The Consulting Industry Got Disrupted Overnight, and Most Companies Missed the Real Story
The consulting industry has been turned upside down. OpenAI launched a ten billion dollar operation that does what McKinsey charges millions to do, and moments after, Anthropic moved the same way. Same day, within minutes of each other. If you work in consulting, you need to understand what happened.
Two Years of Middlemen Money
For the last two years, consulting firms made a boatload of money telling companies how to implement and use AI. They charged Fortune 500 CEOs millions to teach employees how to write reports, how to run specific workflows, and how to fold tools like chatGPT into daily operations. There is one issue with that. These consultants did not build the AI. They are the middlemen. They read the documentation, learned the tools, and repackaged it with an hourly rate.
OpenAI and Anthropic said out loud that the middlemen are no longer needed. Last week OpenAI announced a deployment company, a billion dollars backed by top private equity firms like TPG, with the entire purpose of sending OpenAI engineers into companies to help them implement AI.[1] Within minutes, Anthropic made the same announcement, raising 1.5 billion from Goldman Sachs to do the same thing.[2] Let us send our engineers into your companies and help you build things.
Why This Matters
This matters because seventy nine percent of companies are struggling to adopt AI, and half of all AI projects are stuck in pilot mode.[3] The bottleneck was never the technology. It was the implementation. The consulting industry has been the gatekeeper between technology and adoption for decades, and that gate has now been kicked open.
Here is where I have to be straight with you. This is not a solution. This is going to exacerbate the problem these companies already have.
The Real Problem Is the Promise
The huge problem OpenAI and Anthropic face is the deliverance of the promise. The return on the investment. With the way Anthropic keeps cutting people off on the computations their software allows, every other half hour the work stops itself. Then look at OpenAI, who has made huge prognosis and future insights, now moving in a hurry to find ways to give people the return they were promised. Remember when Altman told investors in a meeting that the answer has to be found in chatGPT, and everybody laughed? I do not hear them laughing anymore.
This is a strategy. Cut out the middleman. One of the biggest costs corporations carry is working with consultancy firms. A number of those firms, big, small, and medium, built their entire business around folding AI resources into their consultancy work, telling clients we make you AI ready. Now OpenAI and Anthropic want to provide the software directly to corporate sectors and say you do it yourself. You do not need them in the room.
What it is, is another way of breaking up subscriptions, getting corporations to buy the product, and delivering on the revenue that was promised. Understand the intention. When there is an investment somewhere, the return has to come back. Put two and two together.
The Trap of Bringing It In-House
Here is how the problem gets worse. Companies that think they are cutting a huge amount of cost by hiring people, educating them, and folding in what is needed to be AI ready are taking a huge problem in-house. OpenAI and Anthropic say put it in-house, let the reports and the consultation happen there. Before any of that, you still need education. You still need the proper human capital to do the monitoring, the implementation, and the deployment of whatever comes out.
In Dutch they say “houtje touwtje werk”. You are tying things together with little pieces of string and calling it art. Ta-da, this is the solution. It is going to backfire so hugely, because even corporations that say we are AI first, AI led, and are kicking out a huge portion of human capital have not taken the time to understand what leveraging means. The new Red Bull that gives everybody wings.
When you take that on, you take in the understanding, the education, the infrastructure, and the problems that come with running your activities on compute power…without consisten human feed that drive the data that AI needs. Tokens versus people. You are not getting an all-inclusive package where you do whatever you want. Computing power is expensive because everyone has a huge demand for it, and that demand drives prices up. It puts enormous pressure on margins, and companies will watch their profits get eaten away by the costs they take on.
The Buffer You Threw Away
If you do not have the knowledge of what you are getting into, you are exacerbating your own problem. You think you are cutting the middleman out, not understanding that the middleman was a buffer for costs you will now incur double, triple by doing it tokens. This lack of insight is a short win for OpenAI, Anthropic, and the corporate structures, and a huge cost in the long run.
Leave with this, built from the expertise I have collected over the last years. Potential is not always a great promise to make.
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Footnotes:
[1] OpenAI deployment initiative and TPG-backed funding, company announcements, 2025.
[2] Anthropic enterprise deployment program and Goldman Sachs funding round, company announcements, 2025.
[3] AI adoption and pilot-stage stall figures, industry enterprise AI surveys, 2025.
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