Software has already taken over research, benchmarking, and diligence support. The strategy layer is the last big pool of billable hours — and it is moving.
For two decades, the strategy consulting industry has been remarkably resistant to unbundling. Research got outsourced. Benchmarking became SaaS. Diligence support moved to India and the Philippines. But the top of the pyramid — framing, synthesis, recommendation — stayed inside partner-led engagements priced in the hundreds of thousands.
That is now changing. Not because AI writes better memos, but because the workflow around a decision — the issue tree, the hypothesis log, the evidence trail, the scorecard — has finally become software you can run yourself.
The blocker was never intelligence — it was structure. A decision needs an issue tree, a hypothesis, evidence, scoring, and a red team. Once that scaffolding is in the tool, the marginal cost of a case drops by an order of magnitude.
The obvious move — sell their own AI copilot — protects revenue this year and cannibalizes it next. The less obvious move is to reprice around outcomes: fewer engagements, more embedded decision-support retainers, and a shift from selling weeks to selling accountability.
Either way, the client posture is changing. Strategy is becoming something the company owns, not something it rents.
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