Frameworks, core principles and top case studies for SaaS pricing, learnt and refined over 28+ years of SaaS-monetization experience.
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Not every activity in a service business is equally amenable to agentification. The conversion process begins with a clear eyed audit of the delivery workflow, separating the work into three categories. For our strategy consulting firm, this audit reveals a striking pattern that the partners have never explicitly acknowledged: most of what clients pay for is not strategic insight. It is the production labor required to generate the evidence base from which strategic insight is drawn.
The first category is production work, the tasks that consume the most hours and involve the most repetitive patterns. In the strategy firm, this category is enormous: competitive landscape research, market sizing and segmentation analysis, customer and prospect analysis, financial and scenario modeling, sensitivity testing, and the heavy volume of slide production, chart creation, and document formatting that turns raw analysis into polished deliverables. Most of it follows well established patterns the firm has refined over hundreds of engagements.
A typical pricing optimization engagement at the firm might consume 400 billable hours. A careful audit reveals that roughly 280 of those hours, about 70 percent, are production work.
The second category is judgment work, the tasks that require domain expertise, contextual reasoning, and the kind of pattern recognition that comes from years of experience. In the strategy firm, this is where the partners earn their rates. The senior partner who reviews a price sensitivity analysis and notices that the data shows an anomalous willingness to pay cluster in the midmarket segment is not following a procedure. She is drawing on a mental model built from two decades of pricing engagements that tells her this cluster usually signals an underserved buyer persona that the client has been ignoring.
The principal who reads a competitive positioning map and immediately spots that the client’s differentiation narrative is vulnerable to a specific competitive entry strategy is not running an algorithm. He is applying judgment that no production process can replicate.
This work cannot be fully agentified today. It can be dramatically amplified by agents that do the production work and surface the right information at the right moment for the human expert to make a judgment call. When the partner no longer spends three days waiting for an analyst to build the price sensitivity model and instead receives it in two hours, her judgment is applied sooner, more frequently, and to a richer evidence base.
The third category is relationship work, the client facing interactions that build trust, manage expectations, navigate organizational politics, and maintain the human connection that enterprise clients expect. In strategy consulting, this category is particularly important because the firm’s recommendations often require the client to make uncomfortable decisions such as raising prices, killing a product line, or restructuring a sales organization. These conversations require reading the room, understanding which stakeholders are aligned and which are resistant, calibrating the message for different audiences, and sometimes having the courage to tell a CEO something they do not want to hear.
A quarterly strategy review with a $100 million ARR client’s executive team cannot be delivered by an agent, and attempting to do so would destroy the trust that the firm has spent years building. This work should not be agentified. It should be protected and elevated, because in an agentic world, the partner’s ability to navigate complex organizational dynamics becomes the primary source of human differentiation.
The audit produces a map: 65 to 70 percent of the billable hours in a typical engagement are production work that can be agentified, 15 to 20 percent are judgment work that can be agent assisted, and 10 to 15 percent are relationship work that should remain fully human. The implications are staggering. The firm has been billing $250 to $300 per hour for work that an agentic system can perform at a cost measured in dollars per task, not dollars per hour. The entire economic foundation of the business is built on a cost structure that is about to be disrupted, and the firm can either be the disruptor or the disrupted.
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