Whether I'm hiring a website manager, a designer, an accountant, or a lawyer, I ask the same thing early in the conversation:
"How do you use AI in your work?"
A year ago I wasn't asking that. Today it's the single most useful question I have, and the answer tells me more than a portfolio does.
What Changed
The market is putting two demands on all of us at the same time. Become AI-enabled, become AI-first, move faster. And also: don't produce AI slop, don't lose whatever made your work original. Both are fair. Both are being asked of everyone at once, and the landscape has shifted quickly, in Japan and globally.
So when I look for business partners for both GetItDoneWith.AI and anosa.ai, I look for people who know how to use AI to maximize their productivity and deliver better results without compromising quality. Not people who avoid it. Not people who hand the whole job over to it.
The Part Nobody Has Solved Yet: Pricing
I expect pricing to change. If AI lets a task be finished in a fraction of the time it used to take, it makes sense that some of that efficiency shows up in the price. Clients are going to start expecting that, whether or not the industry is ready.
But the other half of this matters just as much. The value of a good professional was never the hours. It's the expertise, the judgment, and increasingly, knowing how to use AI effectively. Producing work faster is not the same as producing more valuable work. A pricing model that charges purely for speed misprices the thing that actually matters.
Which leaves most professions in an uncomfortable middle: the old model no longer reflects reality, and nobody has a clean replacement.
I spoke recently with someone from an accounting firm who was unusually honest about this. They said their pricing model was designed for the pre-AI era and no longer fully reflects today's reality. Many tasks that used to require an accountant can now be handled by clients themselves, with AI. Their conclusion was that the industry will have to rethink how accounting services are priced in order to keep delivering value.
I appreciated that they said it out loud. Most people in that position don't.
And it isn't just accounting. I see the same pressure across profession after profession: the work that used to justify the invoice is exactly the work AI is fastest at absorbing.
The Hard Part Is Finding These People
Many people would agree with me that things should be faster and cheaper with AI. But it's still surprisingly hard to find partners who genuinely understand how to use AI.
In Japan especially, it isn't easy to find business partners who are truly AI-enabled and know how to build AI into their work in a meaningful way. Plenty of people say they use it. Fewer have changed how they actually work because of it.
Those are exactly the people I'm always looking for.
What I Think Is Coming
We're only at the beginning of a broader shift in how professional services are valued. As AI reduces the time required to complete many tasks, pricing models, contracts, and client expectations will all evolve. The firms that get ahead of that conversation will be the ones defining the new terms. The ones that wait will have the terms defined for them by clients who did the work themselves over a weekend.
If you're a professional reading this, the question is worth turning around on yourself. If a client asked you tomorrow how you use AI in your work, what would you say? And would the answer justify what you charge?
How is AI changing your profession? Have you already seen changes in how clients evaluate your work, negotiate pricing, or define the value you provide?