The Future of Consulting: From Billing by the Hour to Productised Advisory

The consulting industry is facing a fundamental economic shift as artificial intelligence disrupts traditional labor-intensive service models. Johan Devér, a former McKinsey consultant and co-founder of Grasp, argues that the sector is moving away from hourly billing toward productized, subscription-based advisory services. This transition is driven by AI's ability to automate complex strategic analysis, forcing firms to redefine their value proposition beyond manual data synthesis.

Traditional consulting has long relied on a model where strategic analysis is expensive and laborious, requiring analysts to manually review company websites and industry reports to build market maps. Johan Devér notes that projects like doubling a client's revenue often took months of work and resulted in seven-figure bills based on hours spent rather than outcomes achieved. However, modern AI systems can now perform these same tasks—assessing market opportunities, identifying acquisition targets, and generating client-ready decks—overnight. This automation challenges the core premise of selling human time for data synthesis.

The rise of AI is fundamentally inverting the economics of the consulting sector, shifting it from a low-fixed-cost, high-marginal-cost business to one characterized by high fixed costs and low marginal costs. Historically, the primary expense was human time, meaning every new project required a new team and thousands of billable hours. With AI, the significant investment lies in building the system, after which answering client queries costs very little. Devér compares this shift to the impact Salesforce had on sales teams, where manual admin work like pipeline management and customer tracking was replaced by automated software products.

As AI commoditizes the analysis of proprietary benchmarks and frameworks, the value proposition of consulting firms is shifting toward judgment, interpretation, and trust. Clients are increasingly expecting product-style experiences from advisory services, where AI synthesizes intellectual property at an infinite scale to uncover overlooked insights. Despite these clear advantages, larger firms face a scale paradox that creates friction in adoption. While these major players possess the most intellectual property to productize, the source notes that the larger the organization, the more friction exists in transitioning away from established models.