Is the Consulting Industry Broken?
Signals of an Irreversible Shift
Over the past months, the signals have been accumulating: layoffs at iconic firms, mounting pressure on fees, projects paused or re-scoped, clients scrutinizing value with unprecedented rigor. The prevailing narrative frames this as a slowdown — a difficult cycle, another temporary correction.
Yet a more uncomfortable question is beginning to surface:
what if this is not a cyclical downturn, but the exhaustion of a model?
An industry no longer explained by demand alone
At first glance, the diagnosis seems paradoxical. Organizations continue to face strategic complexity, technological transformation, regulatory pressure, and geopolitical uncertainty. The need for guidance has not disappeared.
What has changed is the alignment between that need and the way consulting has historically created — and captured — value.
Traditional consulting was built on three implicit pillars:
Intensive leverage: talent pyramids where many analyze and few decide.
Methodological opacity: proprietary frameworks difficult to audit from the outside.
Hour inflation: time as a proxy for value.
For decades, this architecture was effective. Today, it is increasingly questioned — not for ideological reasons, but for structural misfit.
What is actually breaking
The current pressure is not merely about margins. It reaches the core of the model itself.
On one side, technology has eroded the economic rationale of many tasks that were long treated as inherently billable. Activities that once required large teams and extended timelines can now be executed faster, more cheaply, or partially automated.
On the other, clients have become more sophisticated. They no longer purchase recommendations in the abstract, but clarity, impact, and genuine transfer of capability. Value is no longer perceived in the final deck, but in what changes after the consultants leave.
Here lies a central tension:
the traditional model remains optimized to produce deliverables, while the environment increasingly demands outcomes.
A structural shift, not a technological one
Within this context, artificial intelligence introduces an additional tension — not because of what it automates, but because of the alternative models it makes possible. Models in which knowledge is structured, reused, and embedded into systems; where value is measured not in hours, but in impact.
Against these emerging architectures, the traditional consulting model — artisanal, time-intensive, and difficult to trace — begins to reveal limitations that can no longer be explained away as temporary market conditions. Artificial intelligence does not “kill” consulting. It accelerates the obsolescence of a specific design.
Why this crisis is not like 2008 — or the pandemic
In 2008, consulting suffered from a sudden contraction in spending. During the pandemic, from a temporary freeze in decision-making. In both cases, the model endured because the context eventually realigned with its underlying assumptions.
What is unfolding now is different.
This is not simply about tighter budgets, but about redefined expectations. Clients are not postponing decisions; they are reassessing what kind of external help they need — and under what conditions. The question is no longer “who should we hire?”, but “what value can we no longer generate internally, and why?”
Once that question is asked, the traditional model is no longer the default answer.
The silent shift in client expectations
Today, many organizations are seeking something else:
less structural dependency,
greater transfer of judgment and capability,
more transparency in methods and decision logic,
and advisory relationships that reduce complexity rather than extend it.
This shift rarely appears in headlines. It manifests in how projects are scoped, how impact is evaluated, which engagements are renewed — and which quietly disappear.
It is a silent adjustment, but a profound one.
Closing: a question of design, not narrative
The consulting industry is not in crisis because it has become irrelevant. It is in crisis because its historical architecture is increasingly misaligned with the economic, technological, and cultural context in which it operates.
When a model needs to constantly justify its value, the problem is rarely communication.
It is usually design.
And when even the institutions that once defined the standard begin to show strain, the question is no longer whether isolated cases are failing. The question becomes whether the standard itself is still fit for purpose.
