Services, the new software — and why pricing is a great fit

AI didn’t replace consulting. It made it possible to deliver what consulting was always supposed to.

What clients have always actually paid for in consulting is the senior judgment layer — the directors and project leaders who frame the right question, carry proprietary customer and competitive insight, and help the company win. The pyramid that grew underneath them was an artifact of a different era — a structure built around a single constraint: that analysis was slow and expensive. That constraint is gone.

What the pyramid actually was

The pyramid wasn’t built around the work clients actually wanted. It was built around the constraint of expensive analysis. Firms put a small number of partners at the top and stacked junior consultants beneath them. The juniors did the analysis — research, modeling, benchmarking, slide-building — and the partners reviewed it.

The real cost of this structure wasn’t the labor. It was the coordination. Decisions had to travel through layers of people, each filtering what reached the next. That created what clients usually experience as slow timelines, agreement-by-committee instead of idea meritocracy, and a sense that the firm is managing itself more than it’s solving the problem. From the customer’s seat, the pyramid creates friction and cost that doesn’t align with the value they’re paying for.

The pyramid worked, economically, because there was no other way to scale. Now there is.

What AI changes

Analysis is the part of the work that AI is best at. A piece of competitor benchmarking that used to take an associate three weeks now takes a day — depending on how mature the AI harness is. A pricing scenario model that needed a small team to build is something one person can iterate through in a sitting. The cost of generating structured analysis is collapsing, and the curve is still moving.

Once that’s true, the pyramid loses its reason to exist. It was scaffolding around a slow, expensive bottleneck: the partner. That operating model is outdated.

The partner role had three jobs traditionally: selling work, monitoring and reviewing what others built, and disseminating experience across the firm. Selling stays human — it’s relationship work, judgment in context, the kind of thing AI doesn’t replace. Monitoring and reviewing changes with the model: when an AI-enabled director or project leader is doing the analysis directly, there is no junior layer to supervise. The supervisory function disappears.

The third job — disseminating experience — is the most interesting one. A partner has always been the medium through which lessons travel from one engagement to the next. But a partner is bandwidth-constrained. Only so many rooms, only so many people they can mentor, only so many lessons they can carry forward. A well-designed memory system is a better medium than any partner has ever been or could ever be. It doesn’t forget. It doesn’t have to make the connection on the spot. You can probe it endlessly without making it feel like a test or a personal attack. From the client’s perspective, the firm shows up to every project carrying everything it has ever learned — without the friction and cost of a pyramid in the way.

Why software alone isn’t the answer either

Another story being told now is that pricing — and other commercial decisions like it — should be solved by software. A SaaS tool, a dashboard, a workflow product handed to whoever owns pricing inside the company.

Software is genuinely useful at one thing: producing faster, more rigorous analyses. The puzzle pieces. What it doesn’t do — at least not on its own — is paint the overall picture. A meaningful pricing decision touches product, sales, finance, leadership, and customer success. Everyone has a view. No one owns it cleanly. The hard work isn’t computation; it’s getting alignment on a story that will move everyone in the same direction. That’s where judgment comes in.

Pricing decisions need someone in the room who can frame the trade-offs between growth, margin, and competitive position; identify which stakeholders need to own which parts; and assess what the company can actually execute against in the next two quarters. That isn’t a tool. It’s a person, doing senior work, with a system underneath them.

What’s worth keeping

The question was never whether AI replaces consultants. It was which parts of consulting were worth paying for.

The parts worth paying for are the parts only senior judgment can do — and that, in the traditional model, only a senior partner could deliver, with the dilution that came from cascading the work down a pyramid. Framing the right question. Carrying the proprietary customer and competitive insight that helps the company win. Navigating the stakeholders. Owning the outcome.

There’s a distinction in that last point that matters. In the traditional model, the partner is accountable but not responsible — a bodyshop arrangement where the partner signs off on the work but isn’t the one actually doing it. Clients increasingly want both. The senior person who frames the question should also be the person doing the work and the person staying with the engagement to its outcome. That’s what an AI-native services firm makes possible.

The model: AI-native services

Sequoia recently framed this as services being the new software. The argument is that AI lets services firms compound knowledge, codify expertise, and operate with margin profiles that used to belong to SaaS — without losing the judgment and accountability that make services valuable in the first place.

That’s the firm we’re building. In one line: a high-touch, high-judgment, asset-driven advisory firm — where the assets are productized IP and a custom AI harness that makes one senior person dramatically more effective than they could be alone.

The structure is simple. Senior operators do the work directly. Underneath them sits a platform: a methodology that’s codified, evaluated, and versioned, plus a persistent client memory that compounds across every engagement. The platform is what gives the senior person leverage. The persistent memory is what makes every new project start further down the curve than the last.

Clients work with the platform alongside us, gaining the experience and capability via the engagement itself. What we deliver is alignment, the conviction to move forward, and the system that supports the decisions you’ll keep making after we’re gone.

The leverage in this model isn’t headcount. It’s depth — more iterations on the same problem, more angles examined, more chances to crack the puzzle than a pyramid could ever afford.

Why pricing is a great fit

Pricing is the right entry point for this kind of firm. Not because the inputs are clean — they aren’t — but because the structure of the work is repeatable. Most consulting domains don’t have that. Strategy is too bespoke. Transformation is too organization-specific. M&A is too situational. Each project starts from scratch.

Pricing is the rare exception. The option space is bounded — packaging, metrics, models, price level — and the playbook is generic. Every engagement moves through roughly the same sequence: commercial guidelines, packaging design, value-metric mapping, competitor benchmarking, business-case validation. The frameworks are stable. The artifacts repeat. The decision gates are predictable. But the context and emphasis is always different. That’s where judgment comes in.

That structural repeatability is what lets the platform compound. The methodology gets refined. The persistent memory accumulates. The evals get tighter. None of this replaces the senior judgment in the room — it makes the senior person more effective than any pyramid could.

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The work itself is high-stakes, multi-stakeholder, and senior-by-necessity. The wrong shape for a SaaS tool. The right shape for an AI-native services firm.

Pricing also moves at a pace most other commercial decisions don’t. AI-native companies ship product weekly. Markets shift. Packaging that worked six months ago lags adoption. A pricing model has to keep up — and the only way to keep up is to operate at a speed that traditional consulting can’t match. That’s where the platform earns its weight.

What we’re building

Strategy without execution is a deck. Execution without judgment is a dashboard. We’re building the third thing — a high-touch, high-judgment, asset-driven advisory firm. Senior people doing the work themselves. A platform underneath them with productized IP and a custom AI harness. A persistent client memory that compounds across every engagement. More iterations on the puzzle than a pyramid could ever afford.

The parts of consulting worth paying for are now what the whole firm does. Everything else, AI cleared away.