The music industry spent the better part of two decades fighting streaming. Labels had a product that worked, packaged albums at $15 a unit, and they weren’t going to let a new technology take it away. They sued Napster. They sued individual downloaders. They lobbied Congress.
The labels that licensed their catalogs to Spotify and Apple Music early set the terms of the new market. The ones that spent years suing ended up licensing too, but on someone else’s terms, with less negotiating power and less revenue to show for it.
I watched this happen from inside the music-tech world, backing companies that were building for the streaming model while the incumbents were still trying to protect the old one.
That pattern has repeated in every technology cycle since. I’ve been through five of them. The story is always the same.
The digital payments version
I was at NYDIG working with major banks when Bitcoin started showing up in boardrooms. Boardrooms fixated on Bitcoin the asset. The deeper shift was something else: fast, cheap, programmable digital payments that didn’t need a bank to clear.
The instinct at most banks was to fit Bitcoin into the products they already sold: custody for institutional clients, ETF access for wealth advisors, structured exposure inside the existing book. They took something genuinely new and slotted it into the model they already had.
Meanwhile, companies like Strike, Cash App, and Wise built new products around what fast, cheap digital payments now made possible. They didn’t try to make new payment rails fit the old banking model. They asked what services became possible because the technology existed, and they built those services from scratch.
The banks that wrapped Bitcoin in existing products instead of building around the new payment rails watched the payments revenue go somewhere else.
A firm defending the billable hour today is a label defending the compact disc in 2003.
The enterprise software version
I worked at Platform Computing in the years before IBM acquired the company in 2012 to build out their cloud business, and at Varicent when sales performance software was moving from on-prem to SaaS. Both companies sat in the middle of the same transition.
Some vendors saw cloud as cheaper distribution. They took the same software, hosted it somewhere else, and cut the infrastructure costs. Then they competed on price, margins shrank, and most of them are gone.
The vendors that won asked a different question: what could they now sell? They rebuilt their products around what only an always-connected, multi-tenant platform made possible: real-time data, continuous updates, and services delivered as software instead of bought as software. They went from selling licenses to selling outcomes.
Every vendor in that market got the same cloud and the same migration. The losers read it as cost reduction.
The professional services version
Professional services firms are running that same instinct right now. They’re buying AI tools, training their people, automating workflows, and billing the result the way they always have. All of that is necessary. None of it is sufficient.
The math is straightforward. When AI lets a team do in one hour what used to take five, and the firm bills by the hour, revenue per engagement drops. Among law firms that already use AI widely, 20% report challenges meeting billable targets.
The instinct is to protect the current model. Do the same work faster. Cut costs. Hope the billing model holds.
It won’t hold. It’s never held. The firms clinging to hourly billing while AI compresses delivery time are doing exactly what the labels did when they tried to keep selling packaged product at $15 a unit after distribution costs had fallen to zero.
What happens next
The firms that move early set the terms. That was true for the labels that licensed to Spotify before their competitors did. It was true for the enterprise software vendors that rebuilt for SaaS first. It’ll be true for the first professional services firms that launch genuinely new offerings built around what AI makes possible.
And this time, the disruption has a funding thesis behind it. In March 2026, Sequoia Capital told its portfolio companies that professional services revenue is the next trillion-dollar opportunity. They published a map of every major vertical (legal, accounting, staffing, consulting, insurance) with the dollar value of outsourced work in each. The labels didn’t see Spotify coming. This one is visible in advance. The map is public.
Protecting the old model always costs more than building the new one. The music industry spent hundreds of millions on lawsuits and got nothing from it except a delayed transition and a worse negotiating position. Every month a firm spends optimizing hourly billing instead of designing new offerings is a month a competitor uses to get ahead.
And the expertise to adopt a technology is different from the expertise to sell with it. The labels knew music. The banks knew finance. The software companies knew their products. None of that told them what to sell differently. 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.
BDO’s managing partner has named the ceiling on what efficiency inside the existing business model can return. After that, there’s nothing left to extract.
The question is what comes after the ceiling. The music labels that licensed early and built new revenue models around streaming are thriving. The banks that missed the shift to fast, cheap digital payments are watching new entrants serve their former customers. The enterprise software vendors that saw cloud as “cheaper hosting” are gone.
Professional services firms choosing efficiency-only AI are on the same path. The technology is different. The commercial pattern is identical.
Two years spent automating the work you already sell ends with the same offerings, priced by someone else. The labels paid for their delay in negotiating power and never got it back, and they can at least say nobody drew them a map of what was coming. Sequoia drew this one and published it in March 2026.