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AI cuts your billable hours by 25%. Who keeps the money — you or your clients?

Hourly billing hands the savings to your clients. Outcome pricing keeps them with you. Two minutes, no account.

Adjust to your firm

Roughly. The number you’d give a banker, not your CFO.

50%. Drafting, research, review: anywhere a tool is in the loop.

15%. Fixed fee, retainer, value-based, deliverable-priced: anything where the fee doesn’t shrink when the hours do.

Net AI impact on your firm, per year

−$1,575,000

Example values shown. Adjust the inputs to see your firm.

Lost from hourly billing−$1,912,500
Gained from outcome pricing+$337,500
Net impact−$1,575,000

8 minutes, no account.

25% per-task AI time savings: Dell'Acqua et al., Organization Science, 2025. Defaults come from SPI Research 2026 (revenue); Wolters Kluwer + Karbon + Deltek 2026 (AI-touched); Thomson Reuters / Georgetown 2026, Forrester / Dentsu 2026, and AICPA 2025 National MAP Survey (outcome-priced).

The gain side is an upper bound. It assumes outcome-priced work keeps the full productivity gain as margin. In practice some gets reinvested in quality or clawed back at renewal, so the real effect lands at or below what’s shown. Your break-even depends on the pricing power you hold there. The Workshop is where you work that out.

The loss side is also an upper bound. It assumes freed hours aren’t resold. Firms with the demand resell those hours as new billable work, and some report real gains. But selling time at a rate AI keeps pushing down is a treadmill: the hours you win back this year compress again next year. Shifting the mix is what compounds.

Methodology last reviewed June 2026.