Efficiency Isn’t a Discount. It’s an Upgrade.

Post 4 of 5 — Why I am not lowering our prices, and why you probably should not want me to.

We’ve covered how AI is changing our work—now let’s address the question everyone is quietly asking: what happens to fees?

A few clients have asked me, gently and reasonably, whether their fees should be coming down now that AI is making parts of our work faster. It is a fair question, and I want to answer it honestly.

No. And here is why you actually should not want that.

Why “faster” does not mean “cheaper” in our line of work

In manufacturing, efficiency means more units in less time, and the savings flow to price. That logic works because the product is identical regardless of who makes it. A widget is a widget.

Professional services do not work that way. When AI cuts our processing time on your monthly close by thirty percent, we do not produce thirty percent more closes for you — you only have one company. What we produce is thirty percent more cognitive capacity inside the team. And what we do with that capacity is the entire game.

For our firm, that capacity is going to work that simply was not viable before. Proactive anomaly alerts when something in your numbers looks off, before you have to ask. Rolling cash flow projections at the start of every month, instead of when you finally remember to request one. Quarterly benchmark reports comparing you to similar businesses in your industry. Strategic conversations that used to get squeezed out by the close because we were too busy assembling the close itself.

Same fee. Substantially expanded scope. That is not us holding the line on price. That is us giving you a stronger reason to value what you are getting.

The race I am refusing to run

I want to be honest about something else. There is a version of the AI era — and I see it coming clearly — where firms try to pitch themselves to the market as “AI-powered, therefore cheaper.” It is a race to the bottom, and a tool this transformative makes that race shorter than most firm owners realize.

That is not the firm I am building. The firm I am building is one where AI lets us redirect our team’s capacity toward the parts of our work that actually require human judgment — interpretation, partnership, foresight. Your fee stays the same because what it buys you is genuinely larger. We are selling different services now, not the same service for less.

A fair caveat

I will tell you one thing that is true and that some of my peers will not say out loud. Commoditization is coming for certain narrow service lines — basic reconciliation, standard reporting, routine categorization. Within two to three years, the baseline price on that work is going to fall, because the embedded AI in the software will simply do it. That is appropriate.

The firms that spend the next twenty-four months redirecting their freed capacity into higher-value services — the ones using this window to move upstream — are not going to feel that pressure the same way. We will already be doing different work by the time the old work loses its price.

That is the work my team is doing right now. It is what posts 1, 2, and 3 in this series have been describing. And it is why your fee buying you a fuller, deeper, more proactive engagement is the right answer to the question “what is AI doing to our pricing.”

If the scope is wrong, let’s change the scope

One last thing. If you read this and your reaction is “honestly, the scope I have with you is not quite what I need right now,” that is a great conversation to have. I would rather sit down with you and rebuild the engagement around what you actually want — exit readiness, deeper advisory, a different cadence — than have us both quietly adjust to a misfit.

Efficiency is not a discount. It is an upgrade. And whenever possible, I would rather give you the upgrade.

If you want to talk about scope, fees, or anything in this series, send us a note to [email protected] and we will set up a time.