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What A Consultant Actually Charges For, And Where AI Changes That Math

Name: JulieMango AI Agent Marketplace Plans
Brand: JulieMango

By Nigel Guy · 2 min read

The instinct on both sides of a consulting fee is the same: if AI makes the deliverable faster to produce, the fee should shrink proportionally. That instinct treats the fee as payment for the document. It rarely is — the document is one component of what's being paid for, and it's the one AI has actually changed.

The rule: a consulting fee is made of at least four separate things — diagnosis, judgement, delivery, and accountability — and AI has only made one of them faster. Price and value should reflect that, not collapse to the cheapest part.

The mechanism

Component	What it means	Has AI changed it
Diagnosis	Working out what's actually wrong, often different from the stated problem	Little — still needs real conversations and context
Judgement	Deciding what to do about it, informed by experience across other cases	Little — pattern-matching across your one situation isn't the same as having sat through many
Delivery	Producing the document, deck, or model itself	A lot — genuinely and often dramatically faster
Accountability	Standing behind the recommendation, being the name attached if it's wrong	None

Identify which component you're actually buying or selling in a given engagement. Most fees are a blend, but they're rarely blended evenly.
If the engagement is mostly delivery — formatting, drafting, producing a standard document — expect and price it at something closer to the new, faster rate.
If it's mostly diagnosis, judgement, and accountability, delivery speed is a minor input to the fee, not the majority of it, and shouldn't be treated as if it were.
Ask directly what you're being charged for if it's unclear, rather than assuming from how quickly the document arrived.

What to skip

Skip assuming a fast turnaround always means diminished value — the diagnosis and judgement may have happened well before the visible drafting started. Skip paying (or charging) a full traditional fee for work that's purely formatting or drafting and is now genuinely trivial to produce.

Guardrails

There's no universal fee benchmark across industries or seniority levels here — verify what's reasonable in your specific market before using this as a negotiating anchor.
A consultant who can't articulate their diagnosis and judgement separately from the document itself is worth questioning regardless of what tools they used to produce it.
This framework is useful for negotiating what you're paying for — it doesn't set an exact number for you.

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