The Billable Hour is Dead; Long Live the Billable Hour — Kevin Madura + Mo Bhasin, Alix Partners
Jul 23, 2025 · 17:04
Kevin Madura and Mo Bhasin from AlixPartners argue that AI is reshaping knowledge work by compressing upfront data ingestion from 50% to 10-20% human effort, enabling analysis of 100% of data rather than the top 20%. They detail three use cases: categorization via structured outputs achieving 95% accuracy on 10,000 vendors in minutes; enterprise-scale RAG that democratizes access to siloed data by teaching LLMs to call APIs; and structured extraction from documents using schemas and log-prob-based confidence scoring. They caution that AI investments face a paradox—89% of CEOs plan agentic AI but NBER finds no earnings impact—and stress that success requires people skills, demos, and a focus on NPS and ROI over chasing shiny new tools. The episode concludes that once Excel-powered LLMs work reliably, AGI will be here.
