The consulting industry is not running out of problems to solve. It is running into a more uncomfortable question: who gets to own the relationship with the client while those problems are being solved?
City A.M., reporting new research from Source Global Research, says a meaningful share of senior executives are trying to reduce their reliance on external advisers, while technology companies are increasingly being preferred as the first call for major business change. That sounds like a simple cost-cutting story. It is more important than that. It suggests the traditional hierarchy of transformation work is being reordered.
The buyer has changed
Consulting demand itself has not disappeared. In its March 2026 forecast, Source projected the global consulting market to grow by around 6% that year, with particularly strong demand around AI, data, cybersecurity and transformation. In separate research, Source says 88% of clients surveyed had paid for AI-related consulting support in the previous 12 months, while the share of large, complex AI projects had tripled.
At the same time, buyers are becoming more demanding about what that spending produces. Source’s 2026 financial-services research describes the era of effectively open-ended technology budgets as coming to an end: only 25% of clients expected significant increases in technology investment, down sharply from 56% a year earlier. The contradiction is the point. Companies still need outside expertise, but they are less willing to pay simply for access to expertise. They want delivery, integration and proof.
Technology firms can now lead the transformation
For decades, the classic model placed the consultancy near the top of the food chain. Advisers diagnosed the problem, designed the programme and often brought technology partners in underneath them. Cloud platforms, enterprise software companies and AI providers are now capable of reversing that relationship.
A technology supplier may already own the infrastructure, the data layer, the implementation team and the recurring commercial relationship. Once that supplier is helping a chief executive decide how AI changes customer service, finance, operations or product development, it is no longer just selling software. It is participating in strategy.
That does not make independent advice obsolete. In fact, vendor-neutral judgement becomes more valuable when the technology provider has an obvious commercial interest in the answer. But it does mean traditional firms need a clearer reason to sit at the centre of the programme rather than arrive later as a specialist partner.
AI attacks the middle of the old consulting model
The most exposed part of consulting is not senior judgement. It is the large middle layer of work that historically turned human hours into billable output: research, benchmarking, synthesis, basic modelling, documentation, slide production and first-pass analysis.
Generative AI can accelerate much of that work. Used well, it does not remove the need for consultants; it changes the economics of a project. A client that once accepted a ten-person team for twelve weeks may reasonably ask why the same insight cannot be produced by a smaller team using better tools.
The valuable work therefore moves upward and outward: deciding what to do, understanding the sector, navigating regulation, changing behaviour inside an organisation, integrating systems and taking responsibility for outcomes. Those are harder to automate because they sit inside messy institutions rather than neat datasets.
The winners will sell proof, not presence
The strongest consulting firms are likely to look less like armies of generalists and more like combinations of deep domain expertise, proprietary data, reusable technology, implementation capability and trusted executive judgement. Pricing will also come under pressure to reflect outcomes rather than headcount.
That is good news for smaller specialist firms as well as the largest global players. If the value is in a distinctive method, dataset, network or capability, scale alone becomes less decisive. It is also an opportunity for consultancies that can form credible alliances with technology providers without becoming dependent on them.
What this means for clients and careers
For buyers, the useful question is no longer simply which consultancy has the strongest brand. It is who can diagnose the problem, deploy the solution and show whether it worked. For people building careers in consulting, the safest skills are becoming equally clear: technology fluency, sector expertise, commercial judgement, change management and the ability to earn trust when the answer is uncertain.
Consulting is not being killed by technology. It is being forced to compete with technology for the most valuable part of the job: deciding what happens next. That may be a much healthier market than one in which the largest team automatically wins.
Sources & verification
City A.M., 28 September 2026: Consultancy firms told to step up as bosses threaten to cut ties.
Source Global Research, 2026: Service line forecasts for 2026; Understanding the market for AI-related consulting services; and The Financial Services Consulting Market in 2026.
