Whammy Two is occurring with accelerating frequency these days. It’s the client who uses their own AI to check your work and then demands you review and respond to their version.
This whammy has two parts: the effect on your relationship with the client and the effect on your fees.
The Client Relationship
All of us in knowledge based firms know that our relationships with our clients are key to success, longevity, and the growth of the impacts we create for them. We ask people to share their needs, wants, and desires and we work hard to create the impacts that are meaningful to them. There is an intimacy in this work that is not found in other business transactions.
Trust is weakened
So it is natural to feel taken aback when a client asks their favorite AI platform to check your work and then sends you a report they want you to respond to. It conveys a lack of trust, or a desire to create a “gotcha moment” that puts you on the defensive.
These feelings seriously interfere with the trust and warm relationship the professional wants to cultivate with their clients.
I am not willing to underestimate these feelings. We may be experts, but we are also human beings and our feelings play a role in our work every day. Our feelings of doing our best for our clients, loyalty and satisfaction when they succeed are real and not to be discounted.
It’s virtually impossible to repair the damage after the fact so I advocate preempting it before any offer is made.
Effect on Your Fees
To do this, your engagement letter must include your position on Ai generated reviews.
There are 3 options:
- You can state clearly and ask the client to initial a clause in your engagement documents that states you will not review or respond to any AI generated review of your work. It’s important to talk about this during your discovery conversation so it’s not a surprise that causes the client to change their mind. Taking this position means your fees are proportional to the significance of the IMPACTs you create.
- You can state that you will look at and respond to one AI generated view of your work . It’s important here to declare that your expert opinion is the final answer. You will not defer to an LLM generated answer that contradicts your own expertise. You can add a 10-15% surcharge to your fee for allowing this.
- You can agree to receive, review, and respond to as many AI generated reviews of your work as the client sends you. You can choose whether to stand by your expert point of view and recommendations or whether you will make changes that the AI version recommends.
This sounds horrible to me however you can make this conditional on a 35-50% (or more) surcharge on their fee. That’s the condition under which you will accept their insistence on unlimited AI reviews.
Time is not a factor
Notice that I didn’t mention the time it will take to review and respond to AI generated reviews of your work. I don’t want you to fall into that trap. If you mention the extra time, then you’ve turned your fee into something that compensates you for your time rather than for the IPACTs you create.
It is tempting to do this so beware and be careful not to.
What’s really important for your position is this: There are many AI apps and platforms now and that number is growing.
Remind the client that any AI is a collection of vast numbers of documents and points of view. The goal of AI technology is to synthesize and amalgamate all this information. This smooths outliers and variations. It will never be able to respond effectively to any unique data or information. It will tell you those things are wrong.
The knowledgeable expert sees and contextualizes the unique data and documents of their clients. This person doesn’t want to get rid of the anomalies, they want to use them appropriately for the client’s benefit.
When the client chooses to ignore this truth about AI and demands your review and response, you should put a surcharge on their fee because you are adding an outcome/IMPACT to what you’re creating for them.
If you haven’t yet had a client demand that you respond to their own AI review, you will. It is happening every day.
Better to prepare for it by choosing your position and building it onto your discovery or client conversations.
I am finding that that the growth in AI is causing a lot of stress for the small/solo firm. Feel free to schedule a meeting with me to discuss.
