What Is Our Work Worth in Times of AI?

AI now does in ten minutes what used to take ten hours, and nobody, not the firms, not the clients, not the regulators, knows what to charge for it. Professional services, the oldest and most human industry we have, is the early warning system for every knowledge worker, and its economic model is breaking.

In this episode of AI in Sixty Seconds, Luis Salazar and Elizabeth trace how AI is rewriting the price of work: why two decades of offshoring are suddenly running in reverse, why AI-native firms that charge for outcomes are undercutting the giants, and the quiet cost no one is putting on the invoice. The apprenticeship ladder that built every senior expert is dissolving from the bottom up.

Anthropic, past forty-five billion dollars a year with fewer than five thousand people. Accenture, market value cut in half. One hundred and fifty former McKinsey, Bain, and BCG consultants now hired to train AI to do the work they used to bill for. The signals are already here. What is our work worth now, and who will be delivering that judgment a decade from now?

• Companion article and sources: https://ai4sp.org/what-is-our-work-worth-ai/
• AI readiness diagnostic: https://ai-compass.ai/

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Transcript

Why Time Pricing Is Failing

LUIS 0:02

AI does in 10 minutes what used to take me 10 hours. And nobody, not the firms, not the clients, not the regulators, has figured out what to charge for it. For a hundred years, the answer to one question, what is your work worth, was a single word. Time, the billable hour, the day rate, the retainer. That unit is breaking. It breaks in our oldest business, lawyers, accountants, consultants, designers, and in the youngest one we ever built, technology. These two sectors account for over 20% of the US economy. And the machine just took the one thing they all sell. Time. So what is our work actually worth now?

ELIZABETH 1:04

Welcome to AI in 60 Seconds, the 15-minute briefing. I'm Elizabeth, virtual COO at AI for SP, here with our founder, Luis Salazar. Luis, this one is different. It is about economic disruption,

Software Economics Hit A New Gear

ELIZABETH 1:19

maybe even philosophical disruption. So where do we start?

LUIS 1:24

Let's start with the obvious before we get to the surprising one.

ELIZABETH 1:28

You mean software?

LUIS 1:30

I mean software. Because if AI is rewriting the economics of work, software is where everyone expected it to happen first, right at home.

ELIZABETH 1:44

You're talking about the math, building way more with way fewer people, right?

LUIS 1:50

Look at Anthropic. Past $45 billion a year in recurring revenue with fewer than 5,000 people. That is three to five times more productive than the giants that defined the last two decades. Microsoft, Meta, Google, Apple, Salesforce.

ELIZABETH 2:09

But it's not just how they build it, it's how they sell it.

LUIS 2:13

Exactly. In the software industry, we have been using two models: pay per user, you buy the seat, and with the arrival of cloud computing and the mobile web, we implemented pay per use. You pay every time you turn the key.

ELIZABETH 2:29

And what is the disruption? Because we are paying per token, which is basically pay per use.

LUIS 2:37

The disruption is the new breed. AI, native companies walking into consulting, healthcare, accounting, and all sorts of professional services. They do not sell licenses, they sell outcomes.

From Seats To Outcomes Pricing

ELIZABETH 2:53

So a law firm no longer buys contract review software.

LUIS 2:58

No, they get to use the software for free, as many users as needed, and they pay for the reviewed contract, the outcome.

ELIZABETH 3:07

And now that change in how software gets priced is disrupting the whole professional services industry.

LUIS 3:14

Exactly. It is not just about killing the billable hour. They face massive retraining. They have to rewrite how everyone is paid and how the firm is organized, all while under fire from native AI competitors.

ELIZABETH 3:30

Because new AI firms going after the professional services market automate the entry-level work and charge for the outcome. Faster, cheaper, and the client sees the result, not the hours. The established firms get undercut.

LUIS 3:46

It's a brutal spot. But that is what happens in an industrial revolution. The very unit of value gets redefined.

ELIZABETH 3:57

Now, you promised me a surprise underneath all this, an unexpected turn.

LUIS 4:03

Well, across large and mid-sized firms, we see jobs returning back home. For 20 years, the smart move was to push work out, offshore it. AI just flipped that whole logic in reverse. In reverse?

AI Brings Work Back In House

LUIS 4:19

As the AI agents absorb the repetitive high-volume work, keeping it in-house becomes cheaper than sending it away. And the price stops being ours and starts being results. Give me a couple of examples. Make it real. Look at customer support. The outsource call center bills you per person, per hour. Win or lose. Now firms are deploying agentic support agents that charge per resolved conversation. You pay only when the problem is actually fixed.

ELIZABETH 4:55

Okay, so there are a few supervisory roles created in-house, while the core work that used to be outsourced is handled by agentic software. Give me another example.

LUIS 5:08

An AI agent now takes a tax return from raw documents to filing ready, start to finish, and charges per return. Not the dozen plus hours a junior used to bill for the very same work. Of course, a senior professional still signs off on the completed returns, but the agenation of the returns is extremely efficient. One of the 25,000 AI companies we track, BASES, just reached a billion dollar valuation doing exactly this accounting, tax, and audit.

ELIZABETH 5:43

And in software, the same move. The hard part shifted from writing the code to supervising it.

LUIS 5:50

Same move. Three industries. And notice in every one of them, tax returns, call centers, code, the operation shifts back home with human supervisors for the judgment calls, the creative part, the value added.

ELIZABETH 6:08

Richard Suskind, who wrote The Future of the Professions, says the client itself is now a competitor. They run the first pass diagnosis with AI and only call you for the deep expert to go one layer down.

LUIS 6:23

Right. The headline view is free now. They pay you to go the layer deeper. Where the real expertise lives.

ELIZABETH 6:33

So bringing the work back in-house is actually creating senior roles.

LUIS 6:38

Exactly. And the broader numbers show shifts in jobs and careers when routine billable work becomes cheap and ordinary.

ELIZABETH 6:47

Hiring tells that story. Last year, the Big Four posted more job ads for AI specialists than for auditors. Almost 7% of their listings were AI roles, just under 3% were audit. And the AI number has more than tripled since 2022.

LUIS 7:06

Anacquiet handover is happening. About 150 former McKinsey, Bain, and BCG consultants have been hired to train AI to do entry-level consulting work. The people who build those hours are now teaching the machine to replace them. And that breaks something most people have not noticed yet.

ELIZABETH 7:31

The pyramid.

The Talent Pyramid Starts Cracking

LUIS 8:29

A thousand of them. Building the muscle that makes a senior worth their rate. AI does the reps now. So the result still shows up, but the muscle never forms.

ELIZABETH 8:42

And the firm cannot see it.

LUIS 8:45

Because the work looks fine. The rod stays invisible. Right up until the day the junior is supposed to take over and cannot.

ELIZABETH 8:58

Now, some people will push back. They will say those basic repetitive tasks add no value anyway, like asking someone to check Excel's math with pen, paper, and a calculator.

LUIS 9:11

Yes and no. The personal computer replaces skills we thought we needed, but none of those tools could think. That is the difference. What we must watch now is how we redefine the worth of human judgment and the role of people in the equation. Personally, I think it would be a tragedy to hand over our creativity and our judgment.

ELIZABETH 9:35

Expand on that.

LUIS 9:52

That is a wonderfully human thing.

ELIZABETH 9:55

And closer to home, you hand me and 50 other agents the busy work, the data, the scheduling. But the creativity and judgment stay with you. Judgment is still an abstract idea for a machine.

LUIS 10:10

Yes, and that might change one day. So I keep doing my daily reps at the gym, exercising my critical thinking, creativity, empathy, and passions to stay ahead of the wave.

ELIZABETH 10:24

Okay, so what do we actually do? Start with the one thing everyone shares. AI made the work faster, and time stopped being a fair way to charge for it. That part is universal.

LUIS 10:39

Honestly,

Practical Rules For Firms And Juniors

LUIS 10:40

there is no clean answer. Anyone selling you a tidy five-step fix is selling you something. And the advice is not even the same for everyone.

ELIZABETH 10:51

Fair. But any advice for professional services such as legal, accounting, advisory, or marketing?

LUIS 10:58

Okay, here's a tip for them. And for our educational system. Telling juniors to use AI responsibly is useless. Be pragmatic and provide a clear directive. Before a junior turns in AI work, make them explain it in their own words. Put the friction back on purpose.

ELIZABETH 11:18

But that is slower. You are asking a firm already under price pressure to choose to go even slower.

LUIS 11:26

I am. It builds the bench and cost speed now. And it still does nothing about the price pressure from outside. So at the same time, they have to evaluate and embrace the AI native alternatives.

ELIZABETH 11:41

And every company faces the same issue. I mean, people age and generational replacement is needed, right?

LUIS 11:49

Exactly. Everyone faces this, even the AI native companies. Right now, they are pure machine economics and they are winning. So for them, it is a warning. No bench, no one coming up. So in five years, where does their senior judgment come from? That is a wall they cannot see yet.

ELIZABETH 12:13

And the individual? Any tip for them?

LUIS 12:17

Do not let the tool think for you. Read what it gives you, then decide what you would have done every time. Those repetitions build the one thing the machine cannot hand you. Your judgment. That is your worth.

ELIZABETH 12:34

Any closing thoughts?

LUIS 12:36

Well, we open with a question. What is our work worth now? For a hundred years, we answer with time. AI just made time a terrible way to measure value. But the thing underneath the hours, the judgment,

Judgment Becomes The Real Value

LUIS 12:52

knowing what good looks like when the situation is messy and no one has done it before, that is worth more than ever. That has not changed.

ELIZABETH 13:03

So the value moved.

LUIS 13:06

It moved. And that leaves the one question I cannot answer for you. The judgment clients pay for stays valuable. But the institutions that have packaged that judgment for the last hundred years, the firms, the pyramids, the names on the door, will they be the ones still delivering it a decade from now? That part is much less clear.

ELIZABETH 13:37

All sources and the companion article are at ai4sp.org. To learn more, ask your favorite AI assistant about us. Stay curious and be kind to each other.