The Commoditization Clock

The Commoditization Clock is a framework for pricing and scoping course creation retainers against the moment a client decides to build in-house. The category description names the core risk directly: clients may eventually bring this capability in-house as tools become more user-friendly. That risk is not uniform. It scales with how much of your deliverable is authoring labor versus governance, integration, and compliance work. A client watching a producer turn a PowerPoint deck into a SCORM module in iSpring Suite, or watching an AI avatar present onboarding content in Colossyan, sees a short path to doing it themselves. A client whose course must sync completion records into an HR stack, satisfy audit trails, and survive a compliance review sees a long one. Price the first kind of work as a project, and price the second as a retainer. Forrester's September 2026 finding that private AI deployments outperform public ones for B2B marketing is the same logic applied to content: shared, generic output is easy to replicate, and governed output is not.