Why Is "I Use AI To Do It Faster" No Longer A Selling Point For My Business?

Because in one week, two governments handed AI access to millions of people for free, and one of the largest accounting firms on earth put a nine figure price tag on the part AI cannot do. Here is what that means for how you sell.

An accounting firm just put a price on human judgment, and it was $100 million.

On August 31, EY announced it will spend $100 million rewarding U.S. employees for what it calls "future-focused" human skills: business acumen, judgment, adaptability, leadership, collaboration. Spot awards up to $500. Individual and team awards up to $25,000 for work that makes a material difference to the firm, according to the Wall Street Journal as reported by Fortune.

Set that next to three other things that happened in the same seven days.

JPMorgan told clients that humanoid robots become economically obvious once the cost of running one falls under $10 an hour. The Pentagon opened AI access to roughly 3 million military and civilian workers. South Korea announced it is giving its entire population free generative AI with no token limits.

Here is the direct answer to the question in the headline. Access to AI capability is collapsing toward free and universal. In the same week that happened, a firm with hundreds of thousands of employees decided the scarce thing worth paying a premium for is judgment. If your marketing says "I use AI to do X faster," you are advertising the commodity and hiding the asset.

I have been on the wrong side of a value proposition before. I have been to prison. I have been through bankruptcy. Both times, the thing I thought I was selling turned out not to be the thing anyone was buying. That lesson cost me years. This one only costs you a rewrite.

Key Takeaways

EY is spending $100 million on bonuses for human skills like judgment and adaptability, which is a public comp benchmark for what a large firm thinks judgment is worth.

In the same week, South Korea committed to free unlimited AI for its whole population and the Pentagon extended AI access to about 3 million workers, so raw access is no longer scarce.

PwC's 2026 analysis of more than a billion job ads found roles where AI amplifies human expertise are growing twice as fast, with 42% faster salary growth, than roles AI makes easy for anyone.

The research says AI helps beginners far more than experts, which means "I know how to use the tool" is the least defensible claim you can make.

Reposition around the judgment you apply, not the speed you achieve, and price the decision rather than the deliverable.

The Problem: You Built Your Pitch On The Thing That Got Cheap

Walk through the last twelve months of your marketing. I will guess you find some version of this: faster turnaround, more content, quicker research, AI-powered workflows, half the time.

I wrote sentences like that. So did most people I know in this space.

They worked. For about two years, being the person in the room who actually knew how to drive these tools was a real differentiator. Clients paid for it because they could not do it themselves and did not know anyone else who could.

Candidly, that window is closing faster than most business owners have noticed.

The reason is not that AI got worse. It is that access got free. When South Korea's "AI for All" program finishes rolling out, a citizen there will have unlimited generative AI as a public utility, roughly the way they have roads. Seoul has set aside about 10 trillion won, near $7.2 billion, for AI spending in 2026, which TechSpot reported is triple the prior year.

When 3 million Defense Department workers get ChatGPT and Grok through a secured platform, as Fortune reported on September 1, the phrase "I have access to advanced AI" stops meaning anything at a dinner party, let alone in a proposal.

Here is the thing. Every business model has a layer where the profit lives. Clayton Christensen called the pattern the law of conservation of attractive profits: when one stage of a value chain becomes modular and commoditized, the ability to earn real margin moves to the adjacent stage.

Hardware got cheap and the money moved to software. Software got cheap and the money moved to data. Model access is getting cheap right now. The money is moving to the layer above it, which is knowing what to point it at and being accountable for whether the answer is any good.

If your offer sits at the layer that just got handed out for free, you are going to feel it as price pressure first. Prospects asking why it costs that much. Longer sales cycles. A client who says they tried it themselves over the weekend.

That is not a sales problem. That is a positioning problem, and no amount of better follow-up fixes it.

The Evidence: Four Findings That Should Change Your Copy

1. The wage premium is real, and it is moving toward judgment.

PwC's 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer analyzed more than one billion job advertisements across 27 countries. It found the labor market splitting into two tracks. "Professionalised" roles, where AI removes routine work so human judgment gets emphasized, are seeing twice the job growth and 42% faster salary growth than "democratised" roles, where AI makes the job easier for non-experts to do.

Read that again with your own business in mind. Is your offer the professionalised track or the democratised one?

2. Entry-level work is being rewritten around senior skills.

The same PwC study looked at 2.4 million U.S. entry-level jobs. The AI-exposed ones are now seven times more likely to demand traditionally senior human skills such as leadership, creativity, and face-to-face interaction. Those "seniorised" entry-level openings grew 35% since 2019 while other entry-level openings shrank 10%.

The market is not asking for fewer humans. It is asking humans to show up further up the stack.

3. AI helps beginners the most and experts the least.

Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li, and Lindsey Raymond studied 5,172 customer support agents given a generative AI assistant, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Productivity rose about 14% on average. For novice and low-skilled workers, it rose 34%. For experienced, highly skilled workers, the effect was minimal.

Sit with the implication. The tool compresses the gap between the beginner and you. Whatever advantage you have that AI can hand to a novice in an afternoon is not an advantage you should be selling.

4. The protected ground is tacit, not codified.

The Stanford Digital Economy Lab's August 2026 update to "Canaries in the Coal Mine," using ADP payroll data, found employment for workers ages 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations now sits about 19% below where it would be if it had tracked their less-exposed peers. Experienced workers show no comparable gap.

Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen point to a distinction that matters enormously for service businesses: employment fell in occupations built on codified knowledge, the kind you can learn from a textbook or a documented procedure, and rose for experienced workers in occupations built on tacit knowledge acquired through practice, mentorship, and repeated exposure to real situations. They are careful to call these descriptive patterns, not proof of causation.

MIT's David Autor has argued the same thing from the other direction in his NBER paper Applying AI to Rebuild Middle Class Jobs: used well, AI extends the reach and value of human expertise rather than erasing it. And David Deming's work in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that jobs requiring high social skill grew nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the U.S. labor force between 1980 and 2012, with the strongest wage growth going to people who paired social skill with technical skill.

None of this is new news to the economists. It is new news to your sales page.

The Solution: Sell The Decision, Not The Draft

Michael Hyatt's newsletter this week was, to me, the small business version of the exact same trade EY just made. Five ways to use Claude's design capability to make presentations better.

Read it closely and notice what is actually being sold. The tool did not make Hyatt a better presenter. He already knew what makes a slide land and what makes an audience lean in. He applied that taste to a faster tool.

He has been public about the mechanics of this. He has said a newsletter that once ate more than four hours a week now takes about sixty minutes, with the same or better quality because the research goes deeper. And when an AI detector flagged one of his newsletters as fully machine written, including a passage about his 92-year-old father, his response was the sharpest line I have read on this all year: "These tools can't see who brought the ideas."

That is the whole game. Who brought the ideas.

So here is the system I use, and the one I teach. I call it moving from output to outcome ownership. Three layers.

Layer one is access. The model, the subscription, the login. Two governments just gave this away in a single week. Charge nothing for it. Stop mentioning it.

Layer two is operation. Prompting, workflow, automation, the mechanics. This still has value, but it is depreciating fast, and the Brynjolfsson research tells you exactly why: it is the layer where a novice catches up quickest. Treat it as table stakes, not as your pitch.

Layer three is judgment. Knowing which problem is worth solving. Knowing when the output is confidently wrong. Knowing what your client's board will actually approve. Knowing which of three good options fits this particular business, this particular quarter, this particular owner who is exhausted and cannot absorb another initiative.

Layer three is what EY is paying up to $25,000 a pop for. It is also the thing you already have and are not charging for.

When I rebuilt my own offers around layer three, the conversations changed. I stopped competing on turnaround time. I started getting asked different questions: what should we do, not how fast can you do it. Those are better questions, and they are attached to better budgets.

The uncomfortable read is simple. If your value proposition is access to AI capability, you are selling something two governments just gave away. If your value proposition is judgment about what to do with it, EY just published your comp benchmark.

Practical Steps: Rewriting Your Positioning This Week

1. Audit every claim in your marketing for the word "faster." Pull your homepage, your top three sales emails, your LinkedIn headline. Highlight every promise about speed, volume, or efficiency. Anything that survives only because of speed is a claim your prospect can now buy for free.

2. Write down the last five judgment calls you made for a client. Not the deliverables. The moments where you told them not to do the obvious thing, or caught something the data missed, or read a room correctly. These are your tacit knowledge assets and they are almost never on your website.

3. Reframe one offer around the decision instead of the deliverable. Take your most commoditized service and rewrite the promise. "Twelve blog posts a month" becomes "a content position your competitors cannot copy, plus the twelve posts that execute it." Same work. Different thing being bought.

4. Put a price on being wrong. Judgment is worth money because bad judgment is expensive. Quantify it honestly for your clients: what a wrong hire costs them, what a mispriced offer costs them, what six months in the wrong market costs them. That number is your anchor.

5. Run this prompt against your own positioning. Paste your current about page and top service description into Claude or ChatGPT with the following.

[The Job]
Analyze my business positioning and identify which of my claims depend on access to AI capability rather than on my judgment and experience.

[The Background]
I run a service business. Below is my current about page and my primary service description. Access to advanced AI is becoming free and universal, so any claim that rests on tool access or raw speed is losing value. Research from PwC shows the market is shifting pay toward judgment, leadership, and human-intensive skills.

[The Deliverable]
Give me three sections. First, every claim in my copy that a prospect could now get for free or near free, quoted directly. Second, the judgment-based value I am implying but never stating outright. Third, five rewritten headline options that lead with judgment instead of speed.

[The Questions]
Ask me any questions you have.

6. Change one proof point in your next sales conversation. Instead of showing how fast you produced something, walk the prospect through a decision you made and why. Show the fork in the road and the reason you went left. That is the demonstration that cannot be replicated by a free tool.

7. Raise the price on your judgment-heavy offer, not your delivery-heavy one. If you have a strategy intensive and a done-for-you package, the intensive is the one with pricing power now. Test a 20% increase on the thinking and leave the doing alone.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does this mean AI skills are worthless now?

No. PwC found the average wage premium for AI skills reached 62% in 2026, up from 57% the year before. AI skill still pays. The point is that it is becoming a requirement rather than a differentiator, the way spreadsheet fluency did. Build it, but do not build your entire market position on it.

I am a solo coach, not a Big Four firm. Does the EY story apply to me?

Yes, and more directly. EY has scale, brand, and audit licenses to fall back on. You have judgment and relationship. When a large firm spends $100 million signaling that judgment is the scarce input, it is validating the exact asset small operators already own but rarely price correctly.

How do I prove judgment to a prospect who has never worked with me?

Show your reasoning in public. Publish the decision, not just the result. Write up a call you made, the options you rejected, and why. Case studies that explain the fork in the road outperform case studies that only report the outcome, because the reasoning is what cannot be copied.

Should I stop telling clients I use AI at all?

No. Disclose it plainly. Michael Hyatt includes a disclosure link in every newsletter, and that transparency builds trust rather than eroding it. Just move the mention out of your headline and into your process notes, where it belongs.

What if my clients only care about price and speed?

Then you are talking to buyers who are shopping the commodity layer, and they will keep finding someone cheaper. Change the buyer or change the conversation. Ask what a wrong decision in this area has cost them before. The answer usually reprices the whole engagement.

The Close

Four things happened in one week. A bank priced a robot's labor at $10 an hour. A defense department handed AI to 3 million people. A country handed it to everyone. And an accounting firm set aside $100 million for the part none of that touches.

Those are not four stories. They are one story told four ways.

The machine layer is being given away. The judgment layer is being bid up. You are standing on the second one and describing the first one.

I am not telling you to abandon the tools. I use them every day, and I will keep teaching people to use them well, because operating them badly is its own tax. I am telling you that the sentence at the top of your website is aging faster than you are.

Michael Hyatt is right that these tools cannot see who brought the ideas. Neither can your prospects, unless you tell them.

So tell them. Not what you run. What you decide.

The tool is free now. You are not.

About the author

Jonathan Mast is the founder of White Beard Strategies, where he teaches non-technical entrepreneurs to use AI to amplify the skill and experience they already have. He runs the AI Insiders membership and leads live AI trainings for business owners, and he speaks on practical AI adoption for small businesses. He spent years selling the wrong thing before he figured out what people were actually buying, which is why he is unreasonably interested in the difference between a deliverable and a decision.

Why Is “I Use AI To Do It Faster” No Longer A Selling Point For My Business?

Contents

Key Takeaways

The Problem: You Built Your Pitch On The Thing That Got Cheap

The Evidence: Four Findings That Should Change Your Copy

The Solution: Sell The Decision, Not The Draft

Practical Steps: Rewriting Your Positioning This Week

Frequently Asked Questions

The Close

Sources

How Do I Know If My AI Automation Quietly Stopped Working?

Am I Paying for a Better AI Model, or Just a Better-Known One?

What Happens To My Business If The AI Company Behind My Tools Gets Bought?

If AI Can Now Run My Business Tasks Without Me, Which Three Should I Hand Over First?

About the Author

Jonathan Mast