Adapting with AI Part 3 of 3: Efficiency Isn’t a Discount. It’s an Upgrade
A client pushes on price because AI made your firm faster. Cutting your fee is the wrong response. Redirecting that capacity into higher-value work is the real move, and the one worth explaining clearly.
From the eBook Adapting with AI: Running an Efficient Team in a Market That Won’t Sit Still By Jason M. Blumer, CPA | Founder and CEO, Thriveal | Sponsored by Melio
In Part 1, we looked at the email every firm owner dreads and the gap between what clients believe about AI and what’s actually happening on the ground. In Part 2, we walked through what it really takes to build an AI-ready team; the timeline, the change management, the prompting skills.
Now we get to the conversation that ultimately matters most: what do you actually say when a client pushes on price?
The Value Conversation
There’s a version of this story where you read Marcus’s email and cut your fee. That version ends badly. Once you’ve priced yourself as a commodity, the only direction is down. There’s another version–and it starts with understanding what efficiency actually buys you in professional services.
Efficiency Isn’t a Discount. It’s an Upgrade.
In manufacturing, efficiency means more units in less time. The savings flow to the price. That logic makes sense when the product is identical regardless of who makes it.
Professional services don’t work that way. When AI cuts your processing time by 30%, you don’t produce 30% more tax returns. You free 30% of your team’s cognitive capacity, and what you do with that capacity is the whole game. The firms that will win this era are the ones who redirect it toward work that was previously out of reach: proactive anomaly alerts, rolling cash flow forecasts, advisory conversations that used to get squeezed out by the month-end close.
Same fee. Dramatically different scope. That’s not holding the line on price; that’s building a stronger case for it.
The honest caveat: this window doesn’t last forever. Commoditization is coming for certain service lines: basic reconciliation, standard reporting, routine categorization. This will happen within two to three years (and is already happening to some degree). When it does, baseline prices on that work will fall, and that’s appropriate. The firms that spend the next 24 months redirecting freed capacity into higher-value services won’t feel that pressure the same way. They’ll have already moved upstream.
You’re not paying less because we’re faster. You’re actually getting more because we redirected what faster generative AI tools have made possible.
The Rescoping Conversation
When a client like Marcus pushes on price, there are two ways to hear it.
The defensive way is: he wants to pay less.
The accurate way is: he wants to understand what he’s paying for.
That’s a better conversation to have–and you can lead it.
Acknowledge his instinct first. He’s not wrong that AI is changing the economics of basic bookkeeping. That’s true. We have to reframe the question: the issue isn’t whether to reduce the price for work that’s getting faster. The issue is what becomes possible when you take that freed capacity and point it at what he actually cares about – in Marcus’s case, exit readiness and strategic planning.
Then get specific. Not vague promises about “more value.” Specifically the promise of a new way you and your firm can work with clients like Marcus. We can provide our clients weekly anomaly alerts, rolling 13-week cash flow, email checkins (generated by AI), quarterly benchmarks against his industry, and a dedicated advisory track for exit readiness on a milestone basis.
We have to sell different services now as we redirect our team’s capacity to higher value services. This is not all about becoming more efficient. Some clients will accept this ‘value redirect’. Some won’t. The ones who won’t were probably already shopping you on price and they’d have churned anyway when someone undercut you by 20%. The ones who do accept your value redirect are buying judgment, partnership, and outcomes. Those are the clients worth building a firm around.
Writing Back to Marcus
Which brings us back to Thursday afternoon, and that email sitting in your inbox.
Instead of being annoyed with his email (like I was), here’s what a firm that has done the work gets to say:
Marcus, you’re asking exactly the right question, and I want to give you a straight answer.
Yes, we use AI. We use it on processing, on initial analysis drafts, on research. It has made us faster and reduced errors. The time that used to go to those tasks now goes to work you’re actually seeing: the anomaly alerts we send before you ask, the cash flow projections that land in your inbox at the start of each month, the benchmark reports we added last quarter. For example, we leverage embedded tools like Agent Mel in Melio to handle the heavy lifting of payments data inquiries in a secure way. It gives us the speed of AI with the security of a professional-grade system, allowing us to be far more precise and efficient on your behalf.
You’re not paying less because we’re faster. You’re actually getting more because we redirected what faster generative AI tools have made possible. That’s the right use of AI in a professional services firm: not a discount, but an upgrade.
If the scope we have isn’t the right scope, I’m genuinely open to that conversation. If exit readiness is the priority right now, let’s redesign the engagement around that. But I’d rather have that conversation from a position of clarity about what you’ve been getting, not in response to a pricing pressure that I think is pointed at the wrong thing.
Let’s talk.
The Firms That Will Still Be Here
The question underneath Marcus’s email, actually underneath all of these conversations, isn’t really about AI. It’s about whether you’ve built something worth paying for. That’s what pricing our professional services has always been about, even before AI.
AI is accelerating a reckoning that was always coming. The billable hour was already a fragile foundation. The commoditization of routine work was already underway before generative AI arrived. What AI has done is compress the timeline and sharpen the stakes. The gap between firms that have built their value around judgment, relationships, and outcomes and firms that have built it around time and tasks, is about to become impossible to ignore.
The good news is that you’re reading this. Not because this book is the answer, but because the fact that you’re asking the question:
“Am I behind? And if I am, what do I do about it?”
Asking this question means you’re not the kind of firm owner who waits until the pressure is unbearable to move. You’re the kind who moves first, even when the path isn’t fully clear. And we are very clear now that everyone needs to be moving towards deploying AI.
The firms that navigate this well won’t be the ones with the best AI tools. They’ll be the ones who treated this moment as what it actually is: not a technology upgrade, but an invitation to finally build the firm they always meant to build. One where the team’s time goes to work that requires human judgment. Where clients pay for outcomes they can feel. Where the question “are you using AI?” gets answered not defensively, but with genuine pride, because the answer is yes, and here’s exactly what it made possible for you.
That firm exists. It’s being built right now, by owners who decided to lead through the uncertainty instead of waiting for it to resolve. The window to join them is open. It won’t be open forever. Marcus’s email was a test. Not of your pricing. But of your clarity, the clarity of your message to the market you serve. And now you’re ready to pass it!
← Part 2: Running an Efficient Team in a Market That Won’t Sit Still
This content is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial, legal, tax, or accounting advice. Melio does not provide professional advisory services. Always consult a qualified professional before making financial or business decisions.
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