For as long as advisory has existed, analysis has been the product. Firms sold the hours it took to gather the information, structure it and turn it into findings. The deliverable was proof of the effort, and the effort was what the invoice measured.

AI is collapsing the cost of that effort. Research that took an analyst team weeks now takes days, sometimes hours. Not all of it is equally good, and none of it is good unsupervised, but the direction is not in doubt. Gathering, structuring and first-draft synthesis are becoming abundant, and abundant things do not command premium prices for long.

That is an uncomfortable read if your revenue model is analyst hours. It is a much better read if you look at why clients actually stay with a firm, because it was never the analysis. Clients stay for judgement. What does this mean for us, what should we do, in what order, and who will stand behind that advice when the board pushes on it. That part of the work has not become abundant. If anything it has become scarcer, because there is more machine-generated material in circulation that someone senior has to evaluate.

Judgement has always had a scaling problem. It lives in a small number of senior people, and the old model rationed it: most of an engagement's hours went to the analysis underneath, so a senior advisor could serve only a handful of clients deeply at a time. When technology carries the research, the constraint moves. The same advisor can put their judgement in front of many more clients, because the weeks of preparation under each conversation have compressed into days.

This is also where the market opens downward. The kind of engagement a Big 4 firm prices at six months and $350,000 was never available to most of the mid-market, which meant most organisations simply went without. Those organisations face the same strategic questions as the large end of town. A firm that productises its delivery is not taking clients from the Big 4. It is serving the far larger group the old cost structure priced out entirely.

Productising means a standard methodology, repeatable deliverables and technology carrying the research, with the firm's name and the firm's judgement on top. It means selling the outcome rather than the hours, and it turns a one-off project into a relationship, because a strategy set once needs revisiting as the ground moves.

It does not mean removing the advisor. A generated analysis with no accountable judgement attached is a commodity, and clients can produce commodities themselves. What they cannot produce is the signature: an advisor who has reviewed the work, weighed it against everything the data does not show and will defend the recommendation in the room where it is decided.

The question worth sitting with, if you run a practice, is a version of the one every client is about to ask. How much of what we charge for is analysis they will soon be able to get cheaply, and how much is judgement they cannot get anywhere else? The second number is the durable business. For most firms it is larger than it looks, once it is no longer buried under the cost of producing the first.

Written by Chris McLaren, published on Mireto by High Impact Group.