Hours were never the product

The column asked why Indian IT still bills by the hour after it said AI made it faster. The working is contractual, not cultural.

A time-and-materials contract does not have a place to put “the same outcome, fewer hours.” It has a place to put a rate and a volume. If you make the work faster and leave the contract alone, you have two honest choices: earn less, or invent more hours. Most organisations will not choose the first. So the hours come back as review, as governance, as a second environment, as a person watching the model.

That is not hypocrisy. It is a unit of sale doing what it was designed to do.

What would have to change

Someone has to buy an outcome — a write that happened, a reconciliation that closed, a store that could act on Tuesday — and someone has to accept that the hours inside it are the vendor’s problem. That is a different conversation from “we have Copilot.” It needs a baseline, a gate, and a person who will sign for a miss.

I will not help a room dress the old contract in a new tool. I will help them find one piece of work they can actually hand over, write the approval, and price that. One is enough to prove the unit can move. Ten assistants on an unchanged SOW will not.

The metric I ignore

Headcount down, revenue up, billed hours flat. That chart is the industry telling on itself. If the hours did not move, the work did not move. The model is sitting in the same contract, generating the same invoice, with better screenshots.