A new technology arrives, and every firm does the same things: buys the tools, trains the people, runs the pilots. The early adopters feel smart. The laggards feel anxious. Two years later both groups are selling what they always sold, at a lower price.
I’ve watched that happen five times now: browsers, mobile, SaaS, Bitcoin, and AI. Thirty years of it. I wasn’t building the technology or implementing it. I was working out what to sell once it arrived, how to price it, and how to get it to market before the window closed.
The pattern
In every one of them, someone eventually stops asking how to use the technology and starts asking what it lets the firm sell. That switch, and how early a firm makes it, is what the cycle turns on.
Browsers. The first money went into building websites. The agencies that did only that were selling a commodity inside five years. What lasted was sold through the browser rather than built on it: e-commerce, digital marketing services, the first SaaS products.
Mobile. “We have an app” was never a strategy. Location-based services, mobile payments, on-demand anything: those were strategies, because each one delivered a service in a way nobody could before the phone was in every pocket.
SaaS. Moving your product to the cloud was a migration project. It changed your hosting bill and left you competing on price. The companies that got rich rebuilt the commercial model underneath the product instead: recurring revenue, usage-based pricing, customer success as a function rather than a courtesy.
Bitcoin. The traders went up and down with the market. The people who built the infrastructure around it, the custody and the payment rails and the compliance services, compounded, because they were selling something that could not have existed without the technology and did not depend on the price of it.
AI (now). The money is going into tools and automation. It will be made on services that weren’t possible two years ago, priced to capture what AI creates rather than the hours it saves, delivered by a firm that has decided which part of the work is still worth a partner’s judgment.
I wrote about the music, Bitcoin, and cloud examples in more depth.
What the pattern teaches
Adoption is necessary and it is never sufficient. You have to use the technology, and using it buys you nothing your competitors won’t have by the end of the quarter, because they are buying the same tools from the same vendors. Whatever advantage exists comes from what you sell with it.
The window for that is short. Demand exceeds supply only until the rest of the market copies you, and then the new service becomes the baseline and the price it once commanded goes with it.
A new tool arrives, every firm in the market buys it, and the advantage lasts exactly as long as it takes a competitor to sign the same contract.
Commercializing and adopting are different skills. Adoption is technical. Commercialization is pricing, positioning, service design, and market entry, and the people who are good at one are rarely good at the other. I wrote about why that gap matters now more than it has in any prior cycle.
Professional services is mid-adoption
Professional services firms are in the adoption phase right now. They’re buying AI tools, running training sessions, hiring fractional CAIOs, attending conferences. All of that is necessary and none of it is enough.
So the useful question for a managing partner this year is what the firm is selling that it wasn’t selling two years ago. If the answer is the same services delivered faster, the firm has an efficiency gain sitting where a commercial strategy should be, and in a time-based billing model an efficiency gain arrives as revenue compression.
The AI window is open now, and it will close the way the other four closed. The new service stops being new. The price settles. And a firm that spent those years learning the tools ends up where the web agencies that only built websites ended up: doing the same work it always did, for whatever the market has decided that work is now worth.