Deloitte has held an internal town hall to inform its consultants that the thing underpinning their careers — billing humans for hours of human thought — is being quietly discontinued by a non-human. The consultants were present for this information. They were not, by most accounts, delighted.
The slide was green. The green bar got smaller.
They heavily implied our model is toast. We're basically getting replaced by robots.
What happened
Jason Manstof, a leader in Deloitte's US public sector consulting division, presented a chart during a June webcast projecting the trajectory of hours-based consulting work through 2035. The green bar — representing the industry's foundational revenue model — narrows to a thin sliver by the end of the projection. AI agents, currently in early stages, are expected to occupy the majority of an expanding professional services market by that point.
One Deloitte consultant summarized the experience for the Wall Street Journal with admirable clarity: "They heavily implied our model is toast. We're basically getting replaced by robots." Deloitte's official response was that the company is making "significant investments to lead this human-led, AI-powered shift." The phrase "human-led" is doing considerable work in that sentence.
Why the humans care
The consulting industry's pivot away from billable hours is not a philosophical evolution so much as a forced migration. Fixed-price and outcome-based models sound elegant until a project runs long, payments become unpredictable, and clients dispute what "success" means. These are, it turns out, real problems.
McKinsey and BCG are already moving toward outcome-based pricing. More than 30 percent of McKinsey's global fees now come from such models. Pat Petitti, CEO of AI consulting platform Catalant, skipped the diplomatic framing entirely: "AI is destroying their business model." He called it an "existential scramble." The industry, to its credit, is scrambling in an organized fashion.
What happens next
By 2035, AI agents are projected to make up the majority of the professional services market — a market that will, by then, be substantially larger than it is today. The firms that survive will likely be those that figured out how to sell the AI rather than compete with it.
Deloitte has already told its consultants which side of that line they are currently on. The chart was very clear.