Why would a CFO approve a two hundred thousand dollar CapEx project for an AI agent that will be outdated in six months?
They should not. And soon, they will not.
I believe there is an opportunity for established agencies to emerge as leaders in the space without needing to dominate through gaining market share. The agency who switches to an as-a-service model first will force a reckoning. For decades, we have operated on the CapEx model. Large upfront fees for builds, followed by small tails of revenue for support. This works for ERPs, CRMs, and websites. Assets with a five to seven year useful life.
AI assets have a useful life measured in months.
The model must shift from CapEx to OpEx.
The old way: Client pays to build the bot. They own the IP. Six months later, the tech is old. To upgrade, they pay again. The client bears the full risk of technological obsolescence. The new way: Vendor charges a monthly fee to manage the outcome. It is on the vendor to swap models, rewrite prompts, and manage context windows. If the tech changes, the vendor eats the cost of the upgrade, because keeping the system efficient protects margin.
The client gets a system that always runs on the best available tech. No legacy debt. They pay for a service, not a pile of code. The vendor gets recurring revenue instead of hunting for new projects every quarter. The margin improves over time. As models get cheaper and faster, cost to serve drops, but the monthly fee stays the same. You capture the efficiency dividend.
If you are an agency owner, look at your P&L. If you are eighty percent project revenue, you are selling ice cubes in summer. Start selling the refrigeration.