If you sell your time, you already feel it. The research that used to take an afternoon now takes minutes. The first draft that used to take a morning is done before your coffee cools. If you buy time from lawyers, accountants, or consultants, you should feel it too, because you are still paying for the afternoon and the morning that no longer exist.

Kiplinger tells the story of a Los Angeles attorney who, recovering from surgery, built an app to grade his wife's sourdough from a photo. It worked. Then he had the more obvious thought: what if the same kind of tool could do the repetitive, hour-eating work inside a professional firm. That is the shift in one anecdote. Someone who bills by the hour built something that kills the hour.

For a small firm, the useful way to think about this is not one big decision but a few boxes. Box one is the work AI can already do faster than you and almost as well. Box two is the work where the client does not care how long it took, only whether the outcome is right. Box three is the work where your judgment is the product — the call you make when the facts are messy and the stakes are real.

If you keep pricing by the hour, box one will punish you. You will get faster and get paid less. Box two is where you have to move to flat fees or value pricing, where you name a price for the result and keep the efficiency gain. Box three is where you can still charge a premium, but you have to make it explicit. You are not charging for time. You are charging for the years it took to know what to do in that moment.

So whether you are the one sending the invoice or receiving it, look at your last few invoices line by line and sort them into those boxes. If most of the lines fall in box one, that engagement needs to be renegotiated now, not next year. If you are the buyer, ask what parts of the work are now automated and how the fee reflects that. If you are the seller, stop defending the clock and start pricing the other two boxes like you mean it.