A few weeks back, I was catching up on industry news regarding the impact of AI on professional services, and a piece in Business Insider completely blew my mind. The headline stated it perfectly:
“In the AI age, clients are now asking consultants to have skin in the game.”
The premise is that in this new era of artificial intelligence, consultants must align their payment structures directly with the customer's outcomes. What surprised me wasn't the concept itself, but the fact that it took the rapid rise of AI to finally expose this glaring need for change in the traditional consulting model.
I’ve spent years working in enterprise programs, watching outside consultants get hired to drive business transformation. It has almost always been a bumpy path to program completion. The traditional playbook goes like this: you spend weeks explaining your business processes, the consultants take over, and they attempt to map those processes into a new product for your organization.
But because traditional firms bill for their time, they lack a critical incentive. Instead of leveraging efficient, declarative low-code configurations that internal teams can easily adopt and maintain, projects often become bogged down in heavy, over-engineered custom code. It creates a dependency, pads billable hours, and leaves you wondering how they justify the extremely high cost of doing business.
The time, energy, and resources spent by a consulting group is a valid internal metric for determining their base operating rates. But without an alignment to the client's actual business outcomes, I don't see how you justify the massive cost outlay to the customer.
It simply makes too much sense that the financial success of a consultant should be directly tied to the impact they have on the business they are transforming. If the technology stack doesn't actually improve your revenue operations or streamline your workflows, the hours spent building it don't matter.
This exact disconnect is why I am creating Vector Formed. My mindset in launching this business is to follow the exact same guidelines I leveraged working inside corporate environments. When you provide services internally, you have to live with the systems you build. You have to be part of the outcome.
I am building Vector Formed to bring that same accountability to small and medium-sized organizations. By leveraging my years of experience working with various Sales, Support, and Marketing teams, the goal is to get the precise system workflows in place that drive your specific business outcomes.
Every project you take on must have the final outcome in mind from day one. Because in the end, there is no true alignment when there is no outcome expectation.
