Unlocking Value Podcast: Episode Fourty-Two

In this episode – the fifth conversation in our mini-series on technology-driven disruption – John is joined by Deb Ashton, who co-founded Certinia in 2009 and now runs its customer experience. Certinia is a professional services automation platform, and through the advisory boards and customer programmes Deb runs across three continents, she hears from a wider range of services firms than almost anyone – from teams embedded inside the big technology companies to large independent consultancies.

Deb’s starting point is one that stuck with John: services and technology firms have spent years helping everyone else through change, and are now on the receiving end of it themselves. The hardest part, she says, is commercial. Firms are being pushed from billing for time towards pricing for value – but value is far harder to measure than hours, and AI breaks the old link entirely when a task that took a person five days takes an agent minutes.

She points to one firm that spent fifteen years turning a familiar argument over price into a conversation about value – eventually building a repeatable method around it, with payments tied to the results it delivered. Tellingly, the clients who saw real value were the ones who came back for more.

But none of that works, Deb argues, without the basics underneath. A firm can’t put AI to good use until it has clean, connected data and consistent ways of working – the unglamorous foundation that everything else depends on.

Beyond the pricing question, Deb and John discuss:

  • Why the line between running projects and delivering them is blurring, and what changes when agents move onto the front line of client work.
  • A project agent that reads a Slack channel and meeting notes, spots the risks and issues, and updates the log itself – and what that frees a project manager to do instead.
  • The split she draws between the “intelligence” work agents are good at and the judgment work that stays with people.
  • The efficiency trap: if AI saves everyone a couple of hours a day, how a firm turns that into revenue or margin rather than letting it evaporate.
  • The build-versus-buy question – the “topic du jour” – and the hidden long-term cost of building your own AI over the weekend.
  • One firm’s move from 70% of the work done by people to 70% done by agents – and why it puts agents through the same training, even on empathy, as new joiners.

If you lead a professional services firm and you can feel the commercial model changing under you, Deb offers a clear-eyed view from across the market of what’s working – and why the unglamorous groundwork of clean data and disciplined delivery is what makes the rest possible.

🎧 This episode is available to stream below or on any of your usual podcast platforms (such as Spotify and Apple Podcasts)

Host: John Howard, Partner at Garwood Growth
Guest: Deb Ashton, Founder of Certinia

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