AI Disrupts IT Consulting: Accenture Down 27%, Capgemini Down 31%
nashnova research
Accenture is down 27% this year and Capgemini 31%, as investors bet that AI is displacing the IT consulting industry's biggest revenue source — system implementation work — in a shift that looks structural, not cyclical.
What exactly are investors selling off?
Capgemini has fallen 31% year-to-date; Accenture 27%. Accenture took a single-day plunge in June after clients delayed large IT transformation projects.
This means → the market is not pricing a soft quarter — it is pricing long-term erosion of the core business model by AI.
Total tech-consulting spend is still growing: an estimated $420 billion this year, up 8% — but nearly all the growth comes from AI-related demand.
The real pressure sits on implementation work — worth $236 billion — where consultants integrate new platforms with legacy systems. In plain terms = money is still being spent, but it is flowing in a new direction, and the old business is being bypassed.
How are clients pushing back?
Greg Meyers, chief digital and technology officer at Bristol-Myers Squibb, says the cost of managed services from consultants is "collapsing." In cybersecurity, much monitoring was outsourced to third parties — "now AI does the monitoring, and those contracts are disappearing."
BMS is pressing advisers to shift from hourly billing to fixed-price or performance-linked contracts. This means → even where contracts survive, unit prices are being squeezed.
SharkNinja — $6.4 billion in revenue last year — used Palantir technology to complete a sales-promotion and media-spend analytics project in just eight weeks, work that would previously have required a large consulting engagement.
Banks are cutting too: UniCredit's external consulting spend fell 24% in H1; Société Générale's fell 9%. Commerzbank plans to invest €600 million in AI by 2030, expecting €500 million in annual savings — part of which will come from lower consulting bills.
Why are software vendors cutting consultants out at the source?
SAP's CFO Dominik Asam says bluntly that AI will "replace on a massive scale" parts of the consulting function. SAP claims its system-migration programme can cut clients' external consulting costs by up to 50%.
Bayer, in the middle of a six-year SAP overhaul, has deployed 30 AI agents — automated programmes that handle coding and testing — with the goal of sharply reducing consultant headcount during rollout.
Bayer's project lead Jochen Kamp puts it plainly: "The number of people needed will keep falling."
In plain terms = clients used to buy SAP software and then hire consultants to install it. Now SAP is using AI to do the installation step itself — intercepting the consultants' work at the source.
What do the consulting giants say?
Capgemini CEO Aiman Ezzat pushes back on SAP's "50% savings" claim, calling it "ambitious." But he concedes that Capgemini is redesigning its SAP deployment approach to cut costs.
He stresses that Capgemini is not solely reliant on IT budgets: technology-engineering consulting in aerospace and automotive remains strong — work harder for AI to replace.
AI-related consulting demand itself is worth $140 billion, spanning AI-tool selection, cybersecurity, and change management — helping employees learn to use AI effectively.
British American Tobacco says external consultants are "even more important" in its three-year, AI-driven cost-cutting programme — which has already eliminated 5,500 jobs and outsourced another 3,500 roles to firms including Accenture.
How long will this shift last?
A Source Global survey finds only one-third of clients say consultant-led IT transformation projects were "fully successful." The Big Four accounting firms scored even lower than specialist IT firms such as Accenture.
This reflects a confidence gap that predates AI — AI is simply accelerating the erosion.
Illumina CEO Jacob Thaysen captures the emerging consensus: AI lets companies advance more projects on their own before calling in an implementer. "The future of consulting must focus more on strategic advice to leaders."
In plain terms = the money for "help us install a system" is shrinking; the money for "help us think through what to do" remains — but the latter is a far smaller pool, and that is the fundamental reason these stocks are down 30%.
市场有风险，内容仅供研究参考，不构成投资建议。