Ted Horton-Billard Of THB Consulting: How AI Is Disrupting Our Industry, and What We Can Do About It

Artificial Intelligence is no longer the future; it is the present. It’s reshaping landscapes, altering industries, and transforming the way we live and work. With its rapid advancement, AI is causing disruption — for better or worse — in every field imaginable. While it promises efficiency and growth, it also brings challenges and uncertainties that professionals and businesses must navigate. What can one do to pivot if AI is disrupting their industry? As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Ted Horton-Billard.

Ted Horton-Billard is a former U.S. Marine Corps Captain, trial attorney, and serial entrepreneur who has spent four decades building and advising companies across law, insurance, tax, and digital marketing. He is the author of Beyond the Business Plan: Building Companies that Move at the Speed of AI (Celestial Publishing, June 2026), which draws on his experience leading legal teams, founding consulting firms, advising executive leadership, and mentoring veteran entrepreneurs to show business leaders how to build for speed in the AI era.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into our discussion, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?

What makes THB Consulting stand out is that I’ve actually done the jobs I now advise others on. I’ve been the trial attorney taking cases to verdict, the executive running a major litigation division inside a national insurance company, and the person across the table from a first-time founder who’s never seen or heard of an operating agreement. Long before that, I was a military police officer training SWAT and Hostage Negotiation teams — work that leaves no room for a rehearsed playbook and teaches you to adapt fast and do whatever the situation requires to get to a good outcome. Most consultants bring one of those lenses. I bring all of them, so I catch the legal landmine, operational blind spot, and growth opportunity in the same conversation — and I don’t rattle when things get chaotic.

The story I’m proudest of is Blue Bowl. I met its founder, Teague, an Army veteran, through the Jonas Project — a nonprofit named for Lt. Commander Jonas Kelsall, a Navy SEAL killed in Afghanistan, that his parents started to help veterans become entrepreneurs. I began working with Teague as he opened his first location. That was ten years ago. Last month, he and his partners celebrated Blue Bowl’s 10th anniversary — 12 locations across four Southern California counties.

I didn’t build Blue Bowl. Teague and his partners did. But for a decade, I was there for the legal structuring and operational calls, the calls from an anxious business owner struggling to find someone who could help, and the legal calls too — and I still am. I remain a mentor to Teague and now serve as Blue Bowl’s Fractional General Counsel. That’s what I mean by standing out: not one big win, but staying in it long enough, with the right range of experience, to help someone go from one location to twelve and keep growing.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

Three traits have mattered more than any others in my career: adaptability, integrity, and mentorship. Each was forged in a specific moment — not something I read about, but something I lived.

1. Adaptability: When I got out of the Marine Corps, I had an economics degree and landed what felt like the perfect job: an interview with Union Bank’s International Affairs Department, hired on the spot to travel to third-world countries and determine whether the bank should extend further lines of credit to them. I was told to report Monday morning. That afternoon, the headhunter called back; I’d been laid off before I even started. The bank had received a telefax after my interview saying the Los Angeles office was relocating to New York, essential personnel only. I was flat broke, living in my parents’ garage, and another economist job would take months I didn’t have. My plan was to enroll in bartending school to earn money while I kept looking during the day. On a whim, I went to the VA to see if my GI Bill would cover the tuition. They said no, so I asked what it would pay for. I knew that if I started receiving GI Bill benefits, I’d get money monthly while attending school, and I needed it. The VA Rep told me they’d pay for law school. I suddenly remembered my constitutional law professor, who’d told me at graduation he thought I’d have made a fine lawyer and seemed disappointed I was heading into the Marines instead. That memory decided it. I adapted to the circumstances instead of mourning the plan I’d lost, and I applied to law school that week.
2. Integrity: As a young Marine Corps officer, I served as Assistant Provost Marshal and, separately, as Officer in Charge of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID), with a chain of command running directly to Headquarters Marine Corps rather than through the base. At 3:00 a.m. one night, my desk sergeant called: the one-star general’s son had been in an accident on base. No one was hurt, and alcohol wasn’t a factor, but the report was clear the general’s son was at fault. By 9:00 a.m., I was in the general’s office with the lance corporal who’d written the report, the Provost Marshal, and the general’s Chief of Staff. The general read the report, then ordered the lance corporal to rewrite it to clear his son. I told the lance corporal not to follow the order; it was illegal. The general dismissed the lance corporal, then asked me directly if I wanted to reconsider. I didn’t. He had me confined to quarters to await a court-martial. Because my CID role reported straight to Washington, I called Headquarters Marine Corps from my quarters. Within the hour, I was off house arrest; no court-martial was scheduled, no adverse comments appeared in my fitness report, and the accident report was never changed. The general never made his second star. What stayed with me wasn’t the general trying to help his son, as wrong as that was, but the silence from the other, more senior officers in the room, more concerned with their careers than doing the right thing. That experience is why I left the Marine Corps, and why, in every business since, I’ve refused to treat integrity as negotiable because someone senior asked.
3. Mentorship: While staffing the new litigation unit I ran at a national insurance company, I hired an experienced paralegal — a woman who, unbeknownst to me, had recently been widowed and was returning to work. She’d been a licensed attorney for more than two decades but let her license go inactive for several years while caring for her husband. After he passed, she needed to work again but didn’t want to reactivate her license; she was an older woman, in poor health, and didn’t want the added responsibility. She was afraid because she’d been out of the law too long. She turned out to be a marvelous paralegal, and over the years I became her mentor, encouraging her to reactivate her license to increase her earnings and, more importantly, regain the confidence she’d lost. She did, and I hired her onto my team as an attorney, continuing to mentor her until I left the company. Not long after, her health caught up with her and she had to file a disability claim. Because she was working as an attorney, her benefit was dramatically higher than it would have been as a paralegal. Years later, I ran into her again, and she couldn’t have been more grateful that I’d pushed her back into practicing law. That’s the return I care about most — not a deal I closed, but a decision I helped someone else make about their own life that changed everything for them.

Different decades, different uniforms, but the same throughline: adapt when circumstances change, hold the line when it costs you something, and put someone else’s success ahead of your own when you get the chance.

Let’s now move to the main point of our discussion about AI. Can you explain how AI is disrupting your industry? Is this disruption hurting or helping your bottom line?

AI is disrupting the legal industry in two ways at once, and I wrote about both in the book.

On the delivery side, work that used to require staffing up now runs on systems. I describe a law firm that used generative AI to review case law, summarize briefs, and extract arguments. It cut research time by 80% and tripled case capacity without tripling headcount. That’s not incremental; it’s the cost structure of legal and consulting work being rewritten. The old model — more hours, more staff, more billing, more expense for clients — no longer defines who wins.

On the trust side, the same technology creating that leverage is unreliable enough that courts are disciplining attorneys for using AI without proper accuracy safeguards. So the disruption isn’t just “do more with less”; it’s “do more with less, but only if you build in the judgment and verification AI still can’t provide on its own.”

For my bottom line, it’s helping, not hurting — but only because I’ve built in that discipline. I use AI to compress research and drafting time on legal and consulting engagements, letting me take on more work and produce faster results without adding staff. That’s the shift I describe in the book: value now comes from human judgment multiplied by machine intelligence, not headcount multiplied by hours. Practitioners get hurt when they treat AI as a replacement for judgment instead of a multiplier; that’s when you get sanctioned, or worse, get it wrong for the client. Forty years of trial and business experience, coupled with discipline, let me use the tool without becoming dependent on it.

Which specific AI technology has had the most significant impact on your industry?

If I have to name one, it’s generative AI; specifically, the Copilot layer built on large language models. It shows up differently in every industry I work in, but it’s the one technology doing real work across nearly all of them.

In law firms, it’s legal research automation. In my book, I wrote about a firm that used generative AI to review case law and summarize briefs, cutting research time by 80% and tripling case capacity.

In insurance, I covered a regional brokerage that used AI copilots to automate 40% of policy servicing and predictive analytics to flag high-value renewal risk, producing a 28% revenue increase over four 12-week cycles.

In hospitality, the more visible technology is physical: service robots. I profile Hotel EMC2 in Chicago, which deployed relay robots for room deliveries and logged over 100,000 deliveries, with measurable gains in guest satisfaction and staff efficiency. Even there, the scheduling and guest communication behind the scenes increasingly runs through the same Copilot layer.

Security, food service, biotesting and regulated labs, healthcare — different regulatory environments and risk profiles, but the same underlying shift: generative AI has become what I call in the book a “productivity layer,” embedded in drafting, triage, research, and analysis regardless of industry. That’s what makes it the most significant technology — not that it’s the flashiest, but that it’s the common denominator across every client I work with.

Can you share a pivotal moment when you recognized the profound impact AI would have on your sector?

There wasn’t a single lightbulb moment; it’s been a gradual realization over decades. I started practicing law with typewriters and carbon paper, then moved through word processors, laptops, and firm-wide networked systems spanning multiple jurisdictions. Each shift felt significant at the time, so pinpointing one as “the” pivotal moment misses the real story: the legal profession has been in constant technological transition for over 40 years, and AI is simply the latest chapter in that evolution, not a break from it. And, with quantum computing on the horizon, the evolution will continue at a much faster pace.

How are you preparing your workforce for the integration of AI, and what skills do you believe will be most valuable in an AI-enhanced future?

First, I should make clear that I do not run a workforce myself, so this isn’t a policy I’ve had to build for my own consultancy. But it’s the advice I give clients: don’t freeze people into static job descriptions; map skills instead — what your people do today, what they’ll need next, and where the gaps are — then close those gaps through training embedded in daily work rather than a separate course nobody remembers the following week. The goal is a human-machine hybrid workforce, where AI is treated as a colleague rather than a replacement.

As for which skills I tell clients to prioritize, adaptability and judgment matter more than mastery of any particular tool, since the tools themselves keep changing.

What are the biggest challenges in upskilling your workforce for an AI-centric future?

As I mentioned earlier, I don’t have a workforce of my own, but this is what I push hardest on with clients: the biggest challenge isn’t finding the right training content; it’s securing genuine buy-in before rollout. My book gets into this at length; people don’t actually resist the technology itself — they resist how the change is introduced. Abrupt rollouts, vague explanations, no training, no voice in the design, no acknowledgment of the personal impact. What looks like resistance to AI is usually a perceived loss of control, a threat to professional identity, or fear of being replaced, and none of those reactions are irrational.

The real cost shows up when leaders skip buy-in and push ahead anyway. The case studies are replete with examples of this failing. They suggest that, more often than not, employees rarely refuse outright; they comply on the surface while quietly working around the new systems or disengaging, creating shadow processes nobody tracks. Problems get hidden instead of surfaced early, mistakes compound invisibly, and trust between leadership and staff erodes. By the time it shows up in the numbers, you’re not dealing with a training gap anymore; you’re dealing with a culture that has learned not to trust what leadership tells them about change.

So the advice I give clients is to treat buy-in as the actual project, not a communications afterthought: explain the why, give people a role in designing the rollout, and make it safe to ask questions or make mistakes early. Skip that step, and no amount of upskilling budget will get you the adoption you’re paying for.

What ethical considerations does AI introduce into your industry, and how are you tackling these concerns?

I’ve written several LinkedIn posts on this because the legal profession’s use of AI raises ethical questions that go well beyond convenience. My perspective isn’t just academic; I served three years as a member of the California State Bar’s Committee on Professional Responsibility and Conduct (COPRAC), helping write and interpret the ethical rules and regulations governing California attorneys. AI doesn’t create new duties for lawyers; it stress-tests the ones we’ve always had.

The California Rules of Professional Conduct implicated by AI use include:

Competence (Rule 1.1): Lawyers now have an affirmative duty of technological competence, meaning they must understand what an AI tool can and cannot reliably do before relying on it in a client matter.

Confidentiality (Rule 1.6): Inputting client information into a generative AI tool risks disclosure if that data is retained, used to train the model, or accessible to the vendor, so lawyers have to vet how a tool handles data before using it on confidential matters.

Candor to the tribunal (Rule 3.3, along with Rules 5.1 and 8.4): AI tools can fabricate citations and case law. A lawyer who files a brief with hallucinated authority is on the hook for it, and their client may be too, so every AI-assisted output has to be independently verified before it goes near a court.

Duty to supervise (Rules 5.1 and 5.3): Supervising attorneys are responsible for how associates and staff use AI tools, just as they’re responsible for supervising a paralegal or contract attorney.

Communication (Rule 1.4): Clients should be told when AI is being used on their matter, particularly if it’s material to cost, strategy, or risk.

Fees (Rule 1.5): Billing has to reflect actual time and value delivered. If AI makes a task faster, a lawyer can’t bill as though it still took the old amount of time; that risks becoming an unconscionable fee, if not outright fraud.

Conflicts of interest (Rule 1.7): Some AI systems can draw on data across matters or clients, raising questions about walling off confidential information between representations.

Unauthorized practice of law (Rule 5.5): Nonlawyer staff or clients using AI tools to generate legal analysis or documents can blur the line between permissible assistance and practicing law without a license.

Fairness and bias: Because I sat on the committee interpreting these rules, I’d add that bias in AI-generated outputs, particularly in areas like e-discovery review or predictive analytics, raises fairness obligations that don’t map neatly onto a single existing rule but touch competence, diligence, and the broader duty to the administration of justice.

That’s roughly how the State Bar itself has organized the issues in its recent guidance on generative AI, built around six core duties: confidentiality, competence, supervision, billing, candor, and fairness.

Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “Five Things You Need To Do, If AI Is Disrupting Your Industry”? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.

1. I’d redefine “competence” to include technological literacy. I would not treat it as optional.

In the legal profession, competence has always meant knowing the law and facts of your case. It now also means understanding the limits of the tools you use to get there. The cautionary story every lawyer knows is the 2023 case where attorneys submitted a brief with citations to cases ChatGPT had invented, complete with fake quotes and docket numbers. The court sanctioned them, and the episode became the reference point for a wave of state bar guidance, including California’s, formally treating technological competence as part of a lawyer’s ethical duty. The lesson generalizes beyond law: if you’re deploying a tool you don’t understand well enough to catch its failure modes, you’re not competent in it yet, no matter how good the output looks.

2. Next, I would redesign roles around human-machine collaboration instead of just automating tasks.

The mistake I see most often is treating AI as a subtraction exercise: which tasks can it remove from someone’s plate? The better question is what someone can become once the routine part of their job is handled by a machine. There’s a technician I write about in my book who feared automation would eliminate his job on an electronics plant floor. Instead, he was upskilled into robotic maintenance and troubleshooting, and within six months was supervising twelve robotic cells. His own words to a visiting consultant: “I didn’t lose a job. I gained a career.” That’s the reframe leaders need to make deliberately, because it doesn’t happen on its own.

3. Importantly, I would secure buy-in before rolling out the change, not after.

People rarely resist the technology itself. They resist how it’s introduced: abruptly, without explanation, and without a role in shaping it. I’ve watched organizations get this right by promising no layoffs tied to an automation rollout, building training and career pathing into the transition, and involving frontline employees in choosing and piloting tools before they went live. The adoption numbers weren’t close to those where leadership simply announced a new system and expected everyone to fall in line. Buy-in isn’t a communications task you check off; it’s the actual mission.

4. Also important is building governance and ethical guardrails in from day one, not as a bolt-on.

This one is close to home for me. During my three years as a member of the California State Bar’s Committee on Professional Responsibility and Conduct, I saw how much easier it is to interpret and enforce ethical obligations when they’re designed into a system upfront rather than retrofitted after a problem surfaces. In law, that means auditing AI tools for bias before they’re used in e-discovery or predictive analytics, not after a client raises a fairness objection. In any industry, the principle holds: governance built in from the start is a design choice; governance bolted on after an incident is a crisis response that’s too little, too late.

5. Finally, I’d build the business to adapt continuously, not to follow a fixed plan.

I’ve practiced law for over 40 years and watched extraordinary technological changes over that time. Every change felt significant, and each required rebuilding how the work actually got done, not just adding a new tool on top of the old process. AI is the same pattern at a faster clock speed, and quantum computing will push that pace further still. The firms and professionals who treat their operating model as something to redesign continuously, rather than protect until the next planning cycle, are the ones who keep up.

What are the most common misconceptions about AI within your industry, and how do you address them?

There are four big ones that come to mind:

“AI will replace lawyers.” This is the one I hear most from clients and other attorneys. My answer, both in the book and in client conversations, is that the roles are being redefined, not eliminated. I point to organizations that have made this explicit rather than let fear fill the silence: Walmart’s approach to its AI rollout, for instance, was built around redefining human roles rather than replacing them. In legal work specifically, AI can draft, summarize, and search faster than any associate, but it can’t exercise judgment, take responsibility for a filing, or navigate a client relationship. The tasks disappear; the outcomes people are paid to deliver remain, and often the human role becomes more valuable once the repetitive part is gone.

“AI is a magic box — you turn it on, and it just works.” This shows up most with clients evaluating vendors. Nearly every product now brands itself as “AI-powered,” but very little operates beyond surface-level features layered on an existing system. I walk clients through what I call the hype problem in my book: most tools sit at the marketing-claims or surface-features level, not where AI actually reasons across context or executes decisions. My line to clients is the same one I use in the book: AI isn’t magic; it’s math applied to well-governed data. If the underlying data is messy or the process is undisciplined, AI just automates the mess faster. Garbage in, garbage out.

“If AI generated it, you can trust it and use it as-is.” This is the misconception I care about most as a lawyer because it has real disciplinary consequences. Generative AI tools fabricate citations, misstate holdings, and present false information with total confidence. I tell every client and attorney I advise the same thing: AI output is a draft from a very fast, very confident junior associate who has never been wrong in their life and has also never been right without checking. Independent verification isn’t optional; it’s the duty of candor and competence made concrete.

“Once you adopt AI, the work is done.” Clients often treat an AI rollout as a purchase rather than a practice. I push back on that framing constantly. Models drift, data changes, and a tool that was accurate at launch can degrade or introduce new bias months later without anyone noticing unless someone is auditing it. The organizations that get real value treat governance and retraining as ongoing, not a box checked at implementation.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life?

My favorite life lesson quote is Benjamin Franklin’s: “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” I’ve been fortunate in ways I didn’t earn: good health, good mentors, and being in the right place at points in my career I couldn’t have planned. But when I look back at the moments that mattered, luck had very little to do with them.

I started as a Marine Corps officer, then a deputy district attorney trying criminal cases to verdict, then spent decades doing trial work across medical malpractice, insurance defense, and complex litigation before building my consulting practice from the ground up. Along the way, I was asked to serve on the Judicial Nominees Evaluation Commission, advising the Governor on whether his nominees to the bench were qualified, and separately on the State Bar’s Committee on Professional Responsibility and Conduct, helping write and interpret ethics rules for California attorneys. Neither appointment happened by luck. They came after years of building a reputation, case by case and committee by committee, that made people trust me enough to put those decisions in my hands. Writing my book decades later followed the same pattern: it was the product of paying close attention to my profession for over 40 years and doing the unglamorous work of putting it on paper.

So, when I tell younger lawyers or clients that quote, I mean it literally: don’t wait to feel lucky. Put in the work consistently enough, for long enough, and the lucky breaks start finding you because you’ve built the platform for them to land on.

Off-topic, but I’m curious. As someone steering the ship, what thoughts or concerns often keep you awake at night? How do those thoughts influence your daily decision-making process?

One of the luxuries of being a consultant is that the problems I’m dealing with aren’t my own. I sleep well knowing I’ve done right by my clients, but ultimately they own their mistakes. I try to mitigate the fallout, but more often than not it shows up somewhere, in some form. If the client’s lucky, the only consequence is paying me to fix it.

That distance gives me objectivity. Because I’m not protecting my own position in the outcome, I can give clients the answer that’s actually true rather than the one that’s emotionally easier to hear.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

Oh yeah, every interview eventually gets down to the pageant question. If I had to pick one, it would be revamping how we educate kids in the first place.

Right now, we’re still largely running an education system built for a world where you learned a set of facts and skills once and then applied them for a career. That model doesn’t survive contact with an environment where the half-life of any given skill is down to three or four years. Bolting AI literacy onto that old model as an elective misses the point. Kids need to come out of school already conditioned to continuous learning as a default mode, not something they’re forced to relearn in their thirties when their industry gets disrupted.

So, the movement I’d want to start is a genuine redesign of K-12 and higher education around adaptability itself: teaching how to learn, unlearn, and relearn as a core discipline, the same way we teach reading or math, so that by the time someone enters the workforce, chaotic change isn’t a threat; it’s the normal condition they’ve been trained to operate in. Everything else — workforce upskilling, capability security, all of it — is downstream of getting that foundation right.

How can our readers further follow you online?

LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/ted-horton-billard-71837711/

Website: — https://beyondtheplanb.com/

Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!

Thank you for having me; this was a genuine pleasure. These are the conversations I most enjoy because they force me to articulate things I usually just feel my way through after 40 years in this profession. I hope some of it is useful to whoever reads it, and I’d welcome the chance to continue the conversation anytime. Thank you again for the thoughtful questions and the platform to share this.