Here’s what I keep circling back to. To explain what you do, you have to use standard language, because standard language is the only kind that communicates. I help businesses price properly. We do brand strategy. I build the operating system. Fine. But the moment it’s said in standard words it sounds like a standard job, and standard jobs sound like things anyone could do.
The bits that make it work, the hundred small judgement calls, the times you did the opposite of the textbook because of this client, this team, this month, you never mention any of that. It’s your job to know it, not theirs. So people price you on the description, and the description was always the cheap part.
Then AI turns up, and it’s brilliant at the description. It can produce the standard version of nearly everything, and the standard version is the one everyone assumed was the job. So the sensible conclusion is that we’ll just do it ourselves.
I use AI a lot to build systems. It’s far better at the code than I am and it saves me hours. But I also fight with it, constantly. It says let’s do it like this and I say but that makes the user click seven times when they could click once. It says let’s build the report like this and I say but then they’ll see green and conclude everything’s fine, when this other number over here should be changing that decision. And it always tells me, very graciously, that my way is a much better frame, or words to that effect.
Nobody puts the fighting in the description either. And if you don’t know you need to fight, why would you fight?
So I think there are two shrinkages coming, and both arrive before AI can actually do the job. The first is mine. People decide the work is the standard bit, so they stop paying for it. The second is theirs. The business that built everything itself ends up standard-fitted where it needed to be bespoke, and it gets a little smaller every quarter for reasons nobody inside can see.
I’m honest enough to say the first one is already shaping what I do next with Valid Point. I don’t think the second one has landed for most people yet.
Which part of what you do have people started assuming is the standard bit?