Ravical launches platform for consultancies considering life after the billable hour

Firms “aren’t struggling to adopt AI” but they do “struggle to understand how to price it and incorporate it into a sustainable business model”, according to Ravical CEO Joris van der Gucht. In a bid to remedy that, the software firm has launched a new platform, designed to help professional services firms move away from billable hours, and into new models based around value.

“The way work is delivered and priced is changing,” explains Van Der Gucht, who is also co-founder of Ravical. “The economics of the billable hour are breaking down in real time. When a VAT return that used to take three hours takes twenty minutes, firms face a choice, to either absorb the margin loss or build a model that prices what the work is actually worth to the client. Ravical is built for the second option.”

According to a release from the company, AI has subjected consulting and auditing models to structural forces “the billable hour was not built to withstand”. With compliance margins under pressure from automation, a talent model that makes senior expertise scarce, and clients who now access the same AI tools as their advisers and expect more in return, firms must radically overhaul their organisations if they are to make the most of new AI tools.

Pointing to examples of what this looks like in practice, Ravical notes the case of KPMG and Grant Thornton earlier in 2026. The Big Four firm negotiated a 14% fee reduction from its auditor, in a move which Ravical believes is prompting an industry-wide reckoning that the billable hour is no longer fit for purpose and exposes firms without an alternative.

The Advisory Workspace is Ravical’s proposed answer to these pressures, as a system that runs the work, prices the outcome, and keeps the human adviser at the centre of the client relationship.

Ravical says the platform continuously assesses a firm’s client book and spots the work that needs to happen before anyone has to ask for it, across client communications, financial data, documents, and external triggers. From here, it executes that work end-to-end through pre-built and custom workflows, pulling the right client context, identifying the relevant specialist inside the firm, and producing a draft ready for expert review and sign-off, with a human in the loop at all times. Importantly, the platform operates at the firm level rather than the individual level, meaning it becomes available to every advisor, across every client, at any time, while client context, workflows, and pricing history accumulate in the platform and compound over time.

For most firms, the real bottleneck they face every day is the capacity to deliver advisory work,” Van Der Gucht goes on. “The client demand is there, but firms can’t consistently act on it at scale, therefore the only way to unlock that is to change how the work itself gets done.”