You know your business. Do you know what's coming for it?
You are the owner of your domain — nobody understands your clients, your margins, and your people better. But domain expertise and technology awareness are two different kinds of knowledge, and generative AI is widening the gap between them every quarter. Pick your industry. This is what the shift looks like from where I sit.
The architecture firm
Design judgment, delivered as drawings — concept work, planning, visualisation, documentation. Clients pay for the years behind your eye and the weeks it takes to draw what it sees.
Text-to-render tools produce photorealistic concept imagery in minutes. Generative layout tools explore thousands of floor-plan variants against real constraints. Documentation and code-checking are automating end to end.
When a client can see thirty credible concepts in an afternoon, what they'll pay for is the judgment to know which one is right — and why. Is your firm set up to sell that?
The software engineering company
Engineering hours — building, testing, and maintaining systems. Your rate card assumes a certain number of people for a certain number of months.
AI agents write, review, and refactor production code today. Teams are shipping the same output with a fraction of the headcount. The price of a line of code is collapsing faster than in any other industry on this page.
If a client can get the same system built in a tenth of the time, do you sell them hours — or outcomes? Your pricing model is the first thing this technology breaks.
The legal & accounting firm
Trusted expertise applied to documents — contracts, filings, audits, advice — billed by the hour, underwritten by your name on the door.
Models draft, summarise, and cross-check documents at a level that passes professional exams. The review work that fills junior years is automating first — which quietly breaks the apprenticeship model the whole profession is trained on.
When the routine 80% of the work automates, the remaining 20% — judgment, liability, standing before the client — becomes the entire business. Who in your firm is preparing for that?
The marketing firm
Ideas and execution — strategy, campaigns, content, and the production hours behind them. The retainer assumes making things is hard.
Generative tools produce copy, imagery, video, and endless variants at effectively zero marginal cost. Your clients' in-house teams now do at lunchtime what used to be a monthly retainer. Volume is no longer a moat.
When anyone can make a hundred ads before lunch, distinctiveness is the scarce asset. Can you prove yours is worth paying for?
None of this is a prediction. It's a description.
Everything above exists today. The only variable is how long it takes to reach your market, your clients, your city — and whether you'll have been practicing when it arrives.
This is the knowledge gap I help owners close. Not by selling software, and not by predicting the future — by showing you, concretely, what the technology can already do to and for a business like yours, and helping you decide what to do about it. That conversation is where everything starts.