What Will Your Clients Say They Value — and What Will They Actually Pay For?
I love talking to smart people about the things I'm curious about.
And over the years, I've made a point of regularly checking in with a great human and long-standing trusted adviser, Sharon Austen.
Sharon and I have navigated many companies and transactions together, and our conversations have ranged well beyond the numbers. So, as I've become increasingly curious about what AI might mean for accountancy and professional services, Sharon was exactly the person I wanted to explore it with.
We talked about automation, efficiency, skills and the changing role of the accountant. But one part of our conversation kept playing on my mind afterwards.
What is a client relationship actually worth?
It sounds like an easy question for professional services. Relationships matter. Accountants know their clients. They understand their businesses. Clients trust them. And one of the promises of AI is that by removing administrative work, professionals will have more time to spend developing those valuable relationships.
But Sharon introduced an uncomfortable historical comparison.
People say they value relationships
Sharon's husband spent many years working in banking, including during an era when branches and personal relationships were an important part of the proposition.
Customers would talk about how much they valued being able to walk into their bank. They liked knowing the person dealing with them. They valued the personal interaction and being able to shake someone's hand.
Then online financial services arrived.
Suddenly, if someone could get the product they wanted online at a slightly better rate, many of those supposedly important relationships weren't, in the customer's mind, quite valuable enough to justify the difference.
That creates a fascinating question for accountancy. What will clients say they value — and what will they actually pay for? Because AI is about to give us the opportunity to find out.
Is the relationship really the product?
The reassuring version of the AI story for professional services goes something like this: AI will automate routine work. Accountants will become more efficient. That will create more time for higher-value client relationships.
There is considerable logic to that. Sharon talked about exactly this opportunity: using greater efficiency to create time for the human understanding and relationship-building that sits around the technical work.
But perhaps we need to think more deeply about what makes those relationships valuable.
A client doesn't necessarily value a meeting because another human being is sitting across the table. A quarterly phone call isn't inherently valuable. Lunch isn't inherently valuable. Even being able to say "we've worked with this client for 15 years" isn't, on its own, a value proposition.
The value may lie in something those years of interaction have created.
Context.
Relationships create context
Think about a trusted accountant who has advised an entrepreneur for ten years.
They know the accounts. But they probably know considerably more than the accounts.
They remember the acquisition that didn't work. They know the founder becomes uncomfortable when cash reserves fall below a certain level. They know one director wants aggressive growth while another is thinking about retirement. They know which parts of the business consistently outperform forecasts and which promises are made every year but never quite materialise.
They may know about succession plans, family considerations, ambitions, disappointments and previous decisions. They understand not simply what happened, but often why it happened.
That is context. And context may be one of the most valuable assets we have in an AI-first world.
AI is powerful. Context makes it useful.
Give an AI a generic question and you'll get a generic answer. Give it the accounts and the answer can become more specific. Give it the accounts, previous board discussions, historic decisions, strategic objectives, risk appetite and an understanding of what the owners are trying to achieve, and something much more interesting becomes possible.
The quality of the technology hasn't necessarily changed. The quality of the context has.
That could become a critical distinction as AI becomes embedded across professional services. If every accountancy firm can access increasingly capable AI models, simply having AI doesn't create much competitive advantage. Your competitors can have it too. Your clients can have it. Increasingly, everyone will have access to extraordinary processing capability.
The differentiator could become what you can bring to the model. And a trusted professional relationship may have spent years generating precisely that context.
The accountant who knows why
This potentially changes how we think about the value of an accountant.
Historically, part of the value was knowing the answer. The accountant possessed technical knowledge the client didn't. AI makes access to that knowledge much easier.
But knowledge and context aren't the same thing.
AI might know the tax rules. Your accountant might know why you're asking about them today.
AI might analyse whether an acquisition is financially viable. Your accountant may remember what happened the last time you acquired a company and understand why the board is nervous about doing it again.
AI might identify that the company could afford to distribute more cash. Your accountant might understand that the founder's real priority is preparing the business for succession in three years.
The difference is context. And the richer that context becomes, the more powerful AI itself potentially becomes.
Perhaps relationships and AI aren't competitors
This changes the question.
We often frame the future of professional services as a contest: human relationship versus artificial intelligence.
Perhaps that's the wrong model. The relationship could actually become one of the things that makes the AI more valuable.
Consider a different sequence:
Relationship → Context → AI → Insight → Human judgement
The relationship generates understanding. That understanding creates context. AI can interrogate that context at a scale and speed that would previously have been impossible. The professional then applies judgement to what comes back.
Suddenly, AI isn't replacing the relationship. The relationship is helping unlock the power of the AI.
That feels like a much more interesting future for professional services.
But where does the context live?
There is a problem.
Historically, an enormous amount of professional context has lived inside people's heads. A partner has worked with a client for 20 years and simply knows them. That's valuable while the partner is in the room. It's considerably less useful to an AI system.
So accountancy firms may need to think differently about how client knowledge is captured, structured, secured and made available.
Meeting notes matter.
Previous advice matters.
Correspondence matters.
Decisions and the reasoning behind them matter.
Client objectives matter.
The information needs appropriate permissions, confidentiality and governance around it — particularly in a profession entrusted with highly sensitive information.
But if that can be done properly, years of accumulated client understanding could become something more than individual memory. It could become organisational context. And organisational context could become a significant competitive asset.
Context without judgement is still dangerous
This doesn't remove the need for the human professional.
Sharon was particularly clear about the importance of checking AI-generated outputs, tracing information back to sources and recognising the risks of confident but incorrect answers.
More context can improve an AI's output. It doesn't automatically make that output right.
Somebody still needs to ask:
Does this make sense?
What evidence supports it?
What's missing?
Does this recommendation fit the client's actual situation?
And perhaps most importantly: are we asking the right question in the first place?
That brings us back to the human skills that may become more important as AI improves. Judgement. Curiosity. Challenge. And the ability to understand what the client is really trying to achieve.
So what will clients actually pay for?
Perhaps clients won't pay a premium simply because their accountant is human. The experience of banking should at least make us cautious about assuming they will.
But they may pay for something much more valuable: an adviser who understands their context deeply enough to help them get better outcomes from increasingly powerful technology.
That means the relationship has to do more than feel good. It has to create understanding. The understanding has to create better questions. Those questions need to produce better insight. And that insight needs to result in better decisions.
Perhaps that's how we should measure the value of professional relationships in an AI-first world. Not by the number of meetings. Not by the number of lunches. Not even by the number of years the client has been with the firm. But by the quality of the context those relationships have created — and what we can now do with it.
Sharon made a wonderful observation towards the end of our conversation:
"We will find out how much people value people."
I think we will.
But perhaps we're also about to discover that one of the greatest sources of value created by human relationships is something AI desperately needs.
Context.
And the firms that learn how to combine deep human relationships, rich organisational context, powerful AI and experienced professional judgement may find that the relationship becomes more valuable, not less.
This article reflects a conversation with Sharon Austen and her personal observations on the changing role of AI in accountancy. The views expressed are Sharon's personal views and do not necessarily represent those of her employer.
If you're leading an accountancy or professional services firm and would like to continue the conversation about relationships, context and how they could unlock greater value from AI, connect with Sharon Austen on LinkedIn.