Humans Are Going to Be Expensive. Most Won't Be Worth It.

There will be two kinds of service providers in five years: those clients compare to AI, and those clients pay a premium to protect them from AI. The difference isn’t talent.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I’m not sure the conversation around AI and work is getting at the real issue. Everyone’s talking about which jobs will disappear, which skills will matter, how to “stay relevant.” But from where I sit, almost 20 years in creative services, first as a freelancer, then running a studio, the shift feels different than that.

Anything that can be explained, repeated, or templated is now on a path to zero value. Design, writing, code, strategy, all of it is becoming commodity work. Not bad work. Often genuinely good work. Sometimes better than what average humans produce.

The humans who remain will be rare, expensive, and judged much more harshly than before.

So the question becomes: what are the expensive humans actually paid for?

I used to think it was skill. Better taste, more experience, sharper instincts. And those things still matter, but they’re the baseline now. They get you in the room. They don’t keep you there.

The humans who stay valuable, the ones clients pay a premium for, aren’t selling output anymore. They’re selling certainty. They absorb risk so other people can move forward without second-guessing. They make the path clear when everything feels ambiguous.

AI hallucinates. It can convince you of anything with complete confidence. Expensive humans do the opposite. They validate what’s actually true. They’re the ones you trust when you need to know something is real, not just plausible.

And that’s what senior people actually do. Not work harder. Not deliver more. They make clients feel safe.

Most of us in the service business are accidentally training clients to see us as replaceable.

Every time we answer the same question again, re-explain what’s included, re-send a timeline someone already had, chase approvals that are sitting in inboxes, we’re signalling something we don’t mean to signal. We’re saying: the knowledge lives in my head, my inbox, my availability. Without me responding, you’re stuck.

That feels like value in the moment. But it’s actually fragility. It makes the relationship dependent on constant communication instead of shared clarity. And clients can feel the difference, even if they can’t name it.

If expensive humans are paid for certainty, then certainty has to be visible. Not promised. Not implied. Actually visible, at any moment, without asking.

Decisions legible. Progress obvious. Constraints explicit. Something both sides can point to and say: this is real, this is current, this is what we agreed, this is what happens next.

That’s trust infrastructure. And building it is one of the ways to stop being compared to AI and start being the person clients pay to protect them from the chaos AI creates everywhere else.

We stumbled into this about 18 months ago at our studio. The same problem kept costing us: one late approval would trigger a week of delays, shifting every dependent task and eating margins fast. We burnet time and money on PM tools, but they were all built for internal teams. Clients don’t want to learn complex boards or deal with permissions and notifications. They just want to know what’s happening, what’s next, and what they need to do, without logging into anything.

So we started simple. Figma mockups with the key info, shared as a link, updated weekly. It worked better than expected. Fewer questions, faster decisions. So we built it out properly, a Framer microsite with a page for each client. Even better. Calmer relationships, clearer expectations, healthier margins.

So we built ProjectLink, and now it’s open to anyone who wants the same thing. One link per project. Scope, timeline, deliverables, status. No logins, no onboarding, no complexity. Just shared truth that makes you look like the professional who has their shit together.

The service providers who thrive in the next decade won’t be the ones with the best portfolios or the most impressive client lists. They’ll be the ones who stopped spending their energy on logistics and started spending it on the work that actually matters.

We have more tools than ever, more ways to communicate, more automation. And yet so many of us still feel buried in email threads, status updates, and “quick questions” that eat entire afternoons.

The real value is in strategic thinking. Deep decisions. The kind of judgment that requires context, taste, and the willingness to be accountable for outcomes. If you’re spending your best hours on logistics, you’re competing in the wrong category.

Check out ProjectLink and ping me if you want to jump on a call.

Love.
Stef