🎙️ What do you charge a client when seven hours of processing replaces three months of engineering? That's not a rhetorical question. It's the actual problem Martyn Day walked me through in a recent conversation. He's been covering AEC technology for 37 years. When he says the billable hour model is structurally broken, he's not being dramatic. The value of architecture was never really in the hours. It was in the judgment, the decisions, the things that couldn't be automated. But the hours were the package we put around that value because it was the model that existed. Now the model is breaking. And the firms that figure out how to charge for judgment instead of time are going to look very different from the ones still counting seats and billable hours in 2027. If you're an architect or firm leader who's been quietly wondering when this reckoning arrives, this one's for you. 👉 Listen wherever you get your podcasts or follow the link in the comments. #AECtech #Architecture #DesignTechnology #TRXL
I posed this same question to an architecture firm recently as part of a strategy. I think we need to turn the premise on its head a bit: 'time savings' or 'reduced hours' to accomplish a task is the wrong metric to understand the impact and pressure on the business model. Among architects, experience tells us that there is rarely any reduction in hours spent on a project when dramatically more 'efficient' and 'time saving' tools are employed. Instead, we see the expectation that the professional produce more (options, renders... in the BIM era we've certainly seen document sets balloon in size, etc). Standards of care become elevated, expected deliverable quantities increase, and (best case) quality might improve. So as I would frame it: The problem becomes the professional being responsible to do more, better, with the same (or often less) fee. However it's framed, the solution does seem to converge on finding a way to illustrate the business value of a creative professional to successfully orchestrate systems, processes, and knowledge to a positive outcome for the client.
Evan Troxel Listened to this today. The thing that stuck wasn't the pricing question, it was what sits underneath it. I think "charge for judgment" sounds right, but it's incomplete. Judgment on its own is just an opinion with seniority behind it. Subject to bias, recency, and gut feel. We've all sat in rooms where "my experience tells me" was the argument, and nobody could challenge it because there was nothing structured to do so. For me, the real shift is this. A building is the frozen outcome of every decision made during its production. The product was never really the building. It was the quality of those decisions. And right now, that decision layer is completely unengineered in most practices. No traceability, no evidence structure, no way to know if the same mistake is repeating across projects. So when seven hours replaces three months, the question isn't what do you charge. It's what you are actually selling now. I think the answer is knowledge-backed decisions, not professional judgment alone.
This is a battle I’m willing to fight.
"It took me forty years to draw this in five minutes.” - Pablo Picasso
Relate it to the value, not the time.
We had this discussion years ago with a quantity take-off/cost estimating company when offered our solution for radically speeding up that process. The management saw the opportunity but was hesitant to change their billable hours business model. So they asked their BIM experts who, no surprise, shot the idea down to protect their own jobs. Pointing out this problem (people looking after their own intetests rather than the company's) to the management did not change anything because it probably was a convenient excuse for them to continue business as usual.
Evan Troxel, I was just in this exact conversation today in another thread, and the answer keeps landing in the same place. The billable hour was never the value. It was the container we put the value in because it was the only thing we knew how to count. Hours are visible. Judgment isn’t. So we invoiced what we could measure and buried what actually mattered inside it. AI doesn’t destroy the value of architecture or engineering. It destroys the container. And that’s terrifying if your business model lives in the container, and completely fine if your business model lives in the judgment. The firms still counting seats in 2027 won’t have lost to AI. They’ll have lost to the firms that finally answered a question the industry has been avoiding for 30 years: what are we actually worth when the work is done instantly? The reckoning isn’t coming. It’s already here. Most firms just haven’t opened the invoice yet.
The one thing to remember is they are hiring for expertise. Architects, engineers, specifiers, consultants are always needed. They will all need to review, edit and approve. There needs to be a stamp of approval and accountability. That my friends comes at a cost. No matter what tools you find or use to make your job more efficient, you know the efficiency will give you new tasks. Maybe some tasks will allow more creativity. Your expertise has great value.
Interesting that legal is and will continue to use the hourly billing model and those guys seem to be doing pretty well? Maybe there is something we can learn from other industries that seem to have managed to create sustainable businesses and client relationships around the hourly business model.
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