Before their CFO retired, Ryan McNulty, President at MBH Architects, made sure to get him in a room for a brain dump.
Over the course of a few conversations, Ryan and his team walked him through how he reviews contracts, specifically NDAs. Which clauses were always unacceptable. Which ones the firm would negotiate, and under what circumstances. What language a client should be expected to provide. What unusual clauses tend to appear, and how the firm has learned to respond. Decades of contract judgment, compressed over time into instinct, were suddenly made visible.
They distilled those conversations into a set of NDA best practices. Those best practices now power a contract review agent. Any manager at MBH can upload a new client NDA, and the agent goes clause by clause, marking each one high, medium, or low risk, explaining the rating, and suggesting a response. Expertise that once lived in one person’s head is now available to everyone in the firm, consistently, at any hour.
The technology mattered, of course. But it was not the only thing that made this possible.
What made the agent valuable was the judgment behind it. Someone had to understand that NDA review was important enough to improve. Someone had to know which expertise mattered. Someone had to help extract that expertise from the head of an experienced leader and turn it into guidance an agent could actually use. Someone had to see that this was more than an interesting AI experiment. It was a chance to take a recurring business process and make the firm’s best thinking more available, consistent, and scalable.
As we have been working with AEC firms in the Synthesis Knowledge Agent private beta, I have found myself coming back to a simple observation: the firms getting the most traction are having their firm leaders build agents themselves.
That distinction matters because high-impact knowledge agents are not created from AI enthusiasm alone. They are created when people who run AEC firms begin to personally and viscerally understand how agents can improve work that matters.
From Executive Sponsor to Leader-Builder
Executive sponsorship matters. It gives agent-building visibility, permission, resources, and organizational gravity. It helps signal that this work is connected to the future of the firm.
And executive sponsorship for knowledge agents becomes even stronger when it is grounded in firsthand experience.
A firm leader can sit through a demo and understand that knowledge agents are powerful. They can attend a meeting and understand the features and benefits of knowledge agents. They can hear a report from a knowledge manager, innovation leader, or technology team and understand that progress is being made.
The deeper shift happens when a firm leader begins building agents themselves.
That experience changes the quality of the questions leaders ask. They begin to see how much depends on the clarity of the workflow, the quality of the knowledge, the precision of the instructions, the strength of the examples, the usefulness of the feedback, and the judgment of the people shaping the agent over time.
Leaders see why the first version of an agent is rarely the final version. They see where the agent is powerful, where it is fragile, and where the underlying knowledge is not yet clear enough. They understand how important it is to make “what good looks like” explicit enough that an agent can reliably hit that quality bar. They see that building the agent often reveals something about the business process itself.
The act of building agents is often quite illuminating for a leader. It shows the firm where its knowledge is clearly documented and where it is tacit. It shows where standards are well documented and where they live mostly in people’s heads. It shows where workflows are repeatable and where they depend on exceptions, judgment calls, and local habits.
By building agents, a firm leader can personally experience what it feels like to have a tedious workflow streamlined enough that it saves them time and cognitive energy, and what it feels like to empower others in their firm to take on tasks which they were previously bottlenecking. In other words, they understand the personal leverage agents can create for themselves and the ability to make firm processes more scalable and efficient.
That’s the great awakening. The enlightenment.
It has to happen directly. It can’t be experienced vicariously.
The Catalytic Effect of Leaders Who Build
When firm leaders build agents, something changes in how they see the business.
They begin to notice high-impact opportunities that were previously hidden inside familiar work. A proposal process becomes a chance to improve win strategy, strengthen project descriptions, create more consistent messaging, help younger marketers learn from stronger examples, and reduce the review burden on principals. A project kickoff becomes a chance to help teams start with more context, fewer blind spots, better access to precedents, and a clearer understanding of the client, project type, risks, and lessons learned. A learning workflow becomes a chance to help subject matter experts turn their expertise into repeatable learning experiences that support career development, onboarding, project delivery, and succession planning.
This is the catalytic effect of firsthand experience.
Once a leader has personally built and refined an agent, they are no longer waiting for someone else to explain the opportunity. They begin to see it everywhere. They can look at a recurring workflow, a slow review process, a knowledge gap, a training need, or a recurring judgment call, and imagine how an agent might help the firm accelerate learning, scale expertise, or streamline the work.
That imagination matters.
The most high-impact agent opportunities often require someone who can connect the technology to the deeper levers of the firm’s operations. A person close to one task may see how to make that task easier. A firm leader can often see how improving that task might change the way a whole team, department, practice, or office works.
And when that leader has built something themselves, they bring a different kind of credibility to the conversation.
They are not simply encouraging people to experiment. They are speaking from lived experience. They know what it feels like to move from doing a task manually to building an agent that can support that task repeatedly.
That makes them force multipliers inside the firm.
They can sit with another firm leader and help them see a workflow differently. They can help a subject matter expert recognize that the knowledge in their head should become a reusable capability. They can help a team move from a narrow productivity idea to a more meaningful business outcome. They can help people expand their imagination for what agents can do because they have already gone through that shift themselves.
This is where leadership becomes especially important.
The goal is not only to build a few useful agents. The deeper opportunity is to help the firm develop a new way of seeing its own work. Where is expertise trapped? Where do people repeat the same explanation, review, or decision-support process over and over again? Where could better knowledge support improve quality, reduce friction, accelerate learning, or help people operate with more confidence?
Leaders who build agents are better equipped to ask those questions.
They bring altitude, because they understand where the firm is trying to go. They bring proximity, because they have worked directly with the medium. And they bring credibility, because they have experienced the process of turning knowledge work into reusable capability.
That combination is powerful.
In a sense, they become player-coaches: still close enough to the work to understand what needs to improve, but experienced enough with agent-building to help others imagine what could change.
Which Leaders Should Build First?
The best place to start is usually with the firm leaders who already care about making the organization smarter, more consistent, and more scalable.
For many Synthesis clients, that may be the executive sponsor who already has a vested interest in knowledge management, learning, operations, or firmwide improvement. That person has often already seen the importance of getting the firm’s best thinking into the flow of work. Knowledge agents give them a new way to act on that conviction.
In other firms, the right leader may be the person who is constantly pushing for better ways of working. They notice broken processes, recurring bottlenecks, and places where too much knowledge lives in too few heads. They are often drawn to the non-urgent but important work of improving the business itself. They care about today’s deadlines, but they are also willing to step back and ask how the firm could work differently, better, a year from now.
These leaders tend to have a builder’s mindset.
They want to understand the source of friction in the business, remove or mitigate it, and create something more durable in its place. They see the value in turning a repeated explanation into a reusable resource, a recurring review into a repeatable process, or one person’s judgment into a capability that can help an entire team.
These leaders often make the best early agent builders.
They have enough authority to connect the work to meaningful business outcomes, enough proximity to understand where the friction lives, and enough curiosity to imagine a better way forward. They are already working on the business, not just in the business. Agent-building gives them a new medium for doing that work.
So if you are trying to decide where to begin, look for the leaders who are already trying to make the firm smarter by design. Give them firsthand experience with knowledge agents. Let them build around work they understand. Let them feel the leverage for themselves.
They are often the people best positioned to help the rest of the firm see what is possible.
Leaders Do Not Have to Build Alone
Getting leaders building does not mean asking them to carry the entire agent-building process by themselves.
In fact, one of the most useful things a leader-builder can do is help assemble the right supporting cast around a promising high-impact agent.
A subject matter expert may need to clarify what good looks like. An AI specialist may need to sit beside that expert and help translate tacit judgment into instructions, examples, test cases, and feedback. A knowledge manager may need to identify, clean up, structure, or maintain the knowledge the agent depends on. A governance lead may need to help determine when the agent is ready for broader use. A change manager may need to help the agent move from available to adopted.
The leader who has built firsthand is better equipped to understand what kind of support agent building requires.
They can see when a prototype needs a subject matter expert. They can see when the real issue is the knowledge base. They can see when the agent needs better test cases, clearer ownership, or a more thoughtful rollout. They can see when a promising tool is ready to become part of a workflow, and when it needs more refinement before it should be widely used.
That judgment is hard to outsource completely.
It comes from being close enough to the building process to understand what makes an agent useful.
The Deeper Opportunity
The more I work with AEC firms on knowledge agents, the more I believe the technology itself is only part of the story.
The deeper opportunity behind high-impact knowledge agents is to identify repeatable knowledge work, clarify what good looks like, connect that work to trusted knowledge, and create reusable capabilities that help more people operate with the benefit of the firm’s best thinking.
This is knowledge management becoming more operational, learning becoming more embedded in the flow of work, and expertise becoming more scalable.
This is how leaders use AI to transform their businesses. This is why leaders should build agents.
They do not need to build every agent. They do not need to become the firm’s AI expert. But they do need enough firsthand experience building agents to recognize the opportunities that matter, ask better questions, support the people doing the work, and help other leaders understand why this is worth taking seriously.
A firm can begin with curiosity. It can begin with a knowledge manager, an innovation leader, a practice leader, or a motivated practitioner experimenting with a workflow they care about. These people are essential. Many of the strongest early ideas will come from people who are close to the work and eager to make it better.
But if knowledge agents are going to become part of how an AEC firm improves the work that matters most, at least a few of their leaders need to step into the agent building process early enough to develop their own judgment.
Leaders need to know what it feels like to turn a task into a reusable capability. They need to see how much the agent depends on the quality of the firm’s knowledge. They need to appreciate the human work required to test, refine, govern, and operationalize it.
Most importantly, they need to see the business differently.
Because once a firm leader builds a useful agent, the question changes. It is no longer only, “How can we use AI?”
It becomes, “How do we want our firm to work differently now that I see what’s possible?”
And it is why, if firms want to build high-impact knowledge agents that move the needle, they should get their leaders building.