The consulting business has spent the last couple of decades selling three things above all else: the appearance of control, the comfort of thick slide decks, and the vague promise that someone expensive is thinking hard about the problem. That package is currently coming apart faster than most firms want to admit.
Big players are already shedding people while their AI revenue lines shoot upward. One of the giants cut more than ten thousand jobs in a single restructuring wave and, in roughly the same stretch of months, pulled in over $2.6 billion from generative AI services alone. The math is brutal: the same firm that once staffed 80-person teams to produce strategy binders is now replacing chunks of that labor with software that runs 24/7 and doesn’t submit expense reports.
Governments are starting to notice the same arithmetic. The U.S. federal government has put tens of billions of dollars in annual consulting spend under a hard lens—some estimates put the figure north of $60 billion a year that’s suddenly in play. A cabinet secretary recently said, more or less in those words, that taxpayers shouldn’t keep paying people six-figure day rates just to generate PowerPoint slides and write minutes nobody reads. When language that blunt comes out of a government department, it usually means the polite version of the conversation already failed several times.
Decision-makers are less shy in private surveys. One recent global poll of senior executives across a wide spread of industries found that about two-thirds no longer see traditional consulting as delivering meaningful value. Only a small minority—something like one in eight—still describe it as highly effective. The rest mostly shrug and keep signing contracts because switching vendors feels more painful than living with mediocre outcomes.
On freelance marketplaces the price collapse is already visible. You can now find people who spent two or three years at name-brand firms offering their time for $160–$280 a day. Daily rate, not hourly. That isn’t a temporary dip; it’s the market saying out loud that a large slice of what used to be called “consulting” is no longer worth premium pricing.
Why would any procurement head approve $2,000 a day (or more) for someone to run secondary research, build basic models, or draft slide decks when the newest frontier models can do the same work in under an hour? The latest releases from the top labs don’t just answer questions—they coordinate teams of sub-agents, run parallel workstreams, cross-check sources, format citations, and spit out three different versions of an executive summary before you finish your coffee. And they don’t need a two-hour “alignment workshop” to get started.
Wall Street has already done the homework. After a string of demonstrations showing what these multi-agent systems can handle when left running overnight, large parts of the enterprise software and legacy services sectors lost the equivalent of a trillion dollars in market value in a matter of weeks. The money isn’t wrong very often.
Most firms still greet every new prospect with exactly the same opening act:
- 50+ offices worldwide (soon 52!)
- thousands of certified experts
- strategic alliances with every relevant software vendor
- our award-winning proprietary framework (repackaged industry standard + new logo)
- our deep commitment to client success (photo of happy people in an open-plan office)
It’s almost endearing in its predictability.
A depressing number of the certifications that get listed on proposals are three-day courses that cost several thousand dollars and leave the participant with roughly the same practical ability they had before the weekend started. Any current model can condense the underlying material into a clearer, better-organized summary in about twenty minutes—no trust exercises, no motivational posters, no awkward networking lunch.
The internal “methodologies” are often even more comical. Entire playbooks that standardize sentence structure, headline formats, the maximum number of bullets per slide, even which shade of blue is allowed in charts. They were built to make junior staff feel interchangeable and low-risk. The punchline is that the industry spent years training humans to act like scripted machines—and now the actual machines do it better, faster, and without needing performance reviews.
The ritual first-meeting question—“What are your expectations?”—has to be one of the most useless phrases still in regular use in corporate life. Clients almost never know what excellent looks like; that’s usually why they reached out in the first place. They want someone to walk in and say: here’s what we see, here’s how bad it really is, here’s what we would change, here’s roughly what it will cost and how long it will take. Not another round of requirements-gathering theater.
A well-known entrepreneur once answered how he would rebuild a business from zero with four short words: sales, preparation, effort, brains. Most of consulting quietly dropped three of those a long time ago. Sales is still faintly embarrassing in many boardrooms. Preparation gets replaced with generic sector reports. Effort is measured in pages produced rather than problems solved. Brains remain optional as long as the approved templates are followed.
The outfits that will still be around in three years won’t be the ones with the fattest methodology manuals. They’ll be the smaller groups willing to tell a client on week four that the whole initiative is heading for a cliff instead of waiting until week thirty to phrase it as “a dynamic recalibration of success metrics.” They’ll price by outcome whenever possible—fixed fees, success bonuses, shared risk—rather than bodies on site. They’ll treat AI as a core production tool instead of a slide bullet. And they’ll know the client’s actual numbers and politics better than the client does, because that’s the only remaining unfair advantage.
Roughly eighty percent of what currently sells under the consulting banner is already commercially dead. Not hypothetically dead in the future—dead right now. The people billing $160–$200 a day are the proof. The $2,000-a-day partners doing essentially parallel work are the floral arrangement on top.
What’s replacing it isn’t another rebrand or another three-letter acronym. It’s just resulting: someone who actually delivers the outcome the client needed, says when something is nonsense, and doesn’t hide behind a 500-page steering committee charter when the numbers go red.
Everything else is background music, and the volume is already being turned down.