Changing industry value
When AI can produce the work, what makes your expertise valuable?
Professional firms are watching clients gain access to research, analysis and draft outputs that once required the firm. Architects, accountants, consultants and designers are facing versions of the same question.
This page is a cross-industry perspective. The architectural example is an observation, not a Two Icons engagement. The research is independent of any client result.
01 · The industry
What is changing for firms that sell expertise?
A client can now produce a plausible version of a report, a critique or a first analysis. Some of that work is useful. Some of it is wrong in a way that looks finished. The firm still has to tell the difference, and explain it.
In 2024–25, the Australian Bureau of Statistics found that 24 per cent of businesses in professional, scientific and technical services used AI, twice the rate for all businesses.
02 · Experience and observations
When a critique becomes cheaper than the report.
A large architectural practice produces reports from specialist knowledge and judgement. Clients have begun putting those reports through AI and returning with critiques. Some questions are legitimate. Others rest on incomplete information or a conclusion that does not hold. The architects still investigate them, then explain the reasoning.
The practice is not a Two Icons client. The observation is useful because producing the criticism became cheaper, while establishing whether it deserved to be trusted did not. The firm is now spending time on review and explanation.
Joe has seen an earlier version of this shift in marketing. As digital channels created more campaign and customer information, the valuable work moved from producing more collateral to interpreting what the information meant for a commercial decision. That history is on the property page. It is not this architectural example.
03 · The economics of value
Where is value moving?
The client and the firm are not paying for the same thing.
The client wants a conclusion they can rely on. The firm has historically been paid for the time required to produce it. Those two are pulling apart.
A Harvard Business School field experiment with Boston Consulting Group followed 758 consultants using GPT-4. On realistic tasks inside the model's capability, people using AI completed 12.2 per cent more tasks and completed them 25.1 per cent faster, with higher-quality solutions. On a complex task chosen to sit outside that capability, people using AI were 19 per cent less likely to produce a correct solution.
Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier. Harvard Business School.
04 · The opportunity
What a professional firm can reconsider now.
01The service
Which outputs are becoming easier for a client to draft, and which still require a specialist to stand behind the conclusion?
02The fee
Does the price still depend on time spent producing, or on the judgement, verification and accountability inside the work?
03The client
How will you help a client tell a useful question from a plausible criticism that does not hold?
05 · The conversation
Questions worth asking.
- Which of your current outputs could a client now draft without you?
- Who is accountable when an assisted answer is plausible and wrong?
- What would a client still come to you for if production were almost free?
The opportunity isn't simply to produce advice faster.
It is to make interpretation, verification and professional accountability the part of the offer a client can still see, and still pay for.
If clients can draft more of the work themselves, and you're asking what they will still pay a specialist to stand behind, that's a conversation worth having.