Skills and expertise are available from the collective. Here is what that does to the people selling and performing them today.
What is at the doorstep today works for a specific kind of use case: structured data, mature processes, and the mind-numbing jobs people do not want and do not do nearly as well as an agent. For the use cases I brought to the founders, a few places in our sector are ripe: quality management, post-market surveillance, clinical resupply, maybe CRO contract management. Hospitals were out of scope for that conversation, and there are clear opportunities there in value-based and pay-for-performance incentives.
Are we all doomed? Maybe, but not "yet." No start-up is disrupting validated processes tomorrow, though AI is already helping inside them. Whether you validate the old way, CSV, or the modern way, CSA, leaning on vendor audits and the supplier's own verification, the vendor's evidence only covers the vendor's half. Requirements, risk assessments, proof against your process, training, and periodic review stay in-house, as does the signature confirming it all. That signature is not ceremonial. Under federal law a quality or C-suite executive can face criminal charges for a regulatory violation they neither knew about nor intended, simply by holding the position responsible for preventing it. No autopilot signs that. In a regulated business, a good share of the six dollars is the price of someone being accountable. This is moving too. The FDA is using AI itself and its guidance is heading the same way, so the work people alone cannot keep up with, or do not want to do, will get better, and the ways to verify it will follow.
What am I doing about it? Judgment is not on the block, not yet. The article draws the same line: AI takes the intelligence work, the rule-based tasks, and leaves judgment to people, because judgment comes from experience built over years of practice. It also expects today's judgment to become tomorrow's intelligence as the data piles up, which is the "yet" in my sentence above. For now, judgment is in short supply: the background, education, training and experience that does not come from an agent. I am not burying my head in the sand either. This wave is sharpening what I think and what I can simplify with software as service. Which brings us back to the demo. I believe we can approach HCAHPS with better transparency across the board. Check the demo link below. It's a data point away from helping a lot of people. The premise is a connected ledger that traces a hospital's funded programs to the patient-experience questions they target, the scores, and the dollars at stake.
If anyone is curious about my candidacy with this start-up, that is another topic.
Takeaway
Sequoia Capital published an article this spring, "Services: The New Software." For every dollar a company spends on software, it spends six on the people who run the process around it, and the next generation of software companies will sell the outcome, without billing any hours. Copilots were the warm-up. Autopilots are at the doorstep.
I fielded a recruiter's reach-out recently. I answer about one in twelve, mostly out of curiosity. This one was an AI-native, services-as-software start-up, squarely in that bucket. They had the goods, started in consumer products and back-office functions with ambitions to scale into our sector. What I saw is the definition of the future: agents tuned to deliver a business outcome, without a bench of people billing for data gathering, stakeholder interviews, assessments, readouts, or sticking around for managed services. The bill ties directly to the outcome. Set-up takes a person and a half for a few hours.
The impact is disruption to two categories at once, services and software. Traditional consulting firms are on the block. I imagine some retired partners are raising an eyebrow while collecting their pensions. I am in it too. I spent many years building consulting offerings and the partner channels for software, and I am still busy offering both in my practice today.
So naturally I asked: is this true, and when am I obsolete? I ran the math over a sample of contracts I have been negotiating. The six to one holds, some higher, some lower, and this is coming. I am on the six side. How nervous am I? A little. Details below.