@Pete Winn and I sat down with the one and only @Shawn on The @Good Stuff Podcast to chat about how AI is upending the billable hour in professional services.
Got into some awesome territory and covered things like:
➡️ Shawn's outer loop / inner loop framework - how to think about what to hand to AI and what to protect, with client relationships on one side, core IP on the other, and everything in between up for grabs.
➡️ The judgment sandwich - you need judgment to point the tools at the right problem and judgment to assess whether what came back is any good. AI handles the middle.
➡️ 1,000 true fans meets 10 agents - Shawn's reframe of Kevin Kelly's idea that you only need 1,000 real customers to have a real business. Now you also have 10 AI agents as your workforce. One person with the right clients and the right stack can do what used to require a small firm.
➡️ Enshittification - Shawn references Cory Doctorow's pattern where platforms first serve users, then extract from them. AI labs have the same structural incentive, which is why depending entirely on one of them is a trap.
➡️ The death of the commodity career - AI isn't just replacing tasks. It's replacing the career path that turned raw graduates into people with genuine judgment, through years of doing the work.
Definitely worth a listen!
Thanks for coming on @Shawn, already looking forward to the next one!
