I remember back in 2023, people were talking about this idea of creating an AI version of themselves and then charging per access to it. That sounded crazy to me. Why would someone pay for access to an AI that's trained on your information when they could just use ChatGPT that's trained on all the information available online?
But it turns out they were mostly right.
Not only are people going to pay for access to AI agents, they already are. It just doesn't look quite the way people imagined it would. Take my agency, for example.
The number one asset at our agency is the people, but the number two asset is definitely our cloud skills.
I never would have thought a set of marked down documents could be so valuable, but we've now put thousands of hours into developing and iterating on them. Now, all the services we provide for our clients still involve a human, but most of the work is done by Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini in some cases.
The Assumption is that over time, more and more of the work will be turned over to these agents, and humans will spend more of their time on what they're best at and enjoy most, building relationships and applying judgment where necessary.
So when you hire us, you aren't merely paying for access to an AI agent, but that is part of what you're paying for. And these days, I'm getting more and more People asking if they can just have access to the AI, they'll say something like, how about you just train my team how to use your work clothes? And I don't have a good way to do that right now, but even if I did, I have no idea how I would price something like that.
And I think this is just something we have to figure out as an economy.
How do you price and sell an AI agent? On one hand, it's just a series of markdown files. And sure, maybe there's some database connection or sophisticated file structure, MCP servers, but most of the value is in those markdown files.
I suspect many people will be hesitant to pay a heavy price tag.
But on the other hand, we're now seeing that these AI agents can produce very high quality work. We're personally only using AI where it does a better job than a human could. So I don't have any answers here.
I just think it's an interesting open ended question for now.