UK firms investing in AI and automation are about to discover an uncomfortable truth about their pricing model. At our latest Leading Voice Broadcast, two practitioners walked through why the time the firm sells is now the part of the commercial model losing money.
For most of the profession’s recent history, the billable hour has carried the same logical weight inside firms that compliance has carried in the client relationship. It is the unit of measurement around which everything else has been organised, from team productivity through to the year-end profitability conversation.
That model has been breaking for years and AI is now breaking it openly.
At our recent Accountancy Age and Intuit QuickBooks Leading Voice Broadcast, Ryan Diplexcito of Johnston Carmichael put the pricing problem in its sharpest form. “Why should you be penalised for being more efficient, for investing more in your staff training, for investing more in your technology? Doing things quicker. You shouldn’t be. You should be getting rewarded for what you’re bringing from your experience, your knowledge, your insights, your efficiencies.”
The point underneath that line is more commercial than it initially appears. Every hour a firm trims out of delivery through automation, AI, better systems, or sharper team training, is an hour the firm cannot bill back. Under hourly pricing, every operational improvement becomes a revenue loss. The firms doing the most to modernise are watching their own progress shrink the top line.
This is the structural problem most firms have not calculated. Hourly billing was designed for an era when more hours meant more work meant more revenue. That equation no longer holds. AI is compressing the time it takes to do the work, and the work itself is increasingly the part that needed compressing.
Anthony Levene of Intuit QuickBooks reinforced the point from the platform side. The AI layer inside the Intuit Accountant Suite, he explained, drafts customer follow-ups, creates invoices, generates reports, and runs MTD readiness checks under the accountant’s guidance. The work the firm used to bill hours against is the work the AI is now doing in minutes.
The natural reading of that shift is that the accountant’s value is being eroded. The argument the broadcast made was different. The work AI is taking on is the work that was already commoditised, and what sits above it is the work that was always undervalued by the hourly model.
Diplexcito framed the human side directly. “Take the robot out of the human, to allow the human to rise and add value.” The AI does the data. The accountant brings what Levene called “AI and HI”, the human insight that comes from experience the platform does not have. “It doesn’t know what motivates the clients in their professional life,” Diplexcito said of AI. “It doesn’t know what their drivers are. We’re in the fortunate position that we can show empathy and judgment to assist our clients with making the decisions that are right for them.”
That distinction matters because it determines what the firm is selling. The hourly model bills for time and counts judgement as a bonus thrown in alongside it. The model both speakers were making the case for inverts that arrangement. The judgement becomes the line item, and the platform underneath handles the data work that used to fill the timesheet.
The pricing implication follows directly. If the value sits in judgement rather than hours, the pricing logic has to follow the value. Diplexcito made the case for fixed-fee, value-based pricing, with the price set around the responsibility the firm is taking on, not the hours spent on the analysis. “It’s the insight we should be getting rewarded for, not our hourly effort,” he said during the session.
The shift requires firms to be bolder than they typically are. “We have to be a bit braver,” Diplexcito said. “We have to be the partnership. In a partnership, everyone wins.” Levene reinforced the point with a line he had heard from Rebecca Bennyworth on a recent HMRC MTD roadshow panel. “I’m not a charity. If you’re not going to work in a way that I recommend to work, unfortunately, it’s going to cost you a little bit more.”
The maths underneath all of this is straightforward. AI is compressing delivery time, and under hourly pricing that compression translates directly into lost revenue. Value-based pricing turns the same operational improvement into margin. The firms making the shift now are the ones treating AI investment as the commercial case for changing the pricing model.
The billable hour still has a place inside most firms. It is, however, the part of the commercial model working hardest against everything else the firm is now trying to do.
