2025 Consulting & Professional Services Year-in-Review (Part 3: Powering Success in 2026) 

Recently we surveyed senior industry thought leaders to identify key trends and challenges from 2025 and map the road ahead for consulting and professional services in 2026. This final installment in our three-part blog series focuses on priority opportunities for professional services firms in 2026. It spotlights the central role of artificial intelligence (AI) in enhancing human capabilities to improve project execution, resource efficiency, and business outcomes. 

AI: A Key Piece of the 2026 Puzzle   

If 2025 was about holding ground by adapting to rapid marketplace and geopolitical changes, 2026 will be about realizing AI’s strategic potential. 

Professional services firms are already deploying AI platforms to automate routine processes and streamline operations. With deeper integration, they will extend AI into higher-value opportunities across delivery, sales, and client experience. This will uncover a much wider gamut of opportunities that remain untapped.  

According to Pascal Bornet, author of Agentic Artificial Intelligence: Harnessing AI Agents to Reinvent Business, Work and Life, “The highest-impact opportunities often aren’t your most complex processes. Instead, look for the routine tasks that are preventing your best people from doing their best work. When evaluating impact, ask: If this task were automated tomorrow, what would your team be able to accomplish instead?”  

AI-Driven Insights and Near-Term Use Cases 

In 2026, AI-driven, real-time insights will increasingly help firms anticipate client and project needs. This could improve margins and strengthen long-term resilience by attracting and retaining clients in a challenging market. 

Examples of near-term use cases include:

• Predictive staffing and capacity planning
• Project risk assessment
• Sales enablement

Beyond operational efficiency, AI opens doors for new service models. Scott Montgomery, Chief Customer Officer at Worldgate, LLC, sees opportunities to bundle advisory, automation, and AI enablement into integrated service offerings. This could create recurring revenue streams and insulate firms from short-term disruptions.

He also underlines the role of AI-driven analytics and predictive tools in delivering enhanced insights, helping firms “anticipate client needs, optimize resource allocation, and reduce risks.” 

Mainstreaming of Generative AI

Industry findings reveal that 71% of professional services firms now deploy generative AI. This is a dramatic jump from 33% in 2023, with adoption levels at 78% in consulting and 71% in accounting. 

Dave Hofferberth, Managing Director, Service Performance Insight (SPI), emphasized that the industry is only beginning to realize the benefits of AI. He added that firms implementing AI-powered platforms will outcompete those that do not, highlighting a widening performance gap between early adopters and laggards. 

AI as a Strategic Enabler 

AI is often wrongly viewed as a cost-cutting substitute rather than a lever for value-added work. Andy Jordan, President of Roffensian Consulting S.A, recognizes AI’s role as a support tool that improves administration and frees his firm’s “expensive human resources” to focus on more strategic work, including customer-facing tasks. 

AI as Catalyst and Disruptor

Aside from building greater agility, AI is fundamentally altering client buying behavior. Jason Mlicki, Principal of Rattleback, labeled AI both a catalyst and a disruptor in equal measure, noting it is “effectively eliminating traditional search traffic and inbound leads as a means for firms to attract new clients.” 

He added that AI will catalyze new business opportunities as clients increasingly seek expertise to maximize their AI investments. The client-side need for expertise to utilize “their proprietary data sets” to train large language models (LLMs) and integrate core data systems could benefit firms. He also listed AI training, adoption, and culture change as other client requirements that firms could support.  

“17% of clients say they'd prefer to deal with an AI agent than a consultant. While that portion seems a little high, the reality is that more of the things firms have traditionally done for clients is being done by software. Firms can either be on the sidelines watching it happen or find ways to translate some of their unique data and IP into their own products to capture their share of that shift.” 

— Jason Mlicki, Principal, Rattleback

Agentic AI: The Next Frontier

Beyond generative AI, professional services firms are beginning to explore agentic AI — autonomous systems that can plan, act, and collaborate with humans to deliver outcomes. McKinsey's State of AI 2025 reports that 62% of organizations are already experimenting with AI agents. Analysts project The U.S. Enterprise Agentic AI Market is expected to reach USD 27.80 billion by 2033, Industry leaders are sounding the call: AWS Professional Services noted in late 2025 that "agentic AI is transforming how consulting services deliver value, compressing development timelines and elevating solution quality."

BCG added that "to scale agentic AI, CEOs must redesign work around outcome-driven processes." For consulting firms, this shift means moving beyond automation into AI-enabled service delivery, where agents handle execution while human consultants focus on strategy, trust, and client relationships.

Beyond AI: Firms Must Turn Human Resources into A Strategic Advantage

There is another element to success in 2026 beyond harnessing AI tools and platforms: a conscious approach to managing human talent. While AI will equip business leaders with data and insights, firms that use it intentionally to enhance human judgement rather than replace it will thrive, cautioned Tissa Richards, CEO, www.tissarichards.com, Keynote Speaker & Award-Winning Author of "Rethinking Resilience: Fueling Your Competitive Advantage."

"The technology will increasingly handle analysis, pattern recognition, and content generation, while people will focus on meaning, context, and connection," she said, emphasizing complementary roles.

Firms deploying AI most thoughtfully to elevate trust, creativity, and resilience instead of eroding them would gain future advantage over those that simply use AI the fastest, Tissa Richards added.

Dave Hofferberth also suggested greater organizational focus on upskilling employees on using AI and creating a future-ready firm. He urged firms to prioritize and better manage capacity planning processes and human resource investments.

"Good leadership and good planning are very highly correlated with success in professional services, and those are two good areas to start," Dave Hofferberth advised.

For Andy Jordan, people remain central in 2026. He advocated for optimizing the return on people investments by redeploying capacity freed by automation and AI. The best firms will differentiate on "service excellence, an area where there is always room to improve," he said.

Hilary Fordwich, President, Strelmark, LLC, Business Development Consultants, argued that professional service firms seeking success in 2026 must find new ways to build relationships, focusing on human connection, trust and likability, and not just adding new packages or services.

While amplifying the importance of commercial skills and relational equity, she also stressed training and coaching employees on how to gain and retain clients. "Technically brilliant left-brain professionals relish being provided with a user-friendly framework for exactly what to do in order to build their client base," she said.

Conclusion

Success in 2026 will depend on how quickly firms adopt and integrate AI while elevating human capital. Combining tech adoption for agility with ongoing workforce upskilling can help firms innovate and become resilient. Future-ready firms will focus on both the pace of adoption and the quality of their integration. The opportunity lies in creating and marketing a competitive differentiation through AI-driven hyper-personalized client relationships and talent agility. At a strategic level, firms that align their people strategy with their AI capabilities will likely outcompete their peers.

For more insights into what these professional services leaders expect in 2025 and beyond please see our 2025 Professional Services RoundTable Webinar (Now On-Demand!)

Thank You to Our Thought Leaders for Their Insights: 

1. Andy Jordan, President of Roffensian Consulting S.A. 
2. Dave Hofferberth, Managing Director, Service Performance Insight (SPI) 
3. Hilary Fordwich, President, Strelmark, LLC, Business Development Consultants 
4. Jason Mlicki, Principal of Rattleback 
5. Scott Montgomery, Chief Customer Officer at Worldgate, LLC 
6. Tissa Richards, CEO and Leadership Expert at www.tissarichards.com