Divya van Mahajan

13 Ways AI Will Change Consulting and Professional Services

ai-daily-brief-podcast

Overview

This talk presents 13 ways AI will transform the consulting and professional services industry, covering both threats to existing business models and emerging opportunities. The speaker is the host of the AI Daily Brief, a daily podcast and video series covering AI news and discussion. The talk draws on the speaker’s direct experience onboarding dozens of consulting partners to the “Super Intelligent Consultant Partner Program,” as well as general industry observation. The speaker frames the analysis as informed speculation rather than definitive prediction.

Source video: URL not provided.

Prerequisites

  • Basic familiarity with the structure of professional services and consulting firms (billable hours, discovery phases, practice areas)
  • General understanding of how large language models (e.g., ChatGPT) and AI agents function at a conceptual level
  • Awareness of common enterprise buyer relationships with external consulting partners
  • Familiarity with terms like business process outsourcing (BPO), total addressable market (TAM), and go-to-market strategy

Main Points

1. Certain Large Billing Categories Will Be Eliminated

  • Entire chunks of current enterprise spend on consulting will shift directly to AI and automation
  • Discovery processes, previously costing ~$200,000 and two months, are being compressed to days at a fraction of the cost
  • Large portions of legal work, accounting tasks, and business process outsourcing are moving to automated systems
  • Firms that cling to declining revenue lines rather than pivoting to new ones face serious risk

2. Firms Will Move Downmarket to Compensate for Lost Scale

  • To offset lost revenue, large firms will target market segments previously below their price threshold
  • Fortune 2000-focused firms will pursue mid-market clients; mid-market firms will pursue SMEs
  • Agentified internal processes allow firms to deliver acceptable-quality services at lower price points
  • This expansion of total addressable market is framed as one of the more positive opportunities AI creates

3. Enterprise Responses Will Diverge Into Two Camps

  • Some enterprises will eliminate external consultants and bring professional services capabilities in-house, enabled by AI tools
  • Others will reduce internal headcount and instead rely on a flexible, external roster of consultants and partners
  • Neither approach is universally correct; the outcome depends on organizational culture and leadership priorities
  • Professional services firms should orient toward clients who are choosing the external-partnership model

4. New Specializations Will Create New Practice Areas

  • AI integration and operationalization will generate entirely new categories of consulting demand
  • New skill sets around deploying and managing AI and agents will become among the most in-demand services
  • Losing old lines of business to automation is offset by the emergence of these new practice areas

5. Trust and Organizational Knowledge Become the Primary Asset

  • Consulting firms broadly split into specialists (repeat, narrow expertise) and generalists
  • For generalist firms, the most durable assets are deep knowledge of the client’s business and hard-won trust
  • In an environment where AI commoditizes much explicit knowledge, these intangibles become the core differentiator

6. Trusted Generalist Partners (TGPs) Become Orchestrators

  • Generalist firms will function like general contractors—orchestrating networks of specialist subcontractors
  • Rather than holding all capability in-house, TGPs will maintain a flexible roster of specialists they can activate as needed
  • This model keeps costs lower for cost-conscious enterprise buyers while preserving quality and breadth
  • Smaller and mid-sized firms are especially suited to this networked model

7. “Jerry Maguire-ing” — Senior Partners Will Break Away

  • Individual partners at large firms will recognize that they, not their firm, are the trusted generalist partner
  • AI and agent networks remove the resource dependency that previously kept individuals tied to large firm infrastructure
  • Breakaway practitioners will build small, highly profitable practices with one or two anchor clients and a specialist partner network
  • This trend is expected to accelerate headcount declines at large incumbent firms

8. Headcount Will Decline Across the Industry

  • Smaller teams managing large swarms of AI agents will become the default operating model
  • This applies both to independent small firms and to teams within larger organizations
  • The consulting workforce shrinks in number even as the scope of work potentially expands

9. Business Models Will Shift from Inputs to Outcomes

  • Billable hours and input-cost models become increasingly indefensible as AI reduces the cost of knowledge and labor
  • Results-based or output-quality models are expected to replace time-and-materials pricing
  • Pricing experiments tied to measurable outcomes will become more common
  • This transition is expected to be bumpy and nonlinear

10. Taste, Judgment, and EQ Will Be Prioritized

  • When AI produces abundant output, the scarce skill is discerning which output is actually good
  • Buyers will pay for people with demonstrated taste and judgment in evaluating AI-generated work
  • Interpersonal fit and emotional intelligence (EQ) also increase in importance as technical skills become more commoditized
  • “If all the skills themselves and the knowledge are commoditized, you’re going to work with people you trust and like.”

11. “PowerPoints Become Products” — Strategy Shifts to Action

  • There will be a move away from pure strategy documents and slide decks toward tangible prototypes and working artifacts
  • Even non-technical consultants now have tools to prototype products they are advising on (as of May 2025)
  • Clients managing leaner internal teams will expect partners to execute and build, not just recommend
  • The speaker frames this as a highly positive development — more exciting, more high-value, and more interesting than slide production

12. Repeat Business Will Depend on Measurement and Impact Tracking

  • Consultants will need to build measurement frameworks into engagements as a baseline expectation, not an add-on
  • Quarterly or annual reviews are too slow for the pace of continuous iteration that AI enables
  • Data, analytics, and feedback systems become table stakes for ongoing engagements
  • Firms that can demonstrate measurable impact will secure repeat business more reliably

13. Timing Expectations Will Compress Dramatically

  • Work that currently takes two months should soon take two weeks, two days, or even two hours
  • Organizational inertia from the client side—not the consultant side—should be the only remaining bottleneck
  • Firms that architect their own processes for speed will have a structural competitive advantage
  • Speed, as a general principle, is increasingly a winning differentiator

Key Concepts

  • Agent Readiness Audit: A compressed discovery process (reduced from ~2 months and $200,000 to ~2 days at far lower cost) that assesses an organization’s readiness for AI and agent adoption.
  • Trusted Generalist Partner (TGP): A consulting firm or individual whose primary value lies in broad client trust and organizational knowledge, who functions as an orchestrator of specialist subcontractors rather than a direct deliverer of all services.
  • Jerry Maguire-ing: The phenomenon of senior partners leaving large firms to start small independent practices, enabled by AI tools and specialist partner networks that remove the need for large firm resources.
  • Results-Based / Outcome-Based Pricing: A billing model tied to the quality or measurable impact of outputs rather than the time or inputs invested.
  • PowerPoints Become Products: A shift in consulting deliverables from strategic slide decks to functional prototypes and working artifacts.
  • Agent Swarms: Large numbers of AI agents managed by a small team of human consultants, representing the emerging default operating model for consulting delivery.
  • Networked / General Contractor Model: An operating structure where a TGP orchestrates a flexible ecosystem of specialist partners rather than maintaining all capabilities in-house.
  • EQ (Emotional Intelligence): Interpersonal and relational skills that become more valuable as technical and knowledge-based skills are commoditized by AI.
  • Continuous Iteration: An operating cadence in which processes, strategies, and deliverables are revised rapidly and repeatedly rather than in periodic review cycles.

Summary

The speaker argues that AI will not eliminate professional services and consulting outright, but will fundamentally restructure the industry across 13 dimensions. Certain large billing categories — particularly discovery, routine legal and accounting work, and business process outsourcing — will be taken over by AI systems, forcing firms to abandon declining revenue lines and pursue new markets by moving downmarket. Enterprise buyers will diverge between those who insulate consulting in-house and those who build leaner internal teams dependent on flexible external partners, and professional services firms should orient toward the latter group. The most durable assets in this new environment will be trust, organizational knowledge, judgment, and interpersonal relationships — intangibles that AI cannot easily replicate. Structurally, the industry will trend toward smaller teams managing AI agent swarms, a “general contractor” model for generalist partners, significant breakaway of senior individuals from large firms, and a shift from billable-hours pricing to outcome-based models. Deliverables will move from strategy decks to working prototypes, measurement and impact tracking will become baseline expectations, and the speed of delivery will compress dramatically across the board. Firms that design themselves for speed, embrace new practice areas around AI operationalization, and anchor their value proposition in trust and judgment are, in the speaker’s view, best positioned to thrive.