This rant will relate to your client work…
I was on a podcast last week and I went off, ranting about how ridiculous it is for companies to track their employees’ mouse movements and screens.
That’s legacy thinking – the idea that your work is only measured by the time spent on it.
With AI, we will be forced to no longer tie value with our time.
How will you bill by the hour for jobs that used to take 40-50 hours but now take 10-20?
This goes beyond simply value pricing, because I and my clients can bill:
- Value-based projects where our “effective” hourly rate jumps above $1,000/hr (and that’s conservative)
- Subscription-based pricing where our profit margins increase due to improvements in productivity
I think the key driver of this won’t be “how much you can do with AI,” but enabling us to think carefully and strategically about what exponential work we can do with all our free time.
For example, the strategy work I do with clients is only getting better as I am able to access thousands of data records and analyze trends in minutes versus days.
With that time saved, I can then look at higher-level problems my clients need solved that:
a) I never thought about, and
b) I never had time to address because I was too involved in the weeds
Even if you delegate work or hire a team, it’s not the same as leveraging the tools because the new possibilities your mind comes up with while you’re in the tech are unique to that moment- just like how reading a book provides value not just from the education and lessons, but the ideas the book inspires.
And this goes beyond building custom GPTs.
I think the key skill set is going to be framework thinking and strategy work – to be able to align the right tools to complete the appropriate jobs for an end outcome, not the other way around of prompting AI to generate an idea for you.
To tie it back to practicals:
- Clients hire you for results, not hours.
- Your time is linear; the value you deliver is non-linear.
- AI is an ally, not an adversary.