Insights

Six articles. Six questions. One consistent answer. What the Consulting Has Changed series established, what it deliberately left unanswered, and what comes next — the Inverted Pyramid and Jana, BearingNode's AI consultant.

It didn't change on a single date. But there is a clear moment of inflection — and you can use it to test whether your consulting partner has adapted. Three forces converged. The old model stopped working. Here's the timeline.

AI hasn't just changed what consulting produces. It has changed who should be doing it — and who clients should hold accountable. Senior intelligence must now be present throughout delivery, not just at the pitch and the debrief. Here's what that means for every role in the delivery chain.

The centre of gravity in consulting has moved closer to the operating system of the business itself. The recommendation layer has been commoditised. Most firms haven't moved with it — because their economics require them to stay where the value used to be.

Traditional consulting scales by adding bodies. The AI era demands something different — observable outcomes, operational governance, and evidence by design. Seven questions to ask any consulting partner to find out whether their delivery model has genuinely changed, or just their pitch.

Traditional consulting is structurally incompatible with the AI era. That's not commentary — it's a design problem. The pyramid was built to solve a production constraint that no longer exists. Here's why the economics have broken, and why the firms most threatened are the ones currently selling AI transformation.

The economics of consulting have shifted. AI has commoditised the output layer — frameworks, slide decks, operating model templates. What clients now pay a premium for is what AI cannot reliably provide in regulated industries: accountable delivery, operational integration, and evidence.

A BearingNode series on the AI era transformation of management consulting. Six questions. One uncomfortable answer. Written for CDOs, CIOs, and senior leaders in regulated industries who are tired of transformation programmes that end with a governance framework no one owns.

Better decisions don't come from more dashboards, faster AI, or bigger datasets alone. Barry Green, Advisory Board Member at BearingNode and co-author of Data Means Business, argues that good decisions require whole-body thinking — integrating logic, experience, intuition, ethical judgement, and organisational context.

Two words. Four meanings. None of them accidental. In the AI era, the premium has moved to trustworthy execution. BearingNode's name encodes exactly what modern data, analytics, and AI consulting must be.

Traditional project management fails AI projects not because it's badly executed, but because it's designed for the wrong world. Learn why Mediocristan governance can't handle Extremistan uncertainty.

A common mistake in data conversations is to treat governance and observability as interchangeable. They are not. D/I O11y overlaps with governance, compliance, management and strategy — but it is distinct from all four.

Both F1 racing and modern data platforms rely on telemetry to prevent disasters. The difference? F1 cars cost £15 million and get 300 sensors. Your data estate? Worth billions, gets a quarterly audit.

I challenged Claude Sonnet 4.5 to destroy our Data & Information Observability framework. What followed was one of the most intellectually challenging conversations about whether we're selling genuine innovation or just repackaging old ideas with new terminology.

As AI systems move from experimental projects to business-critical applications, organisations need comprehensive AI observability and governance frameworks that actually work in practice. Join BearingNode at Big Data London 2025.

Join BearingNode at Big Data London 2025 as we highlight essential sessions on real-world data observability implementations, from Iceberg deployments to enterprise-scale solutions at Dun & Bradstreet and Arch Capital.

AI productivity gains stall when organisations rush transformation without first maturing data discovery & classification foundations.

Demystify data observability with BearingNode's D/I O11y framework. Learn how the five capabilities - Discover, Track, Comply, Govern, Value - transform data management beyond traditional monitoring approaches.

The EDM Council's DataVision EMEA 2025 revealed three fundamental shifts reshaping data governance in the AI era: the move from governance by policy to governance by evidence, the evolution of standards frameworks, and the challenges of federated data management at scale.

The Rise of Data and Information Observability: Moving Beyond Traditional Methods.