AI and Consulting - Trust v Results
Big consulting and Fortune 500 enterprises share decades of bruises from tough change projects. Is the trust they have built up enough to survive when AI changes the dynamics?
Big consulting and Fortune 500 enterprises share decades of bruises from tough change projects. Keeping those relationships alive is existential for McKinsey, Accenture and the Big Four.
But AI changes the dynamic. Will C-suite buyers still trust their long-term consulting partners in this wave?
Start with the McKinsey report The State of Organizations 2026. You can draw all sorts of messages from this - these reports are like the horoscope in the newspaper, something for everyone.
Two specifics lurking in the buzzword jungle caught my eye:
“Two-thirds of leaders say their organisations are ‘overly complex and inefficient’”
“72 percent of leaders tell us that their organizations are not fully ready to face upcoming changes”
The people surveyed in this report are all buyers of top-of-the-range consulting services. Ask a consulting partner what they sell and simplification, efficiency and change are all very likely to be mentioned.
Why keep buying from these firms if they don’t deliver on their promises?
The careers of C-suite execs and senior consulting partners (like me) run together, cross-fertilised by a long trail of change projects that failed to deliver. Every failure is blamed on unforeseen circumstances. Either bad luck or causes for which no-one is accountable.
By the time the post-mortem is finished, another change trigger appears and the whole cycle begins again.
The same thing will be repeated with AI. Right now, we don’t even know what the technology can do from one week to the next. We can’t define or predict the organisational and cultural shifts that deploying it will bring.
So will the cycle simply keep repeating? More clients with more change projects generating more revenue for consultants.
Things are not that simple. Those highly selective statistics I chose from McKinsey signal a deeper truth. Enterprise leaders have built careers on moving from one failed change project to the next. That leaves a legacy of doubt, increasingly hard for consultants to overcome.
In previous waves, those doubts had no consequences. New tech slotted into the old machine. AI is different. For the first time, tech is reshaping consulting businesses as well as their clients.
That arms those doubts with real weapons.
Consultants brought bodies to do analytical and process-mapping grunt work. Now clients are told AI can cut the cost of that drudgery to near zero.
Tech-savvy firms configured and customised software for big organisations. Now clients can do that themselves — it’s what AI does most reliably.
Leaders were willing to pay a high price for the expertise and experience of top consulting firms. Now they’re sold AI that claims to be smarter than all of them put together.
Consulting firms push back with outcome based pricing. But clients have little faith left in their ability to even define outcomes, never mind deliver them.
Who needs consultants now? They may provide a convenient scapegoat for hard decisions. Or a safety blanket for insecure managers. Is there anything else?
Will the consulting industry play a big role in AI or will this be the technology that ends its long run of success?
No tech can replace human interaction. As shared earlier, we are entering in an era of human -AI augmented operating model , be it advisory or consulting in this instance. All of us need to re-skill/up-skill to stay relevant.