Published on June 18, 2026

We are currently in the high potential and yet chaotic ‘Teens’ of the AI era!

The phase making an identify shift from taking orders to becoming independent agents, breaking-rules, becoming confident, and outpacing the infrastructural limits! The mid-age phase of gaining maturity and setting down is still far away!

With all the industries massively getting impacted by this teens AI era, software IT consulting is one of the top ones. Let’s take a quick look at the present transition and then understand the future trend.

Today:

• ‘Implementation’ (result) is winning over ‘Consulting’ (advise)! This is already reflecting at doubling growth rate for MBBs’ AI revenue shares!
• 0 → 1 delivery with AI factory and standard toolchains, repository of accelerators wins over advisory firms. SaaS is pivoting to AI-as-a-service (AIaaS) where pre-built AI tools, MLOps models, microservices, SDKs, and APIs by third-party providers being used to build, train, and/or host AI models
• AI owns execution. Humans own judgement, accountability, and trust, relationships, and rapport building and software engineers’ peak market demand in the decade between 2010 to 2020 is the history now!
• Time to market is drastically getting reduced from months to weeks measured timelines for AI projects.
• Consulting model has already moved from 25-year-old hourly-rate based consulting model to outcome-driven delivery.
• MBBs have already shifted focus to build reusable Agentic platforms and products! g. McKinsey’s QuantumBlack Lilli, IBM’s Watsonx, BCG’s Deckster and GENE, Deloitte’s PairID, Sidekick, and Omnia, KPMG’s workbench, EY’s EY.AI, Accenture’s myWizard and GenWizard, Infosys’s Topaz, Cognizant’s Neuro AI and Agent Foundry and the list is exponentially growing! McKinsey alone has 25,000 agents deployed against total human workforce of 40,000!
• AI is already taking over these: Previous efforts-heavy work like business and technical research, data related work like preparation, clean-up and analysis, test automation, debugging and troubleshooting, code quality optimization work like refactoring and modernization, interfacing with cloud platforms and creating Docker files, CI/CD, maintaining existing codebase and even end-to-end application and website development is now being achieved in seconds and minutes through AI platforms!
• AI disruption is flattening the traditional consulting pyramid and traditional junior consultant role is getting replaced by AI engineers.
• AI evaluation and governance for ethics, grounding, hallucination, observability, compliance, and regulatory control is evolving very fast.
• AI consulting start-ups and promising mid-tiers are in demand for SMBs who are eager to stay ahead in AI race but can’t pay heavy consulting fees to MBBs.

The Three-Year Lane:

• AI owns and will continue to own execution. As McKinsey has predicted, AI will automate 30% to 45% of consulting efforts by 2029-2030.
• AI Agents to bypass Human Agents! The current ratio of junior developers:AI engineers which is at 3:1 or 4:1 will become 8:1 or 10:1! Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) chairman Mr. Chandrasekaran declared last week that TCS expects to deploy as many AI agents as it has human employees; eventually matching with the workforce of half a million in next 3 years resulting into significant slow-down in hiring!
• Mutation of Roles: Average software developers, business and data analysts, tier-1 helpdesk agent, BPO, manual QA tester, general researcher, content creators, general PMO coordinators, junior network administrators, and legacy system migrators kind roles will almost be phased out and their alternative opportunities will highly rise.
• Senior strategist premium roles will be in demand: Who define transformation strategy and orchestration, navigate messy real-world complexities, takes high-stake decisions and accountability, and effectively manage ambiguity and change.
• Shared-Risk Model: Outcome based billing model is already building and the commercial model will stabilize in the coming years. This will further transform to shared-risk pricing model consulting firms.
• New AI product and platform revenue stream getting generated. Top professional firms are partnering with LLM/AI firms to build proprietary, licensing-based assets to generate a new AI based product revenue stream for customers in different domains.
• Potential areas of opportunities will be:
  • Building AI-first business model
  • Legacy systems to modernization with AI uplift
  • Building ethical AI frameworks
  • Various cybersecurity implementations to protect AI models and data
  • Build alliances-based ecosystem to build fast, hyperscale, and co-innovate
  • Large enterprises increasingly build in-house AI products

• Global and national AI strategies, boundaries, and regulations will continue to evolve and strengthen.
• As this transformation will heavily attack future professionals, Computer Science curriculums are shifting towards Agentic Engineering and related focus areas to match the demand change.
• Countries built on labor-focused model and not deeply investing in AI innovation will be exposed!

Change is the only constant and history says that every industrial revolution has brought transformation upgrade every time. Let’s wait to see what the AI resolution brings to the IT professional services and the human race overall due to its global impact!