Consulting after knowledge scarcity

If you are in consulting business like myself, questions about the future of consulting appear regularly. The discussion usually turns to artificial intelligence quickly, and to the assumption that easier access to knowledge will inevitably reduce the need for advisors. I am not sure this is the most interesting question. A more interesting one is how consulting remains valuable when knowledge itself becomes easier to access and increasingly loses its scarcity.

I have written about parts of this before, about what happens to expertise when everyone knows everything and about why the stock market suddenly questions consulting. This article is an attempt to bring those threads together. My working hypothesis is that the value of consulting is shifting rather than disappearing. Information, frameworks and standardized approaches are becoming easy to access and easy to replicate. Experience, judgment, context and the ability to create outcomes are not.

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Why consulting existed in the first place

Consulting emerged because organizations needed help solving problems that exceeded their own capabilities, and for a long time knowledge was the most visible reason. Methodologies, frameworks and best practices were difficult to access. Experience gained in one industry could be transferred into another, and over time accumulated knowledge became intellectual property and competitive advantage.

Knowledge was never the only reason. Most companies encounter certain situations only once or twice. ERP transformations, mergers, carve-outs or operating model redesigns are rare events for the organization itself, while advisors see comparable situations repeatedly and develop pattern recognition that helps identify risks early. Capacity played a role as well, because external teams allowed companies to respond to temporary peaks without permanently increasing headcount. People inside organizations naturally become part of their environment, so the external perspective had value of its own. And consulting has always played a role in change itself, when organizations needed support to align stakeholders, moderate conflicts or create legitimacy around difficult decisions.

Together, these factors created a remarkably successful business model. A relatively small number of experienced leaders could leverage larger teams of junior consultants, methods and deliverables were reused, and knowledge could be scaled. Underlying much of this model was a simple assumption: knowledge is scarce.

The interesting part is that only some of these value drivers actually depend on that assumption. Capacity, experience, the external perspective and support in change are not primarily knowledge topics. They are about people, trust, speed and execution. The part of the model that genuinely rests on scarce knowledge is real, but it is smaller than the industry's self-image would suggest.

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What clients really buy

Consulting firms officially sell methodologies, frameworks and deliverables. That was never the whole story. Clients buy confidence, risk reduction and access to experience. They buy speed, judgment and people who have seen similar situations before. Sometimes they also buy legitimacy.

Still, the official assets carried real weight for a long time. In selection processes I have been part of, a proven methodology, a pre-configured solution or the promise that a firm's training and onboarding would guarantee consistent quality were genuine differentiators. Clients were always interested in the team, that part is not new. But the assets could compensate. A firm could win with its approach even when the individual names on the staffing plan were interchangeable.

That compensation mechanism is weakening. When methodologies, accelerators and templates can be reproduced by anyone with access to the same tools, they stop differentiating. What remains as a differentiator is exactly the part that cannot be downloaded: judgment, emotional intelligence, presence, the ability to read a room and a political situation. And if those qualities are what clients are actually paying for, then it matters very concretely who shows up. I expect the question of who will actually do the work to become the central question in most selection processes, not an afterthought once the framework discussion is done.

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What changes

Historically, knowledge itself was valuable because access to it was limited. Today many knowledge components are becoming widely available. Frameworks, benchmarks, analyses and research can be generated, accessed and reused more easily than ever before. Artificial intelligence accelerates this development, although the trend started long before generative AI became widely available.

I can see this in my own history. Earlier in my career, we impressed clients with deliverables that took weeks of real work: benchmarks built from scratch, structured analyses, carefully developed methods. They were valuable, they were maintained and further developed, and they were treated as intellectual property because that is what they were. Most of them are commodity today. Anyone can produce a comparable artifact in hours, sometimes minutes. Nothing went wrong there, the product simply moved on.

As a result, the question changes. For a long time, organizations asked who possessed the knowledge. Increasingly, the more interesting question is who can turn available knowledge into good decisions. Access to information has become easier, while good judgment has not.

Having access to knowledge does not automatically lead to good decisions. Organizations still need prioritization, context, risk awareness and an understanding of trade-offs. AI can generate ten target operating models, and the difficult question remains which one will actually work in a particular organization, with its history, constraints and people. Perhaps this observation is not entirely new. Experienced advisors have always been paid less for possessing information and more for knowing what to do with it. What is new is that this distinction is no longer a nuance of the business model. It is becoming the business model.

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From advice to outcomes

Clients rarely suffer from a lack of slides. Many organizations already have a fairly good understanding of what should be done. The difficult part is usually making things happen: aligning stakeholders, managing trade-offs, navigating resistance and translating recommendations into operational reality. This is where experience becomes practical rather than theoretical. Advice remains important, but advice alone is rarely the objective. Clients care about outcomes, and outcomes require people who stay engaged when the recommendation meets the organization.

Trust becomes personal

Brands remain important, but they are no longer sufficient. Clients increasingly ask about the partner, the architect, the expert or the program leader. They want to understand who will be involved and what experience these individuals bring. Relationships become more personal, and trust becomes more personal as well. This is probably one reason why boutique firms, independent experts and highly specialized advisors have become more visible.

I should be transparent here. My own move into a small specialized firm is itself part of this thought, so I am not writing as a neutral observer. Readers can decide for themselves how much that colors the argument.

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The uncomfortable part for consulting firms

If knowledge commoditizes and parts of capacity become digitally scalable, the classical leverage model comes under pressure. The pyramid worked because a small number of senior people could monetize a large base of junior capacity, supported by reusable methods and standardized deliverables. Both pillars, scaled junior output and proprietary knowledge assets, are exactly the components that are becoming easiest to replicate.

My hypothesis is that small specialized firms have the easier path through this shift, simply because their model never depended on leverage. When every single person was selected deliberately, the firm already is what clients are increasingly buying. Large firms retain real advantages, scale, global reach and the ability to staff programs that no boutique could carry. But they will have to work out where their advantage actually lies once it no longer comes from methodology libraries and analyst pools, and the answer is less obvious than it used to be.

The classical pyramid economics are the difficult part, not consulting itself.

Perhaps the more interesting observation is that consulting firms are exposed to the same forces that affect their clients. They are not observing the transformation from the outside.

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The junior question

The part of this shift that concerns me most has little to do with business models. Junior consultants remain essential, every experienced advisor started as one. But the conditions under which juniors develop have been deteriorating for years, from several directions at once.

The pandemic removed much of the informal learning that consulting careers were built on. Juniors who started remotely never sat next to a senior in a difficult client meeting, never absorbed how an experienced colleague handles a hostile question, never learned through the small corrections that happen naturally when people work in the same room. At the same time, the path into the profession became shorter. My generation entered after thirteen years of school, often military or civil service, and a Diplom. Today's juniors arrive via G8 and a bachelor's degree, which can mean a difference of five to eight years in age and life experience at entry. And now AI is taking over exactly the tasks that used to be the good learning jobs: research, preparation, structuring material, building first drafts. That work was never just junior capacity. It was the mechanism through which young consultants earned their place inside real projects, with time to watch, copy and improve.

This breaks a quiet economic arrangement that the industry has relied on for decades. Junior development financed itself, because the work juniors did while learning was billable. If that work is automated, learning becomes a real cost that someone has to fund deliberately. The question that follows is not easy to answer: where do the next seniors come from if nobody pays for the path anymore? Judgment, the very quality this article argues is becoming the core of consulting value, is built through years of exactly the kind of work that is now disappearing. Firms that treat training as overhead to be optimized away are consuming their own future, just slowly enough not to notice. None of this is conceptually difficult to address. It is just deliberate work that someone has to decide is worth paying for. In our own firm, juniors are simply part of everything: client meetings, internal calls, business development, the uncomfortable conversations included. We are essentially rebuilding the pre-Covid apprenticeship in a remote world, with AI as part of the toolkit rather than a replacement for the learning. Used properly, AI can even accelerate development, because a junior can see more situations, more variants and more feedback in less time than my generation ever did. But that only works if you understand what the old path actually taught, so you can replace it deliberately instead of losing it quietly. And once again, this is easier in small organizations with flat hierarchies, where exposure does not have to be scheduled through three management layers. Learning, much like trust, scales badly through a pyramid.

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Where this leaves us

I do not believe the world needs less consulting. Organizations will continue to face uncertainty, difficult decisions and complex transformations, and they will continue to need experience, judgment and people who help turn ideas into outcomes. But the value proposition shifts. Information, frameworks and standardization become easy to replicate, while experience, context, judgment and trust become more important, and more personal.

Maybe the world does not need less consulting. Maybe it simply needs better consulting