How Consulting Reveals the Real Pattern of AI Disruption

This podcast is sponsored by Google. Hey folks, I'm Omar, Project and Design Lead at Google DeepMind. We just launched a revamped vibe coding experience in AI Studio that lets you mix and match AI capabilities to turn your ideas into reality faster than ever. Just describe your app and Gemini will automatically wire up the right models and APIs for you. And if you need a spark, hit I'm Feeling Lucky and we'll help you get started. Head to ai.studio/build to create your first app. As AI-related layoffs make headlines, today we are exploring why the consulting and broader professional services industry is a perfect case study in how AI disruption is actually likely going to take place. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to our sponsors Gemini, Robots and Pencils, Blitzy, Rovo and Assembly. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief or you can sign up on Apple Podcasts. And for information about sponsorships, shoot us a note at [email protected]. One more quick reminder, our end of year ROI benchmarking study is live at ROIsurvey.ai and I would so appreciate it if you would contribute a use case or two. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. I am traveling this week for my anniversary, so we are using that as a chance to do some slightly different types of shows that we normally don't have time for with the ever pressing crush of AI news. Now today's topic actually in many ways does connect to a key story that we've been tracking, which is the rise of layoffs that claim to be and in many cases are actually related to artificial intelligence. Specifically though, I want to hone in on a particular industry where for many people the narrative is and has been that it is absolutely doomed in the era of AI and is exemplary of the white collar catastrophe that is coming down the pipeline. I'm talking of course about consulting and professional services. You couldn't throw a stick this year without hitting a story about how consulting was going to die. Fast company back in January, consultants beware, AI is coming for your job. This to see from the economists this summer, who needs Accenture in the age of AI? They pointed out that between February and the end of June, markets had wiped around 60 billion off of Accenture's market cap. In August, the Wall Street Journal writes AI is coming for the consultants. Inside McKinsey, this is existential. The side title captured the concern, if AI can analyze information, crunch data and deliver a slick PowerPoint deck within seconds, how does the biggest name in consulting stay relevant? Making this worse, we're very high profile screw ups. We're the one where Deloitte in Australia had to give back a bunch of money for a government contract because of an AI error riddled paper that they handed in as their work. You're also increasingly getting stories about the new legion of startups that are trying to disrupt some part or all of the consulting model. And this drumbeat just goes on and on. Reuters published a piece just last week called AI sets up Kodak Moment for Global Consultants. Now I have talked about in a previous episode from I think back in maybe May, how I think AI is specifically going to change professional services firms. Today, I want to take the conversation in a slightly different area and talk about why I think on a broader level, consulting is actually a pretty perfect case study in how AI disruption is likely to take place across a number of different dimensions. So what I'm going to do is go through 13 thoughts related to AI and consulting that, as I said, I think show how AI disruption is going to play out in practice across professional industries. And if your eyes are now bleeding from the horrifying cheesiness of these images, I'm sorry, but I couldn't resist just generating the most absolute horrifying stock photo slop that I possibly could. You're welcome. All right. So first note, one of the things that AI is going to do is it's going to make what you're actually paying for really clear. The reason that there is a conventional wisdom aspect to the idea of consultants being disrupted is that a big part of what businesses have historically paid consultants for is scarce expertise and scarce information. Well, guess what? AI makes both expertise and information abundant rather than scarce. And if that was truly all consultants were offering, well, I think they'd be screwed. However, that is of course not everything that consultants are offering. There are actually many different dimensions to it, not least of which is the brand value and cloud cover for executive decisions. It is not a knock on McKinsey or BCG or KPMG or Accenture or EY or any of these other firms to say that part of the reason that they get hired is so that executives can double check their own thinking, validate and support their decisions to their higher ups. And frankly, have someone to blame if things go wrong. In almost all circumstances, people don't get fired for hiring McKinsey. And that sort of brand value and cloud cover for decisions is not something that AI just ups and replaces. In fact, AI creates this whole new scary category of transformation where that brand assuredness is extra valuable. But again, if we're zooming out and trying to generalize for a variety of white collar industries, one big theme of disruption is that AI is going to very quickly make it clear what are all the different things that you're actually paying for when you're buying a product or working with a particular type of company. Number two, it is absolutely the case in the consulting and professional services industry. And I believe in many other industries as well, that AI has tailwinds for both legacy and challenger brands. Going back to the theme that we were just speaking about legacy brands have a high trust quotient that is incredibly useful right away. Initially, that brand trust was valuable because when companies were looking for guidance, it was natural for them to turn to partners they'd already worked with. And I think that is even bolstered now as we move from pilots and experimentation into the full deployment phase, as companies realize that a big part of their success is going to be contingent on the way that they organize and interact with their own data. And that sort of privileged, important and private data is likely to further incentivize them to work with brands that they already trust. Hence tailwinds for the legacy brands. At the same time, as we'll discuss a little bit later, there are lots of new categories of spend, new business line, new activities, each of which creates a new brand opportunity for a challenger. They won't necessarily be able to seize it. And in many cases, they'll be competing with those legacy brands for those same areas. But there are many times that even if a big company wants to work with a trusted partner on important, complex and high level issues, they also might want the new energy and insight from a challenger for a new frontier that they're pushing into. Now, when we're talking about top tier brands, we're really talking about a power law distribution. For all those companies that I just rattled off, there are hundreds if not thousands of others that are part of the industry long tail. I think in these types of moments where transformation is scary and happening fast, the top tier of brands have a chance to reinforce and even extend their position. But the long tail of legacy players is going to struggle. What can change that is, of course, hyper specialization. If a company has a really specific focus, and if they can then be the translator of that focus in this new paradigm, that's extremely valuable for the exact client or ICP that wants what they have to offer. Being extremely niche and narrow, but focused, is, I think, a much better position than being a neat generalist long tail. Let's talk about delivery, though. Something that I think is true for consulting and will be true for many other industries as well, is that AI is going to bring down the cost of delivery, as well as speeding up the time of delivery. This one is pretty self-explanatory. Whether you think this leads to an industry being disrupted entirely or not, it is simply absolutely undeniably the case that information can be collected faster, data can be analyzed more swiftly, and PDFs can get created a heck of a lot faster with far fewer human hours. Which brings us to our fifth point. You better believe that customers are going to expect those savings to be passed on to them in the form of lower prices. This, I think, is one of the most important nuances that tends to get lost in this discussion of to be disrupted or not. Using professional services partners is a spectrum, and sometimes these articles seem to act like it's either you use them for everything in the same way you always have, or you've now decided that you're going to roll everything on your own and you use them for nothing. The reality, of course, will exist in the money middle. And one of the ways that customers and enterprises will move forward initially, as they explore just how much they want to change their relationship with these types of partners, is that they will very quickly expect to see changes in many parts of how those services are provisioned, but certainly in the form of cost. Not too long ago, I had a meeting with a large professional services company who had just gotten out of a conversation with their single biggest client. In that meeting, which was a planning meeting for the next year, the client told them in extremely simple terms that they expected that going into the next year, they would get all of the exact same amount of services and they wanted it at half the price. I think that sort of conversation is going to be increasingly common. And again, not just in the consulting industry, but in any industry, where again, AI is going to bring the cost down and speed delivery up. AI isn't a one-off project. It's a partnership that has to evolve as the technology does. Robots and pencils work side by side with clients to bring practical AI into every phase, automation, personalization, decision support, and optimization. They prove what works through applied experimentation and build systems that amplify human potential. As an AWS-certified partner with global delivery centers, robots and pencils combines reach with high-touch service, where others hand off, they stay engaged. Because partnership isn't a project plan. It's a commitment. As AI advances, so will their solutions. That's long-term value. Progress starts with the right partner. Start with [email protected]/aidailybrief. This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, the enterprise autonomous software development platform with infinite code context. Blitzy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand enterprise-scale code bases with millions of lines of code. Enterprise engineering leaders start every development sprint with the Blitzy platform, bringing in their development requirements. The Blitzy platform provides a plan that generates and pre-compiles code for each task. Blitzy delivers 80% plus of the development work autonomously, while providing a guide for the final 20% of human development work required to complete the sprint. 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Go to assemblyai.com/brief, grab $50 in free credits, and start building your voice AI product today. Okay, number six. I think it is important to acknowledge that even in a world where many of the consultant disruption headlines are a little bit overblown, that there will be certain categories of work that consultants currently do that AI more or less just takes over. Certain rote functions that are easy to automate, certain types of back office tasks, whatever the specifics are, it will be the case that even in a world where the consulting industry continues and even flourishes to a degree that it hasn't been able to before, it will not be exactly the same consulting industry that it once was, and there will be categories that are simply gone. The flip side, of course, is that there will also be entirely new capabilities that were simply impossible before. And in this case, I'm not just talking about totally new lines of business, which is something I'll talk about in a little bit, but just the ability to do something in a way that is radically different than what was possible before that really changes the landscape of the possible for those firms. Frankly, Superintelligent lives in one tiny little example of this. When you think about an information discovery process, the type of thing that kicks off almost any consulting engagement, there are inherent tradeoffs in any way that you gather information, especially human information. You can interview people, which is amazing for getting context, but it's terrible for scale. There's simply not enough time and not enough money to interview everyone that you'd actually want to. Now you can survey them, and that's great for scale, but it's not very good for context. The core premise of the way that we deliver agent readiness planning is that voice agents make it so that you no longer have to choose between scale or context. You just get both interviewing everyone in the company used to be an impossible task. Now we could do it all at the same time and have it done in a single day across not only consulting in professional services, but every industry for all of the areas and categories of work that are just gone, there will be new capabilities that unlock totally new types of work that we simply don't see yet. Now again, on the theme of being real, it is the case and we should acknowledge that some ambitious clients will use AI to cut consultants out. I mean, heck, we even see some companies like Klarna rolling their own software to cut SaaS providers out. It will absolutely be the case that some enterprises will look across the suite of their professional and partner relationships and say, we can just do that now thanks to AI. But once again, there is a flip side. The cost coming down, those costs that as we said, customers will demand come down, as the cost of goods sold thanks to AI comes down also opens up the possibility to bring new customers online. There are right now, many enterprises who would like to work with a McKinsey or a KPMG or another big firm, but who can't really consider it because of the cost profile. So even if yes, there are some firms that decide to go be ambitious and do this themselves, which there absolutely will be the reduced overall cost of services delivery will likely come down enough that there will be first time buyers or expansionary buyers of professional services as well. I think one really fundamental note, an important thing to remember is that in many, if not most cases, AI won't change underlying demand dynamics. And what I mean by that is that professional services don't exist because enterprises couldn't have those capabilities. It's because of specialization, one of the foundational principles to our economy. There are areas where firms don't want to specialize. They don't want to have to be great at tax compliance. In many cases, they don't want to have to be great at marketing. Professional services exist not because companies couldn't theoretically do the things that those professional services firms do. They exist because companies don't want to do them because they're distracting from whatever it is the main thing that the company actually is meant to do. I don't see AI changing that very much. Like I said, I think its impact is much more likely to be around expectations for things like speed and cost. And if we grok with the idea that companies are still going to want to work with professional services firms because of that differentiated specialization, it is also very clearly the case that there is real value as a potentially disruptible industry in faster adoption of the tools that might sow the seeds of your own destruction. And certainly if you look at the story of consulting in professional services, these are some of the most aggressive early adopters across the enterprise sector. There is not a single big consulting firm or professional services firm that is not thinking about AI both as an internal change mandate and as an external transformation force at the same time. I think that there is going to be a direct correlation between the industries where it most seems like AI could disrupt them and which industries get out the fastest to figure out how to leverage AI to turn into whatever the next version of that industry is before they get disrupted. It's also important to remember that beyond just new capabilities, like Super's ability to help companies do discovery faster and on a much more expensive scale, there really will be entirely new categories of business that we just don't even know exist yet. Now, frankly, of all industries, consulting and professional services may have the clearest example of this right away in the fact that AI transformation is now a service and a very important high growth service for many if not most of these firms that didn't exist four years ago. What I think is important is not that particular line of business, but the fact that in any process of creative destruction, ultimately, we see the destruction much sooner than we see the creation, but there will be inevitably creation as well. So as you can tell, I do not think that consultants and professional services are going to be wiped off the face of the planet. I think that there are going to be extraordinary pressures on them to evolve and iterate very quickly in terms of how they provision their services, the speed with which they deliver those services, the lines of services they offer and more than anything else, the costs at which they deliver them. But I don't think they're going away. However, just because I don't think they're going away does not mean I think that incumbents will be able to fill all of the gaps as fast as they try to move. And as much as they want to claim all these areas, there will be categories of work that existing firms just aren't going to be as good at as the market demands. And that creates big opportunities for disruptors. The very obvious one to me at the risk of alienating all of my big consulting firm friends is actual last mile tech delivery and integration. There are some great technologists and developers who work inside the big firms, but they are not AI native engineers. Right now, those big firms are still winning last mile implementation and engineering type of deals, but only because enterprises feel like they don't have any other choices. The contender firms so far are simply too small and too fresh. But I think that that's going to change very quickly. In this one specific category, there is an entire new legion of firms that are totally peopled with AI native engineers, who if their priorities changed would be building agents for some startup like us, but who happened to have made themselves available in the context of these new Latter-day agentic dev shops. And those companies are going to grow extremely fast. What's more, the more scale they get, the more enterprises they'll tip over into being able to work with them because of their increased capability to deal with at scale deployments and growing credibility that comes from more experience, bigger revenue numbers and a bigger body of work. Now again, the specifics don't matter as much here as the fact of the general lesson that as we've seen, both for consultants and in many other knowledge worker type industries, there are actually a lot of advantages that incumbents have. There are tailwinds for them going into this new era, but that doesn't mean that they'll be able to fill all the gaps and they'll either have to seed those areas or find a way to co-opt the disruptors. So this being a presentation about consulting, we have to close by turning it into a roadmap, right? If you are a professional services firm thinking about your AI and agentic future, fear not. It is very unlikely that just because of AI alone, you are doomed to disruption. However, there are some things you can do to make sure that you not only survive but thrive. If you are not some huge everyone knows you type of company, find the niche where you are unique in Excel and understand the AI implications for that niche. Whether you're a little company or a big company, lean into brand and the assets that you've built over time that make you a trusted partner for the companies you already work with. In fact, I probably should say lean into trust even more than lean into brand. As you're doing that leaning in, move as fast as you possibly can to AI yourself. Even if the core thing that you sell is going to change over time, there's an opportunity right now to be two or three steps ahead of all the enterprises that you work with and just help them AI if I whatever domain that you work in. But the first step to doing that well is AI if I am yourself. Next, do not fight the tide. You have to expect costs to come down by all means try to get away with as little of that as you can. But AI is going to bring the cost of delivery of almost all knowledge services down and you're going to have to redesign around that as you're positioning accordingly with those cost reductions in mind. Keep your eyes out for those new business lines, not just the more efficient way to deliver what you're already doing, but the new areas that could be the thing that shapes your business for the next decade. And lastly, weaponize the humility of knowing that there will be challengers who can move faster than you and do things better than you and buy them. Because legacy companies have one other thing that most upstarts don't, which is a balance sheet and access to more credit, equity and debt than those new companies coming up weaponize humility and buy companies that are better than you at whatever niches you think are important in this new AI world. So like I said, this is nominally all about consulting and professional services. But I do think that you're going to see these patterns of what AI disruption actually looks like play out in a lot of other areas as well. It is going to be as profound and transformative as everyone thinks if not more. But it's going to do so in weird, jagged, unpredictable, uneven ways that surprise and stretch us in our organizations and will put a very, very high premium on the fastest learners, the most dynamic strategies, and the most nimble operators. Anyways guys, I love having a chance to zoom out and do thinky think episodes like this. Hopefully you enjoyed it as well. If not, I'm sure we'll be back to the news very soon. AI tends not to give me much of a chance to be theoretical for long. Appreciate your listening or watching. As always, until next time, peace.