Had a fantastic conversation with Shveta Arora, Global Head of Consulting at Cognizant. Consulting is going through a moment right now: exciting on one hand, anxious on the other, as everyone figures out what AI actually means for the industry. My 3 favorite takeaways from our chat: 1. Model makers entering consulting is an endorsement, not a threat. Anthropic's $1.5B fund to embed engineers in client operations, OpenAI doing the same... Shveta's take: this validates how critical the services layer is. There's a real "AI velocity gap" between model capability and enterprise value realized, and only services can close it. 2. Talent debt beats tech debt as the real bottleneck. Tech modernization is finally getting traction. But without people on board, skilled and past their anxiety about AI, the ROI never shows up. 3. Nobody's cracked AI services pricing yet. Human rate cards don't fit agentic delivery. Token pricing is too abstract for buyers to budget against. Shveta's seeing early moves toward outcome-based deals and blended human-plus-agent rate cards, but no standard yet. Check out the full conversation on HFS Unfiltered: https://lnkd.in/eXTEKrrj Ravi Kumar S Mariesa Coughanour Phil Fersht Sia Rostami Ravari Dana Daher Melissa Fersht
It was great speaking with you Saurabh Gupta and jointly reflecting on the Consulting opportunity. Looking forward to more such conversations with HFS Research and evolving the AI-led agenda for services firms
I'm interested
Anyone can access a frontier model, but very few organizations know how to redesign their operating models, manage change, and turn AI into sustainable business outcomes. That’s where consulting has an opportunity to reinvent itself. PF