"Ease of doing business" long sat in the category of soft factors. A customer felt it in an account manager who called back quickly, in a quote that was correct without three rounds of emailing back and forth, in an invoicing process without surprises. It was not really measurable, because it resided in people and their availability. Anyone who wanted to serve more customers with the same ease needed more people.
That premise is no longer true everywhere. Part of what determined ease is work that is now largely or partly done by AI: answering intake questions, putting together a quote based on earlier agreements, answering a status question without anyone having to look up a file. Where that happens, ease shifts from a scarce good that depends on staffing to a baseline that any supplier can reach with the right setup.
The shift is not that "AI now does everything". It lies in three layers that run through each other:
The balance between these three layers determines what ease of doing business looks like at a company. A company where the first layer is large can still get a customer a quote in the evening. A company where that same layer is still entirely human work cannot, regardless of how dedicated the team is. That difference is not a matter of effort. It lies in which part of the process has already been handed over to a system that does not wait for office hours.
Ease of doing business is rarely named explicitly in a conversation with a customer, but it is present in every step of a process. A few places where it becomes visible:
These effects are closely tied to other dimensions. Anyone looking at how quickly quotes go out the door when part of the drafting has been taken over often sees the same shift that also determines ease of doing business: less waiting time because a system has already prepared the first version.
Not every company benefits equally from the same shift, and not every company gains equally from it. That depends on:
That last point touches on another dimension: how warranty and risk commitments shift when AI takes over part of the assessment. Ease of doing business and risk acceptance often pull in the same direction: the more reliably a system is allowed to decide independently, the less waiting time a customer experiences.
The question of whether AI should also change your own staffing deployment falls outside what a comparison like this answers. Its own legal requirements apply there, and those are not addressed here.
The ease a customer experiences is rarely judged on its own. It is compared, usually unconsciously, with the last supplier that customer did business with. That makes ease of doing business a dimension that shifts as soon as a single competitor in a market expands its first layer: the rest of the market is implicitly measured against it, even those who have changed nothing themselves. That mechanism plays a role in why companies compete on price more often than before: when ease evens out everywhere, the remaining comparison shifts to the number at the bottom of the quote.
Which part of a company's own process can actually be handed over to that first or second layer is a different question for each company. That question is answered by the FTE TO AI work scan per task, with an outcome indicating whether work is transferable, partly transferable with oversight, or remains human work.
Anyone who believes they are winning on ease of doing business can test that assumption before a customer or competitor does. The free dimension check shows: you state where you believe you are winning, and you see which of those claims can be defended with evidence. The full benchmark, with the evidence matrix per dimension and the comparison with a peer group, is under construction.