Representatives from Deloitte, EY, and Accenture didn’t respond, or declined to respond, to questions about the impact of AI on their businesses. But Edwin Miranda, founder of AI consulting firm konsultora, doesn’t think his larger competitors are going away anytime soon.

“I don’t think the large consulting firms simply disappear,” he says. “They still have enormous advantages in industry expertise, global delivery, complex integration, procurement, regulation, and the ability to operate inside very large organizations. What AI is attacking is the traditional operating model behind the engagement.”

In the past, a large IT consulting project would involve weeks or months of research, analysis, documentation, with large implementation teams doing the work, he notes. The cost of a large IT transformation came from the human labor required to move information from one stage of the engagement to the next.