What happens to consultants when AI commoditises expertise is that the middle of the market disappears and both ends grow. Routine analysis, synthesis and deck production stop being sellable at professional rates. Judgement that carries responsibility becomes scarcer and dearer. Iconic Empire’s argument is that this is a positioning event rather than a technology one.
The September piece on whether AI replaces consultants answers the yes-or-no version. This is the part after it.
Does consulting go away
Will consulting go away with AI? No, and the reassurance is smaller than it sounds.
Consulting as a profession survives comfortably. What ends is a particular way of earning inside it, the one built on being reliably competent at work a machine now does adequately, in seconds, for the price of the subscription.
If your practice sells analysis, benchmarking, research synthesis or the production of tidy recommendations, the machine is already in that market and it doesn’t sleep, invoice or need a weekend. The honest read is that competence has stopped being scarce.
Scarcity was always doing the pricing work. Remove it and the fee has nothing to stand on, however good the output happens to be.
What stays scarce is somebody who will stand behind a decision. Responsibility doesn’t compress, because there’s nobody to sue and nobody to fire.
There’s a second thing that doesn’t compress, and it’s harder to name. Knowing which of the plausible answers is the right one for this business, in this month, with these people, is a judgement built out of having been wrong before and remembering how it felt. Nothing produces that except time and consequence.
What actually happens to the middle
It gets squeezed from both directions at once, and that’s the shape worth understanding.
At the bottom of a market, capacity is effectively infinite now. Anything average scales without limit and prices accordingly, which is a polite way of saying it approaches free.
The question arrives from the other direction as well, usually typed exactly like this. Is AI getting commoditized? It is, and quickly, which only sharpens the point. When the same tool is available to everyone at the same price, the tool stops being anybody’s advantage and the person holding it has to be.
At the top, the opposite happens. When everything average is abundant, genuine mastery becomes the scarce thing, and scarce things get more expensive rather than less. The live page for Iconic Influence puts it as plainly as I know how. In a world of artificial everything, authentic human mastery becomes the ultimate luxury.
The middle had been living off the gap between those two. It charged professional rates for work that was good rather than exceptional, and that gap is closing from underneath.
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to make this sound like a moral story about excellence. It isn’t. Plenty of the people in the middle are excellent, and some of them are better practitioners than people earning five times as much at the top. What’s changed is the market’s ability to see the difference from where it stands, because the floor has risen to meet them.
Position is what makes the difference legible again. That’s the entire mechanism, and it’s why I keep saying this is a positioning event.
Why management consulting is declining, and what replaces it
Why is management consulting on the decline? Because it sold billable hours by the pyramid, and the arithmetic underneath that model has changed.
The classic structure is a small number of senior partners and a large pyramid of analysts doing the work that gets sold. When the analyst layer’s output becomes cheap and abundant, the pyramid stops being an asset and starts being overhead.
What replaces it is much smaller and far more concentrated. A named practitioner with a defensible position, a short client list, and fees that reflect judgement rather than headcount.
The clients drive part of this themselves. A board that can generate its own analysis no longer wants to pay for a team to generate it, and what it wants instead is one person it trusts to say what the analysis means.
That’s a purchase of a named individual rather than a firm, which is why so much senior consulting talent has been leaving to practise under its own name. The economics finally favour it. That’s the model Kathryn Porritt and the Iconic Empire team have been building with experts for ten years, across more than twenty-five industries, and it was a minority position for most of that decade.
We publish that arithmetic on our own offer page rather than describing it vaguely. Six to eight engagements a year at $250,000, turning over a million and a half to two million dollars, with a handful of clients and almost no team.
That shape was a preference five years ago. It’s rapidly becoming the only shape that works.
How is AI impacting the consulting industry?
How does AI impact the consulting industry in practice? By making everything average abundant and everything exceptional conspicuous.
The practical effects are unglamorous. Proposal and research work that used to justify a junior’s week now takes an afternoon. Clients arrive having already generated the obvious options, so the conversation starts further along. Deliverables that were once the product are now the by-product.
None of that touches the part of the work where someone with thirty years of scar tissue says, plainly, that the obvious option is wrong and what to do instead. That conversation has gone up in value, because everything surrounding it has gone down.
It’s also changed who gets to have it. When a client arrives with the obvious options already generated, the practitioner who adds value by producing those options has nothing to sell. The one who can tell them which to discard, and take the consequences of being wrong, is suddenly the only person in the room worth paying.
The practical implication for how you package work is uncomfortable. Anything you currently sell by the deliverable is at risk. Anything you sell as a decision, with your name attached to the outcome, is not.
Makhosi, known as the Royal Shaman, is not a consultant, which is rather the point. She sold $250K in luxury offers within a few weeks of repositioning, from an offer system she’d already had. Same Makhosi. Same craft. A market that could finally see where she sat.
Still with me? Then the last piece is the uncomfortable one.
What this asks of you
A decision about which end you’re on, made deliberately rather than by drift.
Most practitioners will make it by default, which means defending the middle for another three years while the ground goes. I’d rather you made it on purpose, in either direction. Running a high-volume, machine-assisted, efficient practice at the lower end is a legitimate business, and some very smart people will do well there.
The other end asks for a published position, evidence with names on it, and a number you can say without flinching. That’s the whole prerequisite list, and the pricing part is the easiest of the three. The position underneath it is the work, and it’s the same work as premium pricing strategy describes from the money side.
What I’d ask you not to do is wait for clarity. The middle isn’t going to send a notice.
Your current number already says which end you are on, and the Iconic Pricing Calculator will read it back to you for nothing. If you want the decision made with people who have watched it play out across a decade, the rooms and the application are here.
Make it this quarter. The practitioners who came through the last structural change were the ones who moved before the evidence was comfortable, and they all describe the same thing afterwards, which is that the waiting cost more than the move did.
Kathryn x
FAQ
How is AI impacting the consulting industry?
It’s collapsing the price of average work and raising the price of exceptional work at the same time. Research, synthesis and standard deliverables have become cheap and abundant. Judgement that carries responsibility, and a named practitioner willing to stand behind a decision, have become scarcer and more valuable. The squeeze lands hardest on the competent middle.
