“Why am I paying a consultant for something AI can do in 15 minutes?”

I’ve heard variations of that question several times over the past few months. On the face of it, it’s a perfectly reasonable one.

Generative AI can draft documents, analyse data, write code and create presentations in a fraction of the time they once took. If the work now takes minutes instead of hours, why should customers still pay the same?

The answer is that they were never buying your time in the first place.

Rewind a decade or so in IT consulting

About ten years ago, I was regularly delivering a consulting engagement for risual. We called it a Vision and Scoping Document and it typically took around ten days to complete.

My sales colleagues would often describe it to customers as a “ten-day engagement”. Every time I heard that, it grated.

The customer wasn’t buying ten days. They were buying clarity — a clear understanding of where they were, where they wanted to be and a roadmap for getting there. The ten days were simply our estimate of what it would cost us to deliver that outcome.

If we found a better way of working and delivered it in eight days, we’d make a little more profit. If unforeseen issues meant it took twelve days, that was our problem, not the customer’s. That’s how consulting should work.

Yet, for years, we’ve become comfortable describing knowledge work in terms of days, hours and rates. Time became a convenient way of pricing expertise, even though it was only ever a proxy for the value being delivered.

It’s not just consulting

A couple of weeks ago, I collected my car after some repair work. The invoice listed one hour of labour at £95 plus VAT, alongside the cost of the replacement parts. The only problem was that I’d only been at the garage for around forty minutes. So I queried it, and was told “It’s a plug in.”

That was the garage’s shorthand for a fixed-price job. They weren’t charging me for exactly sixty minutes of someone’s time. They were charging a standard amount for carrying out that repair. In other words, it was already value-based pricing.

The irony is that they were already selling value — but presenting it as time and materials. Time was simply an easy way of arriving at a price. By describing it as an hour of labour, they’d encouraged me to question the price instead of the outcome.

The locksmith test

Imagine calling a locksmith because you’ve locked yourself out of your house. They arrive, examine the lock for a few moments, insert a couple of tools and, within thirty seconds, the door is open.

Do you argue that the bill should be lower because it only took thirty seconds? Of course not.

You’re paying for the years it took them to learn their trade, the specialist tools they’ve invested in and the confidence that they’ll open the door without damaging the lock. You’re paying for the outcome.

Indeed, if they spent two hours trying different techniques before eventually getting you in, you’d probably have less confidence in their expertise, not more.

We rarely question paying for expertise when we can see the outcome immediately, so why should consulting be any different?

AI changes the economics, not the value

Warren Buffett famously observed that “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”

For years, we’ve treated time as though it were synonymous with value. AI is forcing us to revisit that assumption. Because customers aren’t buying typing. They aren’t buying prompt engineering. They aren’t buying someone to spend ten days producing a document.

Customers are actually buying judgement, experience and confidence. They’re buying better decisions, reduced risk and faster progress.

AI changes the cost of delivering those things, but it doesn’t diminish their value. If anything, it increases the importance of knowing when to trust AI, when to challenge it, and how to turn its output into something genuinely useful.

AI is already an extraordinary amplifier of expertise. Put it in the hands of someone who understands the problem they’re trying to solve, and they’ll often deliver better work, faster than ever before. Put it in the hands of someone without that experience, and they’ll often produce something that looks convincing but lacks the judgement that comes from years of practice.

AI compresses effort. It doesn’t compress experience.

Anyone can ask AI to generate a strategy document, but producing one that reflects an organisation’s objectives, culture, constraints and appetite for change is something else entirely.

The commercial shift

I don’t think AI is going to kill consulting firms. I do think it’s going to accelerate the move away from charging for effort and towards charging for outcomes.

The firms that continue to sell “ten-day engagements” may find customers asking increasingly uncomfortable questions. Those that sell measurable business value, and use AI to improve the efficiency of delivering it, should become more competitive, not less.

Perhaps that’s the biggest commercial shift AI will bring. Not the end of consulting — but the end of pretending that time is a good proxy for value.