Every business is a tech business

The Acceleration and Optimisation of Value

Picture Elon Musk in South Africa in 1990. Same brain. Same restlessness. Same intolerance for being told something can't be done. Let's say he digs a hole. It's probably a worse hole than the person next to him. But the people around him notice he's sharp so they let it slide.

At the end of the long day, he has moved some dirt, and tomorrow he will move some more. He's not watching Godzilla with chop sticks catch a reverse parking rocket. He's not growing industry defining companies.

The distance between the 1990 man digging holes and the man we see each week taking peculiar positions is not his IQ, or grit. It's leverage. Once he achieved access to technology, he was able to turn his capability into something greater.

The AI conversation that keeps getting missed I believe, is not whether AI is smarter than us. There's a long list of people who predicted it would exceed all human intelligence for many decades. The interesting question is what happens to human value when the multiplier changes for more people. Human output has always been talent times leverage. The multiplier has always mattered more than the talent.

What code actually gave people

For the last forty years, the multiplier was code.

Not because code is magic, and not because it does what it's told perfectly forever. Anyone who has run a software team will tell you that's a fantasy. Systems decay. Requirements shift. Half the job is maintenance.

The reason code is the great multiplier is much simpler: it collapses the marginal cost of repetition to almost nothing. You solve a problem once, well, and then it solves itself ten thousand times while you sleep. That's it. That's the whole trick. And it's the only mechanism humans have ever found that reliably converts incremental effort into exponential return.

Everyone else is stuck in incremental land. You get better at your craft. You charge a bit more. You take on one more client. You hire, and you manage the hire, and now you have a management problem as well as a craft problem. This is honest work and it compounds gently, but it compounds like a savings account, not like a system.

The people who escaped into exponential land got there because they could build.

Who got past the hurdles and why

Here's where it gets interesting. And where I want to be careful, because the lazy version of this story is easy to tell, but it's wrong.

The easy version says code was for boring people. That creativity and big thinking locked out a certain type of person. That's not quite correct. Traditional programmers are high in conscientiousness, openness, and introversion. And openness is the trait that covers imagination, curiosity and creative thinking. Programmers score high on it. So, they are not the dull ones.

So what was the hurdle?

Orderliness and introversion. Add in an unusual tolerance for precision or sitting alone with an abstract idea and refusing to leave it alone. Add in the classic 'things orientation' rather than 'people orientation', and you have a fairly specific profile.

Now think about who that profile excludes. As above it's not the creative people. It's not the problem solvers.

It excludes people whose intelligence is social, commercial and embodied. The person who reads a room. The person who knows, in the first ten minutes of a meeting, what a client is actually worried about, which is never the thing they said. The person who has developed judgement by seeing four hundred variations of the same situation.

That's the knowledge economy. Advisers, accountants, lawyers, consultants, designers, agency owners. People whose entire value is pattern recognition built from lived repetition. And they have been sitting outside the gate of technical ability for forty years, watching the exponential world happen to somebody else.

Why we revere the builders

This is why Musk and Bezos occupy the place they do in the culture. It isn't that they can code. It's that they hold both halves at once: they can imagine a world that doesn't exist, form a commercial view about why it should, and build the system that gets there, all in the same head without a translation layer in between. For most of business history those two halves have lived across separate groups of people. Getting a whole group of diverse people to work cohesively together has been where the value sits. Where enormous value sits.

Solving the gap between the why and the how is where most businesses fail, and where most well laid plans go to die.

The moat was never the how

There's a story that does the rounds about a CEO who looks at a graphic designer's quote and says, why would I pay you to do this work for me, when I can get AI to do it?

The designer retorts: how about you use AI, I'll use AI, and we compare.

The CEO says: that's not fair, you know what you're doing.

The designer says: I'll send the contract through.

It's a good story, but people take the wrong lesson from it. The lesson is not that experts beat amateurs at using AI today. That's true, and it's temporary, and anyone building a career on it is going to be unpleasantly surprised.

The real lesson is about where the expertise sits. The designer's advantage isn't that they can drive the tool better. It's that they know what to ask for and they know when the answer is wrong. Specification and evaluation. Those two things are downstream of judgement, and judgement is downstream of having seen it before.

And in our profession there's a third layer that no model touches. Accountability. When advice goes wrong, someone is answerable. A licence is at stake. A person is at stake. That is not a feature you can prompt for, and it is a significant part of what people are actually buying.

It won't be a kid in a basement

The dominant narrative says a startup will come along and eat professional services from the outside. I don't think that's how this goes. Not in advice, not in law, not in accounting.

The outsider has the how and not the why. They build a beautiful product for a problem that isn't the problem, and the advice tech graveyard is full of elegant software written by people who had never sat in a first appointment.

The professional now has the why and now the how. Go back to that original archetype. The Elon Musks. All this now in one person. The disruption is coming from inside the profession. And I've already seen it.

The numbers make this urgent

If you need a reason to care about this right now, look at the supply side. Australia has lost 50% of the profession in under eight years, and Rainmaker's more optimistic long-run scenario still has Australia sitting at 11,000 to 12,000 advisers in twenty years' time.

Now the demand side. An estimated 15.9 million Australian adults have unmet advice needs. Fewer advisers. Vastly more people who want advice. A pipeline that is structurally throttled by a four year education and professional year lag, which no amount of goodwill fixes quickly.

There is no version of that arithmetic where the answer is more hours from the same people. The only way through is leverage. Which happens to be the exact thing that just became available.

Every business becomes a tech business

Thirty years ago, email turned every business into a communications business. You didn't get to opt out because you were a plumber. Ten years ago, social media turned many businesses into media businesses.

The next step is now every business becomes a tech business.

Not a software company. A business where a meaningful part of what you deliver is delivered by a system you built, rather than by a person you employed. That is the shift, and like the two before it, it is not really optional. The only variable is speed.

So let's be clear about what that looks like in practice, because an AI-native advice firm is not a firm that uses ChatGPT to write file notes. That's the spreadsheet version of this. It's fine, and it's not the point.

An AI-native firm is one where the adviser's judgement has been encoded into systems that run without them. Where discovery, modelling, scenario work, document production and ongoing review are built once, properly, by the person who actually understands why each step exists. Where the adviser's time goes to the two things that genuinely require a human being: the conversation, and the accountability.

And to answer the question every adviser reading this is already asking: none of that is a compliance problem. Best interests duty doesn't care whether the analysis was assembled by a paraplanner or a process you built. It cares that a qualified human formed the view, can defend it, and is on the hook for it. That has not changed and won't.

The prediction

Within five years, the top decile of advice firms in this country will serve three times the clients per adviser that they do today, and their pricing will not be a percentage of anything.

Not because they worked harder. Because the people who can grow a professional services company, finally got to build.

Every adviser will get there at a different speed, and that's fine. Some firms will move this year, some in three years, some when a client asks them why the fee is what it is. But the advantage compounds, and it compounds early. The firm that starts building in 2026 isn't twelve months ahead of the firm that starts in 2027. It's twelve months ahead on the first system, and by then it's building the second one on top of the first, and it has learned what to build next by having built something. That's the whole point of exponential returns. The gap does not stay linear.

The best part is the constraint is no longer aptitude. Nobody has to go and learn to code. The constraint is appetite: whether you're willing to spend some part of your week building instead of only delivering.

That's a much better problem than the one we had last decade. For forty years the knowledge economy was locked out of the only mechanism that reliably produces exponential returns, and we told ourselves it was because we weren't technical enough. It wasn't. It was a translation layer, and now that layer gone.

The next generation of great advice businesses are going to be built by people who have never once thought of themselves as developers. For those who want to move on from digging holes, the opportunity is to get started now.