Refactoring Orgs

I handle a lot of vendor contracts in our company, and some of them are with external freelance consultants. Yesterday, I talked to one of them about our terms for the next six months. She told me about how her work changed in the past two years. The value she now brings to the table. We talked about her daily rate. That's when it hit me: freelance consultants might be going through a special kind of AI-induced transition right now.

When photography went digital, professional photographers did not stop being good at photography. The demand for images did not decline. It surged. What collapsed was what anyone was willing to pay huge sums per image, because the substrate underneath their work changed. The skill did not degrade. The market for the skill compressed.

Freelance consultants are about to live through that now. The senior practitioner who built a career on "I know how this domain works" is now competing with a free AI chatbot that confidently explains the domain to anyone who asks. The AI might be wrong some of the time. So was the freelance photographer. Here's the thing: Most customers accept "wrong sometimes for free" over "right always for a fee". Companies just won't pay outrageous daily rates for external freelance consultants covering large swaths of topics any more.

This does not mean your consultants lose value. It means the things they used to charge for - the briefing, the explainer, the orientation deck - are now table stakes. What they can still charge for is the actual execution within the team (the talking and convincing), and the judgment call that only happens once you have actually been wrong in their specific domain a few times.

The photography analogy teaches us that there will always demand for great freelance consultants. The market did not disappear. It just narrowed to the slice AI could not replicate. I think it's smart to know what specific non-AI slice you need to fill as an organization. Only then contract your external consultants against that slice.