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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 on the left 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 time savings on AI-touched work: Dell'Acqua et al., Organization Science, 2025. Default revenue $18M per SPI Research 2026 Professional Services Maturity Benchmark (n=509). 50% AI-touched derived from cross-vertical sources: Wolters Kluwer 2026 Future Ready Lawyer (n=810: 62% of legal professionals report 6–20% weekly time savings from AI) divided by the 25% per-task rate; corroborated by Karbon State of AI in Accounting 2026 (98% AI use, average 60 minutes/day saved ≈ 50% AI-touched) and Deltek Clarity 2026 (n=896 A&E firms: 70% AI adoption, 78% generative AI adoption). 15% outcome-priced sits at the low-middle of a wide cross-vertical range: Thomson Reuters / Georgetown 2026 State of the US Legal Market (~10% non-hourly in legal); Forrester for Dentsu Creative 2026 (~25% of NA agencies on exclusive fixed-fee); Ignition 2025 U.S. Accounting & Tax Pricing Benchmark (only ~10% of accounting CAS firms still use hourly as primary method).

The gain side is an upper bound. The model assumes outcome-priced engagements fully retain the AI productivity gain as margin. In practice some of that gets reinvested in delivery quality or clawed back at renewal, so the actual net effect lands at or below the number shown. Your firm’s break-even depends on how much pricing power you hold at renewal. The assessment is where you work that out.