• Traditional IT consulting in 2025 — selling manual labor at premium rates while AI agents do the same work for $0.02 per task.
• Your competitive moat is 'we speak German and show up to meetings' — congratulations on commoditizing yourselves.
• Billing by the hour for software development advice while GitHub Copilot writes entire codebases over lunch.
• The business model is 'rent expensive humans to large enterprises' — McKinsey for people who couldn't get into McKinsey.

24-36 months until enterprise clients realize AI agents deliver 70% of consulting value at 5% of the cost. The premium consulting firms pivot fast; everyone else becomes a footnote.

• 'Technology consulting' without visible AI capability in 2025 — like opening a horse-drawn carriage service in 1920.
• The implicit promise: 'We'll send smart people to solve your problems manually' — a value prop with an expiration date stamped on it.

If your company was a human, it'd be that brilliant contractor everyone loves but no one wants to put on payroll because they cost too much and refuse to learn the new tools.

• Enterprise relationships: the Mittelstand trusts consultants who shake hands and speak German — cultural moat buys 18-24 months.
• Domain expertise: deep knowledge of legacy systems is genuinely valuable during AI migration — temporary scarcity premium.
• Human reassurance: C-suite still wants a consultant in the room when making $10M decisions — for now.

What's the difference between a traditional IT consultant and ChatGPT Enterprise? ChatGPT doesn't bill you for 'knowledge transfer sessions' that could've been an email.

• Launch an AI implementation practice in 60 days — become the guide for AI adoption, not the thing being replaced by it.
• Open-source your methodologies and frameworks — if you're selling labor hours, you're already losing.
• Partner with Anthropic/OpenAI as implementation specialists — own the last-mile problem before Accenture does.