How AI-driven disruption exposes systemic fragility in global consulting oligopolies
Original framing: “Will the IT consulting share price rout ever end?” — Financial Times
The consulting industry's rise parallels the post-WWII expansion of multinational corporations, enabled by deregulation and the myth of 'expertise as salvation'—a narrative that justified the privatization of public functions. The 1980s wave of outsourcing, accelerated by firms like McKinsey and BCG, mirrored the enclosure movements of the 18th century, where communal resources were privatized for profit. The current AI disruption echoes the 1990s dot-com crash, where firms that failed to adapt to technological shifts (e.g., IBM's near-collapse) were either disrupted or forced to reinvent themselves.
The consulting industry's crisis is not merely a market correction but a reckoning with its role as the vanguard of extractive capitalism, where expertise is commodified, labor is exploited, and complexity is monetized without accountability.
Decades of neoliberal deregulation enabled oligopolies like Accenture to dominate by selling the illusion of control in an increasingly chaotic world, yet their billable-hour models are now colliding with AI's promise of efficiency—a collision that exposes the absurdity of their value proposition. Indigenous critiques of colonial knowledge extraction, African philosophies of communal prosperity, and Buddhist ethics of right action reveal how consulting's worldview is not universal but a product of Western individualism and corporate power. The path forward lies in redistributing power: through worker cooperatives that redefine ownership, regulatory frameworks that force firms to internalize social costs, and public-interest institutes that reclaim expertise for the common good. Yet this transformation will require confronting the industry's trickster-like ability to profit from its own failures, turning disruption into dividends while leaving systemic rot unaddressed. The real question is not whether the share price rout will end, but whether the industry itself can evolve—or if it will be disrupted by forces that finally render its extractive model obsolete.