Weekly Update 1: Agents, What We Are Seeing

Giraffe works with really interesting clients around the world. We see agentic workflows being deployed across property — development, asset management, professional services — earlier and at greater depth than most. This is a share of what we're observing, as we observe it.

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1. Billing by the hour is more broken than it used to be.

Giraffe and AI and a whole variety of other tools compress jobs that used to take months into days, and days into hours. In a market where billing by the hour is foundational — and in property professional services, it very much is — that creates tension that is only going to tighten.

Billing by the hour is defensible when complexity and productivity are stable. If a contract review reliably takes two hours, regardless of who does it, and whether they do it this year or next, billing two hours is rational. The well-known alignment problem — slower work earns more — can be solved by competition in a stable market.

That logic holds until productivity becomes unstable. I'm doing design tasks that used to take 4 hours in 4 minutes. I'm not having to review tenders or spin up a project management tool. It's a whole new world. The hours don't vanish from the invoice immediately — but the justification for them increasingly does.

Clients are beginning to notice. This tsunami is going to hit hard.

Is it outcome-based pricing? Service as software? I'm not sure — but the existing commercial frameworks are increasingly distant from the tech reality.

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2. Every knowledge worker is now a manager.

Agents do tasks. If your people are directing agents, they are managers — but without the traditional organisational overhead. No employment contracts, no HR reviews, no compensation committees. The infrastructure of managing humans simply doesn't apply.

It is very interesting. There has always been an ego dimension to seniority. Leaders gravitate toward the interesting work. That's partly why organisations accumulate layers — leaders like headcount: they need people to lead. Agents are absorbing the work no one wanted to do: the repetitive, the low-judgment, the detailed-but-not-intellectually-demanding tasks that consumed skilled people's days and went largely unexamined on the timesheet.

A manager can now lead a project delivery team made up entirely of agents. The HR and project management overhead isn't automated — it becomes redundant.

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3. The creative stack is being repriced.

This may seem nihilistic, or that I don't understand the Jevons paradox. But a concrete example from the last few weeks has been revealing for me: I rebuilt Giraffe's entire website (this website!) without opening Figma or commissioning a single consultant. I started in Webflow, double-clicked into a component inside a component inside a component, couldn't reach the asset I needed, and closed it. Built the whole thing as text files directly in Claude. No tender, no cost estimates, no kickoff meetings.

What was notable wasn't the output. It's a classic SaaS website. But the process — the conversation stayed strategic and it never felt like I was being forced into tedious roles. When feedback came back that the font was wrong or the page didn't work, I didn't have this crushing realization I'd be in the CSS for six hours. I just passed the feedback on to Claude and it was fixed.

The tools that dominated the creative workflow — Figma, Webflow, and their equivalents across every discipline — were built for a world where the gap between intention and execution required specialised software and trained operators. That gap is closing. It's very clear to us that AI and agents restructure the entire business.

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4. App of the week: vertical transportation modeller.

25 minutes to build. $6 in compute. The deliverable: an animation, a visualization, and an optimization algorithm — packaged and ready to distribute.

We are still working out what the economics here mean at scale. The cost of delivering quantitative analytics, presenting it well, and distributing it widely through Giraffe has dropped to a point where it is confusing. The business models built on the scarcity of this kind of capability are looking dicey.

I still believe expert judgement is absolutely critical. It can be massively scaled. (By being a manager of agents.) In a very opaque environment, rapidly shifting, it's not like we as a SaaS vendor can feel very secure. Our bet is to keep building the highest quality tool in the most efficient way we can.

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