Business has shifted in recent years. Customers are more informed than ever before; prices are contracting, and, in some markets, fees are racing to the bottom.

To make matters worse, Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini can do what an assistant or junior team member could, which significantly changes what can be do and by whom.

Clients are buying differently, and with that the help they need has changed. Tasks that once justified a full team to research, draft reports, or analyse information are now things anyone can ask AI to do if they’re willing to learn to prompt and put it together.

Despite all this, clients remain confused with so many tools and features available, they are still stuck, going round in circles, and this can be an endless look as income and the markets change.

You are not taking the time to study what you want, where you’re going? As we still in the right market and if not, are you prepared to leave it?

The real question you’ve been avoiding
Underneath all of this sits the question you already know you haven’t given enough time to: what really makes your business different in a world where access to information is no longer scarce and things can look the same?

With your business, what’s the thing a client can only get from you, not from a search engine, a chatbot, not from a cheaper competitor who’s also figured out how to use AI, but specifically from you?

The new scarcities are judgment, trust, accountability, and the ability to make a hard call in the customer’s interest, so they keep coming back.

We are inherently looking for deep trust-based relationships.
A real example of this working: IKEA
In 2021, IKEA rolled out an AI chatbot for customer service that, within a couple of years, was resolving roughly half of all inbound customer queries: order status, delivery tracking, and returns.

Rather than just reduce headcount, they looked closely at the queries the bot couldn’t resolve and noticed a pattern.

Those unresolved queries were about room layouts, furniture combinations, and styling. The kind of advice that requires taste, judgment, and a real conversation, not a database lookup.

They realised the demand was always there, but staff were bogged down in routine queries and didn’t have the time to notice it.

Ingka created a new paid-for, video-based consultation service, and retrained roughly 8,500 call-centre staff as remote interior design advisors.

The chatbot handled volume, and the staff managed the relationship by calling on judgement and taste, something the chatbot still can’t do.

That new service became a genuine new revenue line. According to Reuters reporting, revenue from Ingka’s remote interior design channel reached approximately 1.3 billion euros (roughly $1.4 billion) in the 2022 financial year — around 3.3% of total revenue — with Ingka stating publicly that it aims to grow that share to 10% by 2028, partly to appeal to future Gen Z customers.
Here’s the lesson
Let AI absorb the repeatable, low-judgment work, and use that space to sharpen your business.
Take the time to study what AI cannot do in your business.
Reskill your people to fill that gap, because they already have the trust, product knowledge, and client relationships a new hire wouldn’t.
This is the exercise you should be doing with your business: where are your AI tools leaving something unresolved that your team is still best placed to answer?
Where to actually start
A few starting points:
First, map what your clients are already doing with AI themselves. If they’re using it to do the thing you used to charge for, that revenue line is shrinking and will continue to do so.

Next, separate “tasks” from “judgment” in your service offering. Identify which parts of your value are replaceable and which aren’t.

Then decide what you want your remaining team focusing on: something a client can’t get anywhere else.

Finally, give yourself time to work on this. A strategy day once a year isn’t sufficient; it must be a recurring monthly session with only two agenda items: where is this business going, and which of your customers’ needs won’t change in the next 5–10 years?

The businesses that struggle in the future will be the ones that never got clear on their positioning, the problems they solve, and the difference their service makes.

If you’re wrestling with this and aren’t sure what to do next, book a complimentary meeting so we can review your position together and discuss your next steps. Book it here:

Until we meet.

Morton