But here's the thing — T&M was already broken before AI showed up. It was a model that quietly rewarded slow, and it killed any incentive to push back on a bad direction. If a client sent us down a rabbit hole, the honest truth is we got paid either way. It reduced complex technology decisions to a single procurement lever: whose rate is lower.
AI didn't kill a healthy model. It killed one that was already working against you.
Last year, you asked us to build something. It would have taken 100 hours. Let’s say now we can do it in 20. So what should you pay?
This is the pricing conundrum nobody in our industry is talking about honestly. If we bill you 20 hours T&M, we're penalizing ourselves for the significant and ongoing investment we've made in staying ahead of the curve on AI tools, models, and workflows. If we bill you 100, that's not honest either.
My answer today? Somewhere in between, but closer to the 100. And yes, that number will come down over time.
But here's what doesn't change: you get it faster, and you pay less than you did before. That's the deal. The question is just how we get there together.
A word of warning. AI doesn't just help good teams move faster. It helps bad ones move faster too.
A vibe-coded project that would have taken six months to become a problem now becomes one in six weeks. A poor architecture decision that might have surfaced in QA now makes it to production before anyone realizes what happened. AI is a force multiplier and that cuts both ways. The experience of knowing what to build, how to build it, and when to stop matters more now, not less.
And T&M isn't just broken for greenfield work.
What should a company with no technical leadership expect to pay when they need to rescue a live vibe-coded project that's heading toward production? What's the right price to productionalize something that was built fast and loose on AI-generated code? What should it cost to enable your teams to leverage AI in a smart, safe, and scalable way knowing it is a force multiplier that will reshape what your business can do?
These aren't T&M questions. There's no hourly rate that captures the value of experience, judgment, and the institutional knowledge of knowing which AI tool to use, when, and how to keep it from blowing up on you.
The firms still selling hours are selling you the wrong thing.
The conversation has to shift to outcomes, value, and results and the sooner we all get comfortable having that conversation, the better it is for everyone.
I'm genuinely curious about this from two directions.
To my fellow tech partners and service providers, how are you thinking about pricing in an AI-accelerated world? What models are you experimenting with? What's working and what isn't?
And to the client side, what are you actually expecting to pay? Has your thinking on this changed? Do you even know how to benchmark it anymore?
We're not looking for volume. We're looking for a few of the right clients, ones willing to rethink how they buy technology services and work with us in true partnership. Share the risk, capture real cost savings now, and build toward better outcomes over time.
If that's you, let's talk.