IT consulting is worth about a trillion dollars versus $6.7 trillion in software spending. Speakers debate whether automation will shrink consulting budgets for routine work like SAP implementations, or if large-scale projects and AI adoption will keep consulting growing faster than foundation-model companies over the next few years.
An obvious one is when you look at the IT spend, you get 6,700 billion of software. But the stunning thing is you have a billion plus or minus of, sorry, trillion of consulting service type stuff. And if some of the software can eat that, that's a pretty big slug of extra budget that's available for a more efficient product. So I kind of agree. It's finding the extra money is the thing.
Do you not think that consulting services pie actually goes up? I think one of the most profitable categories right now is your accentures on the implementation and integration of some of these systems in the largest enterpr. I tweeted this, I said I think they will be more revenue generative than the foundation model companies in the next two to three years, as they often are in early stages of kind of cycles. But actually I think that would grow, not shrink, no, Rory.
That kind of stuff maybe. Yes, the consulting to help you implement AI. Yes, the consulting to help you morph your code base from Fortran to blah. A market we've been looking at a lot is all the consulting spend around systems integration. You know, SAP, Oracle, netsuite. A lot of that is pretty rote stuff. And you know, it makes coding look hard and there's a lot of automation that we think you'll see there. So again, it's the same thing. It's the swings and roundabouts, places where it grows and places where you're going to get scrunched.
Listen, we all need these consultants, whether they're FTEs or Accenture, we all need them, right? I think we need them more in the age of AI. The only thing that I find lost in this, in the simplistic version of the argument, is they have to be smarter than they used to be. They really do.
