How do other companies do it?
An opinion piece on why access to expertise may be one overlooked advantage of scale — and why AI could change the economics for smaller companies.
Ask AI how this applies to you
This was probably the question I heard most often during my years as a consultant.
Sometimes my answer was surprising: You are already the benchmark. Other companies could learn from you.
But most of the time, answering the question meant doing what consultants have always done: transferring knowledge from one organization to another.
In economic terms, you might call this knowledge spillover.
And I think we underestimate how important it is.
There is a striking productivity gap between small and large companies. OECD research consistently shows that larger firms tend to be more productive than smaller ones, although the size of that gap varies across sectors and countries.
There are many reasons for this. Economies of scale matter. Technology matters. Access to capital matters.
But I think another part of the explanation deserves much more attention:
access to expertise.
Research on management practices has repeatedly connected better management with higher productivity. And larger companies have a structural advantage here.
They can afford specialists.
A large organization can employ experts in analytics, CRM, operations, pricing, procurement, finance, technology, legal affairs and dozens of other disciplines.
An SMB cannot maintain that same depth of expertise across every function.
That doesn't mean SMB managers are less capable.
It means they are often expected to make decisions across far more domains without having the same specialist infrastructure around them.
They may have the data.
They may understand the problem.
But they may not have access to the person who has solved variations of that problem dozens of times before.
This isn't just an SMB problem. It's a European competitiveness problem.
Two of Europe's most important recent competitiveness reports point toward the same structural challenge.
Mario Draghi's The Future of European Competitiveness starts with Europe's weak productivity growth and argues that Europe needs to close its innovation and skills gaps if it wants to remain competitive.
Enrico Letta's Much More Than a Market approaches the problem from the Single Market.
And here the connection to smaller companies becomes particularly interesting.
Letta explicitly points out that large companies have the resources to deal with complexity by employing consultants, legal teams and specialists.
SMEs often don't.
The report describes smaller businesses as lacking the financial and human capital available to their larger counterparts.
That is remarkably close to what I experienced as a consultant.
When a customer asked me,
“How do other companies do it?”
they weren't really asking for information.
Information was rarely the scarce resource.
They were asking for expertise: someone who had seen the problem before, knew which information mattered, understood the trade-offs and could translate all of that into a better decision.
Historically, companies had only a few ways to acquire that expertise.
They could hire it permanently.
They could buy it temporarily from consultants and agencies.
Or they could operate without it.
For a large company, the first two options are expensive but entirely normal.
For a small company, they can be economically impossible.
And this is why I think AI could have an impact on productivity that goes far beyond automating tasks.
AI changes the economics of access to expertise.
For the first time, a 20-person company may be able to give its employees access to capabilities that previously required teams of specialists, consultants or functional experts.
AI won't eliminate the advantages of scale. Capital, infrastructure, market power and organizational capabilities will continue to matter.
But it could weaken one of them:
the idea that deep expertise is something only large organizations can afford.
If that happens, one of the most important effects of AI may not be that large companies become even more efficient.
It may be that small companies finally get access to some of the expertise that made large companies so productive in the first place.
Sources and further reading
OECD — OECD Compendium of Productivity Indicators 2025
See Chapter 7, “Productivity in SMEs and large firms.”
The chapter examines productivity differences by company size and the factors associated with them. For this article, the most relevant sections are the findings on business services, where size-productivity differences are less pronounced, and the discussion of human capital, technology adoption, access to finance and knowledge spillovers.
Mario Draghi — The Future of European Competitiveness
See Part A, particularly the sections on Europe's productivity challenge, innovation and skills.
The report describes weak productivity growth as a central European competitiveness problem and discusses innovation, technology diffusion and skills shortages as important constraints.
https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/97e481fd-2dc3-412d-be4c-f152a8232961_en
Enrico Letta — Much More Than a Market
See “Unleash the potential of European SMEs”, particularly pp. 107–108.
This section discusses the disproportionate burden of Single Market complexity on SMEs and contrasts their limited financial and human resources with the consultants, legal teams and specialists available to larger companies.
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/ny3j24sm/much-more-than-a-market-report-by-enrico-letta.pdf
About the author
Pietro Tallarico is Co-Founder of mape and brings many years of experience in consulting, CRM, and Marketing Automation Platforms. He has worked closely with large companies on complex operational and technology challenges and knows first-hand how valuable the right expertise can be at the right moment.
At mape, he is focused on making deep CRM and Marketing Operations expertise more accessible to companies that cannot - or should not have to - build every specialist capability in-house. He believes AI represents one of the biggest opportunities to create additional value where it was previously difficult to capture: by making high-quality expertise economically accessible to smaller companies.
LinkedIn: Pietro Tallarico
