For most of my career, the arithmetic of consulting was stable. Work took the time it took, and price tracked effort closely enough that nobody had to think hard about the relationship. AI broke that arithmetic. A deliverable that once cost me three days of assembly now takes an afternoon. The question that arrives with that efficiency is not technical, it is ethical: when the labor collapses, who gets the savings?
I have settled on an answer, and I think it is the right one for independent practitioners. Price the value, keep the efficiency, and stop apologizing for either.
Value was never the same as hours. The instinct to bill by time feels honest, but it quietly tells the client that what they are buying is your effort rather than your outcome. A target industry study is worth what it is worth to the organization that uses it, whether it took me three days or three hours to produce. The hours were always a proxy for value, and a clumsy one. AI simply exposed how loose the connection always was.
Efficiency gains are yours to keep. This is where practitioners lose their nerve. If a tool lets me deliver the same quality in a third of the time, the temptation is to pass the savings straight through in a lower fee, as if the client is owed the productivity gain. They are not. You invested in the skill, the tools, and the judgment to know when the tool is wrong. A law firm that adopts better software does not cut its rates by reflex, and neither should you. The efficiency is the return on your investment in staying good at your job.
Fixed fees make this honest. Fixed-fee pricing is what lets both truths coexist. The client agrees to a price for a defined outcome, up front, and how long it takes me becomes my concern, not theirs. They get certainty. I get the upside of working smarter. Hourly billing, by contrast, punishes exactly the efficiency you worked to build, which is a strange thing to design a business around.
The line I will not cross is quality. None of this holds if the faster work is worse work. The efficiency has to buy the client the same result or a better one, delivered sooner. Keep that promise and the pricing is defensible to anyone. Break it and no pricing model will save you.
The labor has changed. What you are actually selling (i.e. judgment, expertise, and a result someone can stand behind), has not. Price that, and the arithmetic works again.