Corporate leaders often look to AI for breakthrough innovations, but a faster and more reliable payoff lies in using it to radically improve services productivity by eliminating low-value work. “Deep industry research agents” (DIRAs)—specialized, end-to-end AI analysts tuned to specific industries and case types—can investigate operational exceptions, learn recurring patterns, and automatically resolve routine discrepancies while surfacing only true anomalies that need human attention. In a large financial-services firm, DIRAs revealed that most exceptions were predictable, harmless differences and freed an estimated 65%–70% of operations time by auto-resolving them, while generating rich data on root causes and process performance. Deployed as transparent, auditable systems embedded in real workflows and designed to continuously learn, such agents can compress decades of typical productivity gains into a single wave of improvement, reshaping how services organizations allocate human expertise and manage work.