Hi Reader!

An architect friend asked me something over coffee a few weeks ago and I still haven't managed to put it down.

If AI halves the hours she spends on a project, does that saving go back to the client? Or are they paying her for the skill?

She's well ahead of most in her use of AI, she's just asking the uncomfortable question: the better she gets, does that mean invoicing less?

Or does it mean invoicing more - more clients, and a premium for being the practice that delivers faster?

The maths, first

Across the 2,800 or so professionals we've trained, the measured average time saved is four hours back, per person, per week. If you bill by the hour, that's a large chunk of change especially if you're dealing with 50+ people.

Same four hours, three different endings. Bill hourly and the saving walks out the door. Charge a fixed fee and the margin improves without anyone noticing, which is lovely right up until a client asks why the fee hasn't moved. Price the outcome and finishing sooner is worth more, not less.

So what does value based pricing actually mean?

It gets talked about like a philosophy. It isn't. It's one decision: stop charging for the input and start charging for the thing the client came for.

Nobody ever wanted your hours. They wanted the planning decision, the tender in on time, the building open in March rather than June. The talent and expertise that your team brings.

The awkward bit

Time is stranger. It gets counted everywhere: timesheets, hours budgets, project programmes.
But only ever as a cost, hours times rate. There isn't one person whose job is to ask what a month saved is worth to the client.

I didn't have a tidy answer for my friend. But I was delighted to have this week's guest on Chatting GPT who does.

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​This Week on ChattingGPT : Dr. Atif Ansar

His point: 'Every single company has a CFO. I have never met a chief time officer.'
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That's this week's guest, Dr Atif Ansar, Co-Founder of Foresight and an academic at Oxford, who has spent fifteen years measuring what happens to the world's biggest projects between the promise and the ribbon cutting. Dams that double their budgets. A rail line in Hong Kong that spent four years building its schedule and then opened four years late. He makes the case that capital is globally abundant and time isn't, and that we should start writing contracts that guarantee a maximum time rather than a maximum price. I asked what that would do to professional indemnity and he didn't flinch, although my guess is that the insurers will would. He also answered my architect friend without ever having met her: most clients, he reckons, would happily pay more for a project guaranteed to finish on time, because for them time is revenue.
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🎧 Apple Podcasts​
🎧 Spotify​

And this is where the four hours comes from . . .

None of this works if the hours don't actually come back. Six courses are open. Find one that suits you.

Copilot:

Somebody signed off those licences and most of your team opened the chat box, asked it to tidy an email, thought 'that's quite good' and went back to work. Copilot AI Skills Autumn 2026 starts on Monday. Four mornings for €500, you'll be building Notebooks from your own files and Agents that take on month-end commentary in a matter of weeks. Leave with confidence and experience at doing these things, not a list to fill in later.

Somebody in your finance team is still matching invoices to POs by hand.

You know exactly who. Still rewriting the same variance commentary every month, still at the desk at seven on the last Friday because it won't tie out. Copilot for Finance Teams starts 29 September. Four afternoons, €600. Reconciliation, supplier checks and month-end in plain English, and on the last session they bring a live problem off their own desk and leave with it finished.

Core AI for everyone else:

Proposals, reports, research, client emails, the same document rebuilt from a blank page every time. Core AI Skills from 4 November, four lunchtimes, €600. It's tool-agnostic, so it doesn't matter whether your firm has landed on ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot or Gemini. This is the one to send a whole team on, because it works the same for the QS, the marketer and the ops manager.

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​Not this side of Christmas?

Fair enough. Core AI Skills Winter 2027 runs from 12 January and Copilot AI Skills 2027 from 14 January. Same courses, new year, and January is a much better month to learn something than most people admit.

And if you sell property for a living.

​AI Training for Estate Agents Winter 2027, from 18 January. Four sessions, 12 to 2, €600, or €500 if you're with IPAV. Comparables researched from an address. One property brief turned into the Daft listing, the MyHome listing and the social post in a single pass. Agents that handle the client communications you currently write one at a time. Every prompt, task and document comes from real property work, which is the whole reason it lands.

Six hours of training against 180 hours a year, per person. That's the only return sum I'm willing to put in writing, because the four hours is measured and the rest is your own arithmetic.

​Browse all public courses >>​

One more thing. We're building a two hour masterclass for the stage after the basics, where you've got a policy, your people are trained, and you're moving into agents. Three questions, two minutes, and it decides what goes in it. Tell us what you need →​

Yours, still wondering who owns the hours,

Maryrose
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PS - big thanks to NR on this one