Recurring revenue is income that arrives on a schedule because a client has agreed to keep paying, monthly, quarterly or annually, rather than because you won the work again. For a firm that sells projects, it is the difference between starting every quarter at zero and starting it with most of the revenue already agreed….
AI SaaS is subscription software whose core work is done by an AI model, usually a foundation model from a provider such as OpenAI, Anthropic or Google, called through an API and wrapped in a product that does one job for a defined customer. The model supplies general capability. The product supplies everything the model…
A micro-SaaS is a small software-as-a-service business that solves one specific problem for one narrow group of customers, run by a single founder or a handful of people and usually funded by its own revenue rather than by investors. The “micro” describes the scope, not the ambition: one job, done well, for people who will…
A productized service (productised, in British spelling) is a service sold the way a product is sold: a named outcome, a fixed scope, a fixed price and usually a fixed timeline, delivered by following the same method every time. The client buys a known thing instead of commissioning a bespoke project, and the provider stops…
To productize (productise, in British spelling) is to turn something you deliver case by case into something defined, priced and repeatable that a client can buy without it being designed from scratch. For an expert or a firm, it means taking what you know, the way you diagnose a problem, the steps you always follow,…
The future of professional services, and of consulting in particular, is being shaped by three shifts happening at once: AI is taking over a large share of the tasks professionals used to bill for, the business model built on selling those tasks by the hour is being repriced, and the firms themselves are having to…
Knowledge work is work whose output is information and judgment rather than physical goods: advising, analysing, writing, designing, planning and deciding. Peter Drucker gave it the name in 1959, and for most of the time since, the scarce thing in it was knowing: having the information, the expertise and the time to turn one into…
The jobs AI will replace are, for now, mostly not whole jobs but tasks inside them: drafting, summarising, first-pass research, routine design, data entry, scheduling and the clerical work that surrounds professional services. Whole occupations disappear only where those tasks were most of the job. Everywhere else the job changes shape, and the people who…
Will AI replace consultants? Not as a profession, but it is already replacing a large part of what junior consultants used to do, and it is changing who gets hired at the start of a consulting career. The consultant who survives is the one whose value was never in producing the analysis, but in knowing…
The future of consulting and agencies is being decided by one question: what are clients still willing to pay for once AI can produce the thing that used to fill the invoice? Consulting firms have always sold analysis, and agencies have always sold production. AI now does a large share of both, quickly and cheaply,…