We’re entering a structural shift in B2B that most service founders are still underestimating. AI is collapsing the cost of building software, which is in turn dissolving the traditional boundary between “services businesses” and “software businesses”. The result is a convergence that is already reshaping how value is created, delivered, and sold.

In this short video, our founder Simon Penson explores what this means for B2B founders and how it should fundamentally change the way you think about your go-to-market strategy.

The real shift: from products to problem ownership

The most important implication of this convergence isn’t technological, it’s commercial.

If software creation is getting cheaper and faster, then differentiation stops being about what you build and starts becoming about what problem you own.

Simon’s framing is simple but powerful: start with the visceral pain your customer is trying to solve, and work backwards.

Not features. Not tooling. Not even solutions in the traditional sense. But the core, often emotionally charged, business problem that sits underneath everything else.

For most B2B service founders, that shift requires a reset in how you think about positioning and GTM.

Value is the real product now

A useful way to see this shift is through valuation.

When businesses engage advisory or consultancy support, they aren’t really buying “insight” or “strategy”. They’re buying one thing:

A better, more valuable business.

That naturally translates into one metric: valuation.

Yet most businesses don’t have a clean way of understanding what drives it. They rely on fragmented dashboards, outdated heuristics, or generic benchmarking tools that don’t reflect how value is actually created in modern B2B businesses.

The emerging opportunity is to change that.

To build systems, increasingly AI-enabled, that can:

  • Understand what a business is worth in real time
  • Diagnose the drivers behind that valuation
  • Prioritise the specific actions that increase it

This is where the convergence becomes commercially interesting. Because suddenly, advisory, software, and services all collapse into a single loop: measure → diagnose → improve → re-measure.

Two ways to think about your GTM in this new world

If you strip everything back, there are really only two lenses worth considering when designing go-to-market today:

1. The “metrics engine” model

You anchor your proposition around a key business outcome – valuation, margin, retention, pipeline efficiency – and build a system that:

  • Measures it clearly
  • Explains what drives it
  • Helps improve it

This is where services start to look like software. Not because you’ve built a SaaS product, but because you’ve productised intelligence and action.

2. The “frictionless journey” model

The second lens is more experience-driven.

If you’re close enough to the customer, you can reimagine the entire journey – removing friction, simplifying decisions, and compressing time-to-value.

AI and modern tooling mean you can iterate experiences faster than ever before. What used to require heavy engineering or operational overhead can now be tested and deployed in weeks, sometimes days.

The opportunity here is not just optimisation, it’s reinvention of the customer experience itself.

The new positioning challenge: software disguised as services

One of the most interesting implications of this convergence is how you position yourself to market.

The most effective B2B businesses going forward won’t look like pure software companies or pure service companies.

They will look like:

Software businesses masquerading as service businesses

Or equally:

Service businesses powered by software-level intelligence

That distinction matters because it changes how buyers perceive both value and scalability. It also changes how you package, price, and expand your offering over time.

Start where it actually matters: your ICP

None of this works without one foundational step — and it’s the one most teams rush or skip entirely.

Deep, structured understanding of your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

That means:

  • Talking directly to customers
  • Understanding the real language of their problems
  • Mapping how value is actually perceived inside their organisation
  • Identifying where urgency and budget truly sit

Without this, even the most sophisticated GTM model becomes theoretical.

With it, everything becomes sharper, from messaging to product design to sales motion.

If you’re not doing this regularly, it should be the number one priority at board level.

The takeaway

The convergence of services and software isn’t a future trend – it’s already happening.

And it forces a simple but uncomfortable question for every B2B founder:

Are you still describing what you do as a service, when your market is starting to expect software-level clarity, speed, and measurement?

The businesses that win this shift won’t just adapt their tools.