Your consultants have AI. You have AI. Neither system knows the other exists. That gap is where millions in value disappear.
The Conversation Nobody Is Having With You
There’s a massive conversation happening right now about AI and professional services. You’ve probably seen pieces of it. LinkedIn is full of takes about how AI will replace consultants, or save consultants, or fundamentally reshape the consulting business model. The Wall Street Journal is covering it. Industry analysts are publishing reports. VCs are writing thought pieces about it.
But here’s what’s strange about all of that coverage: almost none of it is written for you.
If you run an internal IT delivery team, a corporate center of excellence, a shared services organization, or an internal consulting function, you are on the other side of this equation. You are the one hiring the consultants. You are the one buying the AI tools. You are the one trying to figure out how to get value from both. And the entire public conversation about AI in professional services is being written about and for the people you hire, not for you.
That’s a problem. Because the decisions being made right now on the consulting side of this equation have direct implications for how much value you get from your technology investments.
What’s Really Happening
James O’Dowd, Founder and CEO of Patrick Morgan, one of the most plugged-in recruiting firms in the consulting space, recently published an analysis that cut through the noise. His core argument: AI is not an existential threat to consulting. It is a transformational one. And the real constraint on AI adoption was never the intelligence of the technology. It was implementation.
O’Dowd points out that two-thirds of companies have not scaled AI across the enterprise, and more than half of CEOs have seen no meaningful financial return from it. Not because the tools are weak, but because getting AI embedded into real workflows, real incentives, real governance structures, and real organizational politics is, in his words, "messy, slow, and deeply human."
The Wall Street Journal backed this up with hard data in their March 2026 piece, “AI Needs Management Consultants After All,” by Allison Pohle. The article reported that among nearly 2,000 employees surveyed by McKinsey, roughly two-thirds said their organizations hadn’t started scaling AI across the enterprise. A separate PricewaterhouseCoopers survey of nearly 4,500 CEOs found that more than half had seen no significant financial benefit from AI so far.
The response from the AI companies themselves tells you everything you need to know about where the bottleneck actually is. OpenAI struck partnerships with McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Accenture, and Capgemini. Anthropic announced deals with Deloitte and others. These are not marketing partnerships. These are implementation partnerships. OpenAI has a team of 70 forward-deployed engineers working alongside consultants to get AI embedded into client operations because they cannot do it alone.
Tom Rodenhauser, managing partner of K2 Consulting Research, told the WSJ that AI work drove global consulting growth of 5.5% in 2025, double the rate of the prior year. Accenture alone disclosed $2.2 billion in new AI bookings in their most recent quarter, a $400 million increase over the prior quarter.
The market is moving. The money is flowing. And the bottleneck is implementation.
The Part That Should Concern You
Here’s where O’Dowd’s analysis takes a turn that matters directly to corporate IT and internal services leaders.
He describes how AI is collapsing the base of the consulting pyramid. The research, benchmarking, and analytical groundwork that used to justify large teams and long engagements is being automated away. What replaces it is smaller, more senior, more accountable delivery. The value no longer lives in producing answers. It lives in deciding which answers matter.
But the more important shift, the one O’Dowd says gets far less attention, is that AI arms the other side equally. That’s you. Your teams now have access to the same pattern recognition, the same data, and increasingly the same analytical capabilities as the consultants you hire. The result is not less scrutiny of the advice you receive. It’s more. More questions about value. More demand for accountability. More premium placed on experienced operators who can navigate the complexity that models alone cannot resolve.
The WSJ picked up on this same shift. Clients are now less interested in paying for large teams of junior associates to collect and synthesize data. Pricing is shifting toward outcome-based models where firms are paid partly based on whether a project achieves a specified result, not how many people they throw at it.
This is good news for you in theory. In practice, it creates a problem that almost nobody is talking about.
The Gap in the Middle
You have AI tools. Your consultants have AI tools. Both systems are being fed data about your organization, your processes, your technology stack, your business logic. Both are generating insights, recommendations, and in some cases taking actions.
But those two AI systems don’t talk to each other.
Your internal AI knows your Salesforce configuration, your ServiceNow workflows, your historical implementation patterns, your team structures, your approval processes. Your consultant’s AI knows their delivery methodologies, their cross-client patterns, their staffing models, their risk frameworks.
Neither one has the full picture. And the handshake between them, the moment where institutional knowledge meets implementation expertise, is still happening in meetings and emails and slide decks. The same way it happened ten years ago.
This is the context turf battle. Both sides have powerful AI. Neither side has the orchestration layer that makes those systems work together. And the value that falls into that gap, the repeated discoveries, the lost context, the ramp-up time on every engagement, the institutional knowledge that walks out the door when a project ends, is enormous.
The Trojan Horse You Should Know About
O’Dowd lands on a point at the end of his analysis that should be required reading for every corporate technology leader. By partnering with OpenAI and Anthropic, consulting firms are handing over something far more valuable than distribution. They are giving these AI platforms the workflows, the institutional knowledge, and the client context that made consulting valuable in the first place.
Think about what that means for your organization. Every time a consulting firm uses an AI platform to deliver work inside your environment, the platform learns. It learns your processes. It learns your data structures. It learns your organizational patterns. And that learning doesn’t stay with you. It goes upstream to the platform vendor.
O’Dowd’s conclusion is stark. At some point, once that system is built, embedded, and running, the platform won’t need the consultant to operate it. It will simply operate.
The question for corporate IT and internal services leaders is: who owns the context? Because right now, the answer is increasingly “none of the above.” Your consultants are feeding it to AI platform vendors. Your internal tools are siloed from your consultants’ tools. And the institutional knowledge that should be compounding inside your organization is instead fragmenting across disconnected systems and vendor relationships.
What Smart Organizations Are Doing
The corporate teams that are getting ahead of this aren’t choosing between building their own AI or trusting their consultants’ AI. They’re solving the orchestration problem.
That means putting a layer in place that captures institutional knowledge from every engagement, every implementation, every interaction between your internal teams and your external partners. A layer that compounds that knowledge over time so the next engagement starts where the last one left off, not from scratch. A layer where the context stays inside your organization, under your governance, and accessible to whoever needs it, whether that’s your internal team on the next project or a new consulting partner ramping up.
This is not a middleware problem. Middleware connects systems. This is an operating system problem. It requires capturing the why behind the what. Why was this configuration chosen? What did we learn from the last three implementations that should inform the next one? What does our organization know, collectively, that no single person or system holds today?
The organizations that solve this will stop paying the ramp-up tax on every new engagement. They will stop losing institutional knowledge when consultants rotate off. They will stop watching their most valuable operational context leak out to platform vendors. And they will be in a position to hold their external partners accountable in a way that outcome-based pricing actually makes possible.
The Window Is Now
BCG reported in 2024 that 74% of companies struggle to achieve and scale value from AI. The SPI Research 2025 Professional Services Maturity Benchmark shows that the highest-performing firms are the ones that have figured out how to operationalize knowledge across engagements, not just within them.
The consulting industry is restructuring itself around AI right now. The firms you hire are changing their team compositions, their pricing models, their delivery methods, and their technology partnerships. That restructuring is happening with or without your input.
But if you’re the one writing the checks, you should be the one setting the terms. And the most important term you can set right now is this: the institutional knowledge generated inside your organization stays inside your organization. It compounds. It gets smarter. And it serves your interests, not your vendor’s.
That’s the context turf battle. And you should be winning it.
Sources:
James O’Dowd, "Thoughts on AI Replacing Consultants," LinkedIn, 2026. O’Dowd is Founder & CEO of Patrick Morgan.
Allison Pohle, "AI Needs Management Consultants After All," The Wall Street Journal, March 9, 2026.
McKinsey & Company employee survey, 2025 (as cited in WSJ).
PricewaterhouseCoopers Global CEO Survey, 2025 (as cited in WSJ).
K2 Consulting Research, Global Consulting Market Growth Data, 2025 (as cited in WSJ).
BCG, "AI Adoption in 2024: 74% of Companies Struggle to Achieve and Scale Value," October 2024.
SPI Research, 2025 Professional Services Maturity Benchmark.
