Last week, two of the world’s largest AI companies decided to enter the consulting market.
OpenAI launched a $4 billion deployment venture. Anthropic launched a $1.5 billion joint venture with Blackstone and Goldman Sachs. Both are embedding engineers directly inside companies to redesign how work gets done.
Nobody knows if this model will work. Adoption is slow, execution is hard, and both ventures could stumble. But if this becomes the norm, and it is worth asking what that means for consulting before it does, the implications are significant.
Most commentary has focused on the threat to boutique IT firms. That framing is too narrow I think.
Operations, HR, change management, finance, strategy – if your work touches a platform, a process, or how your clients measure and run their business, the JV model can eventually claim it. And even if they never directly compete for your specific work, the model changes what clients expect.
Companies that experience embedded, continuous, AI-augmented delivery will start wondering why they are paying for a 90-day engagement with a final deck. That expectation changes buying decisions, affects pricing, and slowly erodes what clients believe your work is worth.
There is a sourcing problem too. Both JVs are backed by major PE firms with hundreds of portfolio companies. Those sponsors will route work to the JVs by default. That is a significant slice of the mid-market consulting pipeline redirected before you ever get a conversation.
So what actually protects a boutique consulting firm?
1. Relationships – not just who you know, but who knows you. Specifically the people who think of you first and trust your judgment before you walk in the door. That is built through visibility and consistent point of view over time. It cannot be manufactured at scale.
2. Domain expertise – but not functional knowledge or industry knowledge alone. The combination of strategic, design-level thinking in your discipline layered on top of deep industry knowledge is genuinely hard to replicate. Not just the execution but the thinking behind why the work should be done the way it should.
👉 Everything has changed, but nothing has changed.
It has always come down to relationships and domain expertise. But the firms still deferring the hard choices – the positioning, the niche, the point of view, the move from project delivery to trusted advisor – are running out of runway.
The structure of consulting is being rebuilt. The time to get clear on what makes you irreplaceable is now.
How do you think these new entities will impact the consulting industry?
—
Ready to add $100k-$500k revenue to your consulting business in 12 months or less without burning out? Schedule a call and let me show you how.
