In this segment, Robert Ta draws on his experience as a former Workday integrations consultant to criticize large consulting firms such as PwC and Accenture for their ineffective approach to enterprise AI projects. He describes how these firms staff AI implementations with low‑margin, junior staff while partners take large cuts, creating incentives focused on recurring service contracts rather than delivering successful outcomes. Ta argues that this model leads to messy deployments, especially when firms lack the expertise to build robust LLM products with world‑class evaluation pipelines. He suggests that smaller, more agile AI builders and service providers have a clear opportunity to disrupt this space by offering better‑aligned, outcome‑driven solutions and capturing market share from the incumbents.
Chapters
So for the people out there thinking that PwC, Accenture, etc. know their shit and could install AI with speed in an enterprise, don't make that assumption. Also, this is coming from, uh, I, I worked at Workday. I started my career at Workday as an integrations consultant, and I remember working with some Accenture folks and PwC folks side by side on projects, and I basically had to go clean up their mess. And 10 years later, uh, I'll say it's the same thing because what they're What they're trying to do actually is just get some college new grads to get staffed on projects that are managed by partners where the partner gets a giant cut to sell it. And then they staff it minimally to get the highest margins they can on the service engagement. What that means is they're not really incented on your outcome. They're incented to get you on recurring service contract retainer to keep them there. And I, I'm very excited to see that disrupted where smaller players like us on our services side, and then other AI builders out there, you can go make this happen. You can go and eat some of their lunch money because from what I'm hearing from industry insiders, a lot of these big contracts by big players, they fall apart because when the rubber meets the road, they don't understand how to stand up an LLM product with a world-class evals pipeline. That's what I'm hearing
anyway.
Jonathan, any thoughts on
that? Yeah. I mean, it's, it's interesting what you say about your experience. I just say, I think there's a lot of opportunity on that forward deployed engineer front. Like there's a shortage of engineers and the shortage of case studies that have achieved ROI outcomes. And I think that provides an opportunity landscape for entrepreneurs like you and I.
