The IT services market is undergoing a transformation. This is not just about economic cycles. It reflects a permanent change in customer expectations and investment decision-making. Artificial intelligence is challenging traditional operating models across the industry and forcing organizations to rethink where customer value is created.
Read the summary (AI-generated, human-reviewed)
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Technology is increasingly valued for the business outcomes it delivers, not the solutions it implements.
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AI is reshaping traditional value creation and challenging assumptions about what customers actually pay for.
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Success depends on the ability to combine technology, business understanding, and human expertise.
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Future partnerships will be built on shared goals, measurable outcomes, and value sharing.
There is currently a great deal of discussion about weak demand in the Finnish IT services market. IT investments are being assessed more carefully than before, new projects are being launched more cautiously, and price competition has intensified.
If the market is viewed only through the challenges faced by individual consulting companies, it may appear that the importance of technology is fading. However, data on AI adoption points to the opposite trend. According to Statistics Finland, by spring 2025, 38 percent of Finnish companies employing at least ten people were already using AI technologies. Among companies with more than 100 employees, the figure had reached 68 percent, and within the information and communications sector, 80 percent.
Eurostat comparisons also place Finland among the leading countries in Europe for corporate AI adoption. The importance of technology is therefore not decreasing. Quite the opposite.
What has changed is the basis on which investments are made. Technology is no longer valued for its own sake. It must deliver measurable business benefits.
AI challenges the traditional logic of value creation
There is already strong research evidence of AI's impact on software development productivity.
In a study by GitHub and Microsoft Research, software developers using Copilot completed a task approximately 56 percent faster than the control group. McKinsey research found that generative AI accelerated activities such as writing new code by 35–45 percent and documentation work by 45–50 percent.
These figures should not be interpreted to mean that entire software projects will be completed in half the time. Writing code is only one part of the overall process. Nevertheless, the direction is clear: the same professional can produce more within the same amount of time. As a result, the amount of work itself becomes a less meaningful measure of value.
This creates an interesting paradox in the IT services industry. If we sell time, and technology enables us to use less of it, better productivity may result in lower billable revenue. An IT company should invest in top talent, AI, automation, and improved ways of working, even though success in these investments may reduce the number of billable hours.
The issue is not time-based pricing itself. The issue arises when the amount of work becomes the measure of value. And the lowest hourly rate is not the same thing as the lowest overall outcome cost.
The value of expertise is increasing
The more AI automates technical work, the more important non-automatable expertise becomes.
Organizations need people who understand their customers’ businesses, identify the right development opportunities, and see the bigger picture formed by systems, data, processes, and people. The outcomes produced by AI also need to be evaluated, and someone must take responsibility for them.
AI will not necessarily make expertise less expensive. It may make it even more valuable.
For this reason, competition based solely on hourly rates can lead to outcomes that are not in the customer’s best interest. If the supplier optimizes billable hours and the customer optimizes unit costs, neither may be optimizing what ultimately matters most: business value.
We need a new kind of partnership
If the value of technology is increasingly measured by the outcomes it delivers, the relationship between customer and technology partner must also be reconsidered.
The construction industry has approached this through alliance models, where clients and suppliers commit to shared goals and to sharing both risks and benefits.
This model cannot be copied directly into IT services, but the underlying idea is compelling. The incentives of the customer and the technology partner can be genuinely aligned.
Imagine a project where the targeted business outcome is achieved through AI and expert knowledge with significantly less effort than originally expected. In a traditional time-based model, the customer benefits from a smaller invoice, while the supplier’s revenue decreases. In a different model, the value created could be shared. In that scenario, the customer and supplier would pursue the same objective: achieving a better result as efficiently as possible.
How should value be measured?
The answer cannot always be a financial ROI figure. Technology investments also aim to improve customer experience, accelerate processes, reduce risks, increase quality, and strengthen the ability to renew and adapt. Not all of these benefits can be immediately converted into euros.
That is why we need a broader understanding of value realization alongside ROI. Even before an investment is made, we should be able to answer three questions: What do we want to change? How will we know that change has happened? How will the value created be shared?
This is how a technology investment becomes business development rather than merely an IT project.
The IT company of the future sells outcomes
Time-based pricing is not going away, nor should it. In many situations, customers need capacity, specialized expertise, or additional resources to support their own organizations.
Alongside it, however, we need more commercial models built around shared goals and outcomes. AI makes this change even more relevant because it is changing productivity in ways that current models do not fully account for.
Technology is not what customers ultimately pay for. Code is not value. A billed hour is not value. Even a completed system is not automatically value. Value is created only through what these things enable within the customer’s business.
That is why the successful IT company of the future will not primarily sell technology or hours. It will sell the ability to create meaningful outcomes for its customers. And that is precisely why the next major transformation in the IT industry is not ultimately technological. It is a transformation in value creation.
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