“It is not as good as what you do. But it is good enough, and it costs about forty quid a month.”
That sentence was said over a flat white, by a contact at an agency, to a freelance UX consultant I am calling Marcus. Marcus has been freelance for eleven years. His day rate was £550, and he raised it to £575 the way he had raised it every year for a decade, because that is what you do when the work keeps coming.
Then two of his three agencies stopped booking him. The third cut him back from retainers to quarterly sprints. The agency had replaced most of its UX research with an AI tool that generates user personas, journey maps and wireframe annotations from product briefs and analytics data. Not better than Marcus. Nobody claimed it was better than Marcus. Good enough, at forty pounds a month, against five hundred and seventy-five a day.
I keep coming back to that phrase, good enough, because it is the phrase doing the actual damage in this economy. Almost nobody is being replaced by something better than them. The displacement conversation people imagine is about AI beating experts. The one that actually happens in agency finance meetings is about AI being roughly adequate at a price that makes the comparison silly. And eleven years of genuine expertise turns out to sit on the wrong side of that comparison, which is not something the expertise itself can fix.
What happened to Marcus’s income after that is in the book, and so is the reason he did not lower his rate, which is the part I think about most. It is not stubbornness, or not only stubbornness. Lowering your rate in consulting is an admission of something, and there is a whole life built around the number, and so the rate card on his website still says £575. Why it still says that, and what he is telling himself while it does, is where the story goes in Chapter 4. It is one of five stories in that chapter, and his is the one freelancers tend to go quiet at.
This is from Chapter 4 of The Next Rung, my book on what AI displacement actually looks like from inside. It’s open for pre-order now: