13 October 2026
Your customer can get credible research, a decent analysis and a first recommendation without picking up the phone to you. That is not a prediction, it is this week.
My take this week is aimed at any business that sells expertise, which includes a lot of the technology channel. If AI has made information and expertise widely available, and part of your business model was built on providing exactly that, you need to be honest about what is left. The part you used to charge for is increasingly the part AI now does.
I get asked whether AI is really providing expertise or just information, and I think increasingly it is both.
It obviously has access to an enormous amount of information. But it can also apply recognised methods and produce a credible first recommendation. That is enough for a customer to form a view about what they want to do, on their own, today. Sidney made the point that he may or may not have used AI to deal with legal matters rather than going to a law firm, and I suspect most people reading this have done some version of the same thing.
There are still two or three domains where a firm selling expertise should be focused.
The first is judgment. That is grounded in understanding the subtleties of a particular customer's situation, and the nuances that sit around it. That does not come out of a training set.
The second is experience. Experience recognises the risks and the patterns that come from many years of repetition in a specific domain, and it recognises the edge cases your customer is about to walk into.
The third, and I think the most important, is execution. Getting to a thesis is straightforward now. You can build an expert opinion about what should happen fairly easily. Actually executing it is still hard, and that is where firms who have traditionally sold advice should be putting most of their effort.
If you were historically selling that expertise by the hour, some of that work has now been commoditised. It is not as valuable as it was, and it is worth asking whether it is still feasible to sell it that way at all, because the cost of delivering it has changed.
You could charge the customer less and still make a higher margin on it, because you are the one bringing it together, consolidating it, presenting it and doing the work around it.
The exercise I would go through is component by component. For each part of the work, where is AI making a difference to the labour cost, and how are you going to distribute that value? You can take some of it yourself, you can give some of it back to the customer, and there are sensible answers in between. But you have to actually do that piece of arithmetic, because your customer is doing it.
Wherever there is a material difference in the effort being expended to deliver a service, that needs thinking through carefully in terms of how much you pass on.
Practically, that points at fixed fees, subscriptions, or even outcome based pricing rather than labour based pricing. This has always been true, but it matters much more now: pricing should reflect the value delivered and the risk each party is carrying. Customers are generally comfortable paying for value, even when value is a bit intangible, and that has to be the centre of how you think about what you are charging for.
There is a lot of data on this. A recent piece from Thomson Reuters found that 78% of customers expect to see changes in the cost of the services their providers deliver, as a consequence of the savings those providers have made.
Only 6% are actually seeing it.
So the punchline is that customers expect a better service and a cheaper one, and they are not getting it yet. That gap is where the awkward conversations are going to happen.
Look at the large consulting firms and there is a lot of restructuring going on, some of it unfortunate. At the same time there are new opportunities appearing, and non traditional players are moving into spaces that used to be defended.
Sidney raised that Deloitte nationally announced they are removing the manager role from their consulting practice: very senior people, then junior people, with that middle administration and management layer going to AI.
There is a fair counterpoint to that, which I saw in the Fin Review the same week. If junior staff never get the opportunity to do the work, how do they ever develop the experience? I do not think any of this is settled. But we are already at the destination on one thing: customers expect more for less, and I do not think they are willing to pay for baseline research work any more. They believe they can do that themselves, or they arrive in the room with a reasonably well researched opinion. In the past they were more willing to sit and listen to advice on that early work.
I obviously do not believe that. If anything I think it creates more demand, particularly for execution projects.
The way I would describe it is that the work has bifurcated. At one end you have the opportunity to deliver judgment and experience. At the other end you have execution. The middle, building a baseline view of best practice and correlating it into a high level strategy, is the part getting commoditised.
System integrators and MSPs often sell the same products as their competitors, so there is a vendor piece at the back and you are selling through it.
Implementation work and operation do not change. If anything this helps you get to the meat of the work more quickly. What does change is the front end advice, which is watered down. When a customer is contemplating change, expect them to arrive with a well formed opinion, and expect that they are not going to want to pay you for that opinion.
Your opportunity at that point is to bring advice around it based on your experience, and to bring data into the room the customer does not have: other customers, other situations, the times when one approach turned out better than another. That is crystallised experience and it is genuinely valuable. Most customers want to hear it.
Then there is execution. Once you are past the initial thinking, there is a lot of detail in what actually has to happen, and that capability and quality is still something customers are happy to pay for.
Expect your customer to come to the conversation well informed, with a predefined view of what they want to do. Anticipate it rather than resisting it.
Your role is then two things. Bring your experience and judgment to that view, and bring data points the customer does not have to help them understand it. Then bring high quality execution, which is the core and most valuable part of what you deliver.
Watch the full conversation with Sidney on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ZwWK6StcVxU
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Michael → https://linkedin.com/in/michaelchanter/ · https://x.com/1keceo
Sidney → https://linkedin.com/in/sidneyminassian/
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