I have spent 30 years turning new technology into revenue. Not building the technology. Not implementing it. Figuring out what to sell, how to price it, and how to get it to market before the window closes.
Five cycles. Same pattern every time.
The pattern
A new technology arrives. Everyone focuses on adoption — buying the tools, training the people, running pilots. The early adopters feel smart. The laggards feel anxious.
Then someone asks the question that actually matters: "What can we sell now that we could not sell before?"
That question separates the firms that win from the firms that just survived.
Browsers. The first wave was about building websites — adoption. The money was made by the firms that figured out what to sell through the web. E-commerce, digital marketing services, SaaS products that could not have existed without a browser. The web agencies that only built websites commoditized within five years. The ones that built new revenue models on top of the web are still here.
Mobile. The first wave was apps — adoption. The money was made by the firms that figured out what to sell through mobile. Location-based services, mobile payments, on-demand everything. "We have an app" was not a strategy. "We deliver this service in a way that was impossible before mobile" was.
SaaS. The first wave was migrating to the cloud — adoption. The money was made by the firms that rethought their entire commercial model around recurring revenue, usage-based pricing, and customer success. The firms that just moved their existing product to the cloud competed on price. The ones that rebuilt around the model competed on value.
Bitcoin. The first wave was buying and trading — adoption. The money was made by the firms that built financial infrastructure, payment rails, custody solutions, and compliance services that only existed because of the technology. The traders went up and down with the market. The infrastructure builders compounded.
AI (now). The first wave is tools and automation — adoption. The money will be made by the firms that figure out what new services to sell. Services that were not possible before. Priced in a way that captures the value AI creates. Delivered in a way that combines AI capability with human expertise.
What the pattern teaches
Three things are true in every cycle:
1. Adoption is necessary but not sufficient. You have to use the technology. But using it does not give you a competitive advantage — your competitors are adopting the same tools. The advantage comes from commercializing it differently.
2. The commercialization window is short. The first firms to offer genuinely new services capture the market. In every cycle, there is a 2–3 year window where demand exceeds supply. After that, the new model becomes the baseline and the advantage disappears.
3. The expertise to commercialize is different from the expertise to adopt. Adoption is a technology skill. Commercialization is a business skill — pricing, positioning, service design, market entry. The people who are good at one are rarely good at the other.
What this means for professional services
Professional services firms are in the adoption phase right now. They are buying AI tools, running training sessions, hiring fractional CAIOs, attending conferences. All necessary. None sufficient.
The question that will determine which firms win the next five years is not "how well have you adopted AI?" It is "what are you selling that you were not selling two years ago?"
If the answer is "the same services, delivered faster" — that is an efficiency gain, not a commercial strategy. And efficiency gains in a time-based billing model translate directly to revenue compression.
The firms that will lead their markets are the ones asking a different question: "What new services can we offer that only exist because of what AI makes possible? What do those services look like? How do we price them? Who buys them first?"
That is the work I do. Not because I know more about AI than your technology team. Because I have seen this pattern play out five times, and I know where the commercial opportunity moves when a disruptive technology forces an industry to rethink its model.