When you work at a huge software firm, there’s a behind-the-veil effect when you realize this: 1-to-1, non-scalable relationships are a massive part of the business model.

Every such firm has its own services, some free, some paid,  from customer support, technical services, and training all the way up to full-service digital agency and consulting services. All provided by full-time humans, not code.

On the same token, large consultancies and agencies package more IP with their services, the bigger they get. Sometimes even a micro-SaaS.

Conversely, if a software company is smaller, there are usually fewer services around it, maybe just customer support. And when a consulting firm is small, there isn’t much IP.

Thus, most small firms in the B2B space are one or the other – solutions or services. With this distinction come very different company structures, sales and marketing processes, and brand messaging.

But LLMs might change that.

Small services firms can quickly build custom software products for clients – if they use LLM assistance in research, coding, system administration, UX design, and data management.

Small product firms can create  bigger customer support,  account management, and client services programs – if they leverage LLM capacities in research, content creation, sentiment analysis, data science, and categorization.

In either case, it’d be humans leading this work, of course. But a special kind of human – ones who know how to ask their LLMs the right questions.

(This was originally published on Art of Message – subscribe here)