The Consulting Goldmine: How Productisation Could Unleash a Billion-Dollar Market

What if everything consultants believe about AI's threat to their industry is backwards? What if, instead of cutting consultants out of the equation, artificial intelligence is actually about to unlock opportunities so vast that the consulting market could expand a thousandfold?

This isn't optimism for its own sake. It's an economic reality that most of the profession haven't yet grasped. Ikum Kandola, co-founder of The AX.ai, a platform designed to help consultancies productise their services through AI, has spent the last couple of years thinking deeply about this inversion.

In a recent conversation, he articulated a vision that reframes the entire future of consulting. Not as a story of threat and displacement, but as one of expansion and possibility. The catch? It requires a fundamental shift in how consultants think about their own value.

The Myth of the Fixed Market

Here's where most consultants get it wrong. They operate from a scarcity mindset. The logic goes like this: there are roughly 1 million consulting projects happening across the global economy each year. If AI makes consultants more efficient, then fewer consultants will be needed to service those 1 million projects. Ergo, AI is a threat to the profession. The consulting pie is finite. Cut it up more efficiently, and there's less pie for everyone.

But this reasoning makes an enormous assumption. It assumes the market is fixed, that client needs are static, and that the world doesn't change. It's an assumption that's rarely examined precisely because it feels intuitively true. Everyone knows that there are only so many problems to solve, right? Wrong.

The Market Isn't Fixed; It's Constrained by Speed and Cost

Kandola argues something quite different. Once consulting services are productised, delivered in weeks rather than months, and at a fraction of the traditional cost, the addressable market expands dramatically. We're not talking about a 20 per cent increase or a marginal gain. We're talking about a shift so fundamental that it transforms the sector's economic fundamentals. A consultancy that might have served 50 clients a year on large, bespoke engagements could suddenly serve 500 or 5,000 through productised offerings. What was a one-off, six-month GDPR compliance project could become a service delivered in a week at a fraction of the cost.

The effect is staggering but straightforward. The consulting market isn't constrained by the number of people willing to pay for traditional consulting. It's constrained by how fast you can deliver and at what price. Unlock speed. Lower the cost. Suddenly, problems that weren't worth the expense of a consulting engagement become solvable. Consider what becomes possible:

A mid-market manufacturing firm can now afford a supply chain transformation that previously required a six-figure, six-month engagement. A fast-growing fintech can access regulatory compliance guidance without depleting its budget. A regional government can implement best-practice HR strategy at a fraction of historical costs. A family business can access the kind of strategic planning that was once the exclusive domain of Fortune 500 enterprises.

This isn't speculation. Kandola points to firms already using productised models with AI embedded in their workflows. They're building and launching new service offerings up to 10 times faster, cutting delivery timescales in half, and reducing costs by up to 70 per cent. None of this requires expanding their headcount. Instead, it requires rethinking what a consultant actually does.

The Real Shift: From Time to Value

Understanding this requires a slight mental pivot. When a consultancy sells time, it competes on the scarcity of its people. Ten consultants can only do so much work in a year. Productivity gains are incremental. Growth requires hiring more people, training them, building client relationships. It's a linear model in which revenue is tied to headcount. But when a consultancy sells value, it competes on the effectiveness of its approach. Productivity gains become exponential. The same 10 consultants can serve many more clients if their underlying approach is systematised.

Codifying Expertise Into Repeatable Systems

Productisation is precisely this shift. Instead of reinventing the wheel for every client, consultancies codify what they know. They build playbooks, diagnostic frameworks, and maturity models. They systemise how they deliver these solutions. They create intellectual property that can be packaged and delivered consistently. And crucially, they let technology handle the work that doesn't require human judgment.

The human role doesn't disappear. It fundamentally transforms. Consultants move away from data gathering, fundamental analysis, benchmarking, and report generation, all tasks that can be automated or AI-accelerated. Instead, they focus on what genuinely requires human insight: interpretation, judgement, facilitation, and strategic thinking. The technology handles the mechanical work at machine speed. Humans handle the synthesis and wisdom-building. That blend becomes the new competitive edge.

Beyond Surface-Level AI Adoption

This is not about ChatGPT wrappers or using generative AI to draft emails and write blog posts. Kandola is precise on this point. That's surface-level activity that feels productive but doesn't fundamentally transform how you work. True transformation comes from embedding AI throughout the entire delivery system, from how you conceptualise a consultancy service through to how you build it, deliver it, and measure its outcomes.

The Big Firms Aren't Your Problem

There's another counterintuitive insight lurking in this conversation. If Deloitte, McKinsey, or PWC were to package up their methodologies and make them accessible to clients through AI, would that destroy smaller, boutique consultancies?

The instinctive answer is yes. But Kandola suggests the opposite. If the major firms do this, it validates the productisation approach. It signals to the market that this is the direction consultancy is moving. More importantly, the big firms aren't actually in direct competition with boutique consultancies looking to productise. The large consulting firms compete with each other across the same massive client base. A boutique firm using productisation isn't trying to win the same contracts. It's serving a different part of the market that large firms can't efficiently reach.

Think of it as Elon Musk's approach to Tesla's electric-vehicle patents. Rather than defending them jealously, he opened them up because the broader adoption of electric vehicles benefits Tesla more than patent protection ever could. The infrastructure needs to be built. The market perception needs to shift. Other companies building electric cars don't threaten Tesla. It legitimises the category and expands the addressable market.

The same logic applies to productisation in consulting. If the big firms move in this direction, they're not your competitors in the race to productise your boutique service. They're your proof point. They're your permission structure.

The Economics Nobody's Teaching

This brings Kandola to what he sees as the fundamental gap in how consultants are educated. Most senior consultants never really learnt economics. They knew how to manage engagements, facilitate workshops, and present findings. But they missed the foundational economic lesson: that every company's role is ultimately to create value, not merely to defend existing revenue streams.

This gap has real consequences. Consultants hear "AI" and think "replacement." They don't think "What if I could expand the pie?" They don't ask, "What if I could serve ten times as many clients?" They don't consider that once you free up consultants from routine work, they can move upmarket. They can tackle more complex problems. They can build deeper client relationships. They can, in essence, grow far beyond what a traditional model allows.

For Kandola, this mindset shift is the main thing holding people back. Not the tools. Not the platforms. Not the technology. The mindset.

The Path That Led Here

Understanding how Kandola arrived at these convictions requires knowing where he came from. He spent roughly four to five years at PWC, one of the world's largest consulting firms. During that time, he noticed something that gnawed at him. There was so much red tape, so much bureaucracy, so many structural inefficiencies woven into the fabric of how the organisation operated. Some of this is necessary in an organisation of that size. Big firms have compliance requirements, audit trails, and governance frameworks. But some of it felt arbitrary. It felt like a process for process's sake, like institutional sclerosis masquerading as rigour.

He also tried to launch another startup while employed at PWC, focusing on education technology and helping teachers with lesson planning. That venture taught him something important about market selection and opportunity identification. The education market in the UK proved challenging, not because the core idea was poor, but because the market dynamics didn't align with what the business needed to scale. It was a formative experience in understanding a lesson that many entrepreneurs learn the hard way: having a good solution isn't enough. You need a receptive market, the right economic moment, and alignment between what you're building and what people are actually willing to pay for.

Here's where Kandola's thinking crystallises. About a year before leaving PWC, he made a deliberate move. He joined the company's Generative AI team, determined to position himself at the forefront of the shift he believed was coming. It was a telling move. He could have stayed comfortable in his existing role, built a career in traditional consulting, and collected promotions and bonuses. Instead, he chose to understand where the industry was genuinely heading. He positioned himself to see the future from within the institution. Then, when the timing felt right and the conviction was strong enough, he left to pursue the vision that had been crystallising in his thinking.

Building the Future You Want to See

The AX isn't just a platform that Kandola has built for others to use. It's a manifestation of the philosophy he's been articulating. The company practises what it preaches. Kandola and his co-founder are running a lean operation. They've built a platform. They're not explicitly selling traditional consulting services. Yet they've created a free assessment tool that allows potential clients to gauge where they sit on the productisation journey. They're launching a new offering called AX30, a 30-day guided service that helps consultancies begin the productisation process whilst giving them access to the platform itself.

This distinction matters. It's not about selling a product and walking away. It's about recognising that the real struggle isn't acquiring the tool. It's the business transformation that comes with productisation. That's where the friction lives. That's where most initiatives fail. So AX.ai exists to guide people through that transformation, not just to hand them software.

Why This Conversation Goes Deeper

What's outlined here captures the core of what Ikum Kandola believes the consulting industry needs to understand. It's a vision that reframes threat as opportunity, challenges the scarcity mindset that pervades so much strategic thinking, and insists that the real competitive advantage lies not in hoarding expertise but in systematising and scaling it.

But there's much more beneath the surface of this conversation. Kandola explores the specific barriers that prevent larger organisations from making this shift, the practical steps that distinguish surface-level AI adoption from genuine transformation, and the more profound questions about what consulting actually is in a world where technology can handle the mechanical parts of the work. He discusses cultural resistance within established firms, how economics shapes incentive structures, and the specific moment when he realised that leaving PWC wasn't just a career move but a necessity.

If you work in consulting or are watching how this industry evolves, this conversation is worth your time. The whole episode digs into all of this with far more nuance and detail, exploring not just the what but the how and the why. Head over and listen to discover the practical pathways that boutique consultancies are already taking, and understand why the golden age of consulting might just be beginning. Head to the Project Flux podcast to hear it in depth.