI on my own. And that is true, but…You need the wisdom and the knowledge on how to apply it, right? In your case, you came to Sundance, you saw how to apply it, you went home and did something with it. You’re now doing that for your clients. Like, what you’re saying to your clients, hey, I’ve already done this for you. You know, I’m going to now run this way, I’ve paid the dumb taxes, I’ve made the investment so that you don’t have to, and that’s gonna increase productivity for you. Like, that’s… that’s the message, and it’s very… it’s very real, wouldn’t you agree?
Nick Anderson: 100%. The… Even to the extent that we published our AI kind of policy, and we framed it the AI manifesto, so how we are doing it internally, I’m just, you know. drawn the curtain back and saying, this is… this is how we’re doing it internally, and I’m not alone in that. There are… By my observation, maybe 5 or 10% of the, you know, collective not the collective 54, but all of the businesses in the U.S, 5 or 10% are on this kind of front… front edge right now.
Greg Alexander: Yep.
Nick Anderson: And I don’t… I’d say those of us who are, now, I get to include myself in that group, we’re being very transparent. Like, this is new, we’re learning, I’m paying the dumb tax, that’s, you know, what you and the Collective 54 team have done for my benefit. Yep. You have… the fact that you went first, and you stubbed your toe a couple of times, has allowed me to get so much farther faster, which then allows me to help our clients get so much farther faster. And so when the, you know, remaining 80 or 90% of the world is ready for this evolution, we will be ready for that.
Greg Alexander: Yep, I agree, and well said. Alright, let me pivot. So, you’ve got a team of approximately 20 people. And sometimes, The team freaks out about this, you know, they think that they’re gonna get replaced. How did you manage the fear that was coming from the team?
Nick Anderson: So the… it’s… it’s a slow roll, in my case. If there were two approaches, you know, I could have come in and said, this is what we’re doing, flat out, this is it. That would have been shocking, frightening, etc. So rather, I have been slowly introducing the tools. So I mentioned our operations assistant. I think the most fun, the coolest tool I’ve developed is our One Accord Sales Coach.
Greg Alexander: Tell me about that.
Nick Anderson: Okay, so just like we have a standard operating procedure document, we have a sales playbook document. Again, 150 pages, right? Every way that we go to market, our ICPs, our various, you know, everything about our sales motions are in there. I distributed this around, I had one of my managing principals say to me, Nick, do you really think I’m gonna read this? It’s 125 pages. I said, Kim, in 1995, this 125 pages would have been broken into 5 days worth of training. We would have gone to a red line for 6 hours a day, it would have been 5 chapters, we would have broke… right? This is how we would have done it.
Greg Alexander: Nope.
Nick Anderson: In 2025, We have an agent that will just walk you through all of the sales playbook. And so, this morning, to prepare, maybe, you know, maybe when we do a live Q&A, I kind of called up, I queued up some things. So I just said to the agent, I’m going to be meeting with a commercial contractor, give me industry background, industry data that we have in our our SharePoint, we own this, to give me call prep questions, and point me to any relevant case studies that One Accord has served a client like this over the last years. The agent then knows what we call the framework of the buyer’s journey, which came out of the Sundance, right? So, buyers takes people… through the buyer’s state in the sales process. I’m talking inside baseball a little bit. But this sales coach then preps me before my call. Then. I’ve encouraged, encouraged, not mandated, but encouraged all our salespeople to transcribe their sales calls, and then feed those back into the sales coach. So, now I’ve had this call, tell me where the client is. And so it’s a slow roll. I’m demonstrating, hey, here’s a tool that’s gonna make you more prepared for your sales calls, and if you’d like. You can record your transcript and get feedback. So then I see in my team of 20, there are a couple early adopters. This is great. So now I’m gonna highlight and celebrate those people. Lawrence was willing to give me a call transcript, and we went through this thing live in a sales meeting, right? This is how the call went. And because Lawrence went first, you know, he’s like the guy in the concert that starts dancing out in the field. Then another guy wants to come along, and then people join. So that’s been my approach. I want to show them something cool, add value, get an early adopter, let those early adopters drive the change internally. Because, honestly, the tool is not fully built yet. It’s not as though I want to just hand over the keys to everybody, because we’re still working some stuff out.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, I mean, I did it the same exact way, and you know, the early attempts at implementing… Nick’s referring to the Opportunity Standard, which is the methodology that we use at Collective 54 and our members are adopting. You know, the early implementations of it were rocky, right? And to be expected, because you’re pioneering new work. But the more you use it, the better it gets, the better you get, and the better results are, and that’s how change management is done. Alright, we do have a private member Q&A teed up for Friday, and members are going to be able to ask Nick questions directly. Nick’s actually going to show members some of the things that he’s built just to put meat on the bone, instead of just talking about it. You know, we want to not be contributing to the AI charlatan community.
Nick Anderson: Yeah.
Greg Alexander: We want this to be real, but leading into that session on Friday, Nick, if there was one thing that you would say to a skeptic or a cynic. right now, to maybe push them towards the… where you are right now, which is a believer, or at least just to have an open mind to think about how to redesign their firm around this enabling technology. What would it be?
Nick Anderson: It would be… You’re right, get over it.
Greg Alexander: So…
Nick Anderson: So if… if you… if you could have seen, you know, window into my soul when I was saying, oh, Greg, we can’t do this, you would have said to me, well, you’re right, Nick, it’s gonna cost you $200. That’s what it takes to get 5 credits. It’s gonna cost you time. And you’re gonna pay some dumb tax. But if you don’t. there’s… there’s no going back. Like, this is the time to… okay, I have a mantra in life, goes way back. Make time to prepare for a time. When there is no time.
Greg Alexander: Interesting.
Nick Anderson: Soon, there will be no time to prepare.
Greg Alexander: Yeah.
Nick Anderson: Now is when we need to make the time to prepare for that time when there is no time. If only 5 or 10% of the business community is adopting AI, really adopting. I don’t mean just using ChatGPT to write social media posts, I mean automating things on the back end. Only 5 or 10%, 10% at best. There will be a moment when that tipping point, and it’s coming fast, I think. That tipping point is coming fast. And for anyone in our space, in ProServe, As soon as it tips, Too late. So, you’re right. It’s gonna be grueling and painful, and you’re gonna have to learn things that you never wanted to learn, and it’s gonna cost you time and resource and hours. You’re right. Get over it.
Greg Alexander: Alright, let’s end there. That is great advice. So, Nick, listen, on behalf of the membership, this was a big contribution, and I just want to, on behalf of everybody, tell you that I’m proud of you for going first, for being a pioneer, for behaving like an entrepreneur and experimenting, and I’m sure it’s going to pay off for you. So, thanks for coming on the show today and sharing your knowledge with us.
Nick Anderson: Thanks, Greg.
Greg Alexander: Alright. A couple calls to action for listeners. So, if you’re a member of Collective 54, and you want to see the actual stuff that Nick has built and ask him questions about it, attend Friday’s session, and we’ll have a private member Q&A. If you’re not a member, and you’re listening to this, and after hearing from Nick, you might be curious about becoming a member. Go to Collective54.com and fill out an application, and we’ll get in contact with you. But until next time, I want to thank everybody for working me into your busy day, giving me a piece of your attention, and I wish you all the best of luck as you try to grow, scale, and someday exit your firm.