From Artisan to Factory: How Services Businesses Are Becoming Software

Those are the two things that can go side by side here and how you solve that customer's problem How you bring software to a bear to create your factory to solve that customer's problem.

You can have the balance between those two.

Sometimes you want to create something specific but deterministic.

Sometimes you can have the flexibility non-deterministic.

And you

can have, as you said, a whole assembly line, if you will, of deterministic and non-deterministic parts.

To take an example from other industries, there are parts of fast fashion that are completely manufactured, never been touched by human hands, never seen a natural fiber.

And that is part of the expectation.

But at the high end, where it's all hand-stitched and the parts of the value is the specific human input, But the materials, the inputs, the things that land on the artisan's work desk are designed to be as predictable and deterministic as possible.

And lots of effort goes into that.

And I think that's the analogy for us.

It's getting rid of, not getting rid of, but capturing the parts where the human is the bottleneck and freeing up the parts where it does require customization and specificity and alignment to a particular human buyer's needs.

Yeah, I agree with where you're going with that.

I also see that there's a bit of a different, at least in my mind, a way that we're sort of going to titrate apart the commodity service components.

And what do we mean by commodity is that you can have interchangeability on the basis of price without sacrifice of value.

commodity gets this dirty word in the sense that, oh, it's like oil or minerals is a fungible thing.

But that's not really the way I think about it.

It's where you can have price sensitivity without quality loss, right? So you can actually do that.

And then you have a value centric domain where you cannot necessarily view I am willing to pay more if the value outcome is significant delta.

And so I think you can see what is today a very blurry messed up market in those two worlds can kind of separate a bit.

But to your point, I think the factory way of working the way of thinking that we're going to have a highly repeatable quality consistent automated components of this transcends that separation of the market, right.

And I think it's almost a continuum of there'll be much more automation and standardization at the commodity service level.

And not that there will be less automation at the high value bespoke level, but it will have to be highly dynamic and you fix it.

So I think in our business, for example, we're working in finance.

So that is a service if you are getting capital, etc, is a highly consultative domain.