In the world of independent consulting, the ‘product’ has traditionally been people. But in today’s shifting landscape, that notion is increasingly under pressure, as the productisation of knowledge emerges as both a significant challenge and a compelling opportunity, writes Howard Scott, founder of Studio:Blueprint.
For most of the last decade, the conversation about AI in professional services followed a reassuring script. Senior partners told clients that AI would make consultants faster and analysis sharper. The consultant remained the product, and technology was a better tool in the same hands.
That script has been quietly retired. In early 2026, PwC launched PwC One: a platform where clients access automated advisory services directly. Six services at launch, with pricing expected to move towards subscription and outcomes-based models rather than traditional billing by the hour.
Paul Griggs, PwC’s chief in the US, told the Financial Times that anyone who believes they can opt out of AI is “not going to be here that long”. He was talking to his own partners.
Speaking at CES in January, McKinsey & Company global managing partner Bob Sternfels said the firm now operates 25,000 AI agents alongside 40,000 humans, with a target of rough parity before the end of the year. Those agents saved 1.5 million hours on search and synthesis work in 2025 alone, and the direction is clear: grow the client-facing roles, compress the operational and analytical layers.
The pattern extends well beyond the management consultancies.
Across the major agency holding companies, 2025 saw headcount reductions in the tens of thousands. The largest groups have each announced restructuring programmes targeting hundreds of millions in annual savings, built around platform consolidation and AI-led delivery. Invest in AI infrastructure, grow the strategic roles, and compress the operational layers that historically absorbed the bulk of the workforce.
According to PwC’s latest AI Performance study, 74% of AI’s economic value is being captured by just 20% of organisations. The firms on that list are the ones making these moves now.
Independent consultants
For the independent consultants and small advisory firms, the instinctive reaction to these numbers tends to be the wrong one. The real risk is a shift in what clients expect.
Most independents are not competing with PwC or McKinsey for the same engagements, and that remains true. The senior independent who brings two decades of sector-specific judgment is not being replaced by a subscription platform.
But expectations shift regardless. When a client can access automated advisory services from a major firm under a monthly subscription, the way they think about consulting infrastructure starts to change. The independent who cannot demonstrate that their methodology is structured, their outputs scored, and their value traceable is no longer competing purely on quality. They are competing on trust, and trust alone becomes a thinner commercial foundation when procurement teams are learning to benchmark against firms that quote automated outcomes at scale.
The consulting industry is turning its knowhow into products
The independents who feel this first will be those whose approach relies on the assumption that experience speaks for itself. It often does, in the room. But experience that cannot be structured, scored, or evidenced outside the room is harder to justify in a market that is starting to expect all three.
What productising actually requires
The large consulting firms can productise because they spent decades codifying. Frameworks, diagnostic structures, scoring methodologies, interview protocols: all documented, all transferable, all structured enough to survive the removal of the individual consultant from the delivery chain.
Independent consultants and small firms have equivalent intellectual property, but most of it lives in slide decks, workshop guides, and documents adapted by hand for each engagement. The thinking exists. The infrastructure to deploy it at any kind of scale does not.
Building that infrastructure used to mean significant capital or a technical co-founder. Some platforms in this space have made the problem worse by requiring thousands in setup fees and months of guided onboarding before a consultant can deploy their first diagnostic. In those models, productisation remains accessible only to firms that can afford to treat it as a project.
The infrastructure gap is closing
Platforms are beginning to emerge that address this directly. Studio:Blueprint, for example, lets consultants upload their own methodology and deploy it as a branded, scored, client-facing diagnostic with no onboarding programme and no implementation layer to navigate. The gap between what the largest consulting firms can deploy and what an independent can access is narrowing faster than most people in the industry realise.
Software alone will not resolve the structural pressures facing small firms in a market reorganising around automation. But the distance between what the largest firms are deploying and what an independent has available comes down to infrastructure, not capability. The thinking, the frameworks, the judgment: those already exist inside most experienced independents. What has been missing is a way to structure and deploy them without rebuilding from scratch for every engagement.
The productisation of professional services is already underway at the firms whose behaviour sets the benchmarks your clients use to read the market. Independent consultants and small firms have expertise that holds real value. Whether that expertise is structured well enough to hold its ground when clients start expecting the same infrastructure they see from the firms making headlines is the question that matters now.
About the author: Howard Scott has spent 30 years in consulting, marketing and digital transformation. He is the founder of Studio:Blueprint, a firm that helps independent consultants and small consulting firms codify and deploy their methodology through AI-powered diagnostic and evidence tools.
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