Blog: Consulting economics
AI is not killing consulting. It is changing what clients should pay for.
Published by Forever Foundry
Consulting is not disappearing. But charging clients for work that AI can now do faster should be.
That distinction matters as established consultancies report growing demand for help with AI transformation while simultaneously using AI to make their own delivery more efficient.
Demand for consulting has not disappeared
On 1 October, Accenture reported quarterly revenue of $18.7 billion and new bookings of $22.2 billion.
Its leadership said that large-scale transformations, including many driven by AI, supported demand. It also reported that more than 400 clients began their first “advanced AI” work with Accenture during its financial year. Read Accenture’s results.
Those are Accenture’s financial and activity figures. They do not demonstrate that every engagement produced a return for the customer.
They do show something important: access to more capable technology has not removed the need for organisations to make difficult investment and transformation decisions.
In fact, more technology creates more choices.
The traditional cost model is under pressure
Accenture also said that AI is making both consulting delivery and technology implementation faster and more efficient.
The FOFO™ view is that those efficiencies should change what customers buy, and what they pay for.
Clients should no longer need large teams spending weeks arranging interviews, manually reviewing notes, combining spreadsheets and producing a presentation that reflects the loudest stakeholders in the room.
AI can listen more widely, process more organisational evidence and expose common themes and disagreements much faster.
That does not make human judgement redundant.
It makes judgement the part worth paying for.
Leadership still needs to decide which problems matter, which opportunities justify investment and what should happen first. Those decisions involve commercial priorities, operational knowledge, risk and consequences that cannot be delegated to an automated recommendation.
AI should expand what leadership can hear and understand. People should remain responsible for the choice.
Buy a decision, not a consulting team
Before commissioning consulting work, ask what will exist at the end that does not exist today.
A useful engagement should produce:
- Evidence from across the organisation, not only a handful of interviews
- A clearly defined set of business challenges and opportunities
- A transparent method for comparing value and delivery complexity
- Named owners, baselines and intended outcomes
- A prioritised roadmap leadership is prepared to fund
- Organisational ownership that remains after the consultants leave
Measure the engagement accordingly.
How long did it take to reach an investable decision? How much of the organisation was heard? Which assumptions were challenged? Does each priority have an owner and an agreed measure of success?
A ranked list only counts if leadership believes it. Read how alignment is built into the decision, not presented after it.
The FOFO Process™ is built around that change in consulting economics.
AI Compass™ uses AI to listen across functions, roles and levels and turn what people know into organisational evidence. Slid3rs™ keeps prioritisation human. FlowRoom™ brings leadership together to agree the roadmap and what happens next.
Being AI-native does not mean recommending AI as the answer.
It means using AI inside the consulting process to improve its coverage, speed and cost, while concentrating human effort on the investment decisions that matter.
AI may not eliminate consulting.
It should eliminate a great deal of what clients were previously asked to pay consultants to do.
See how Forever Foundry has rebuilt consulting around organisational evidence and human decisions.
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