Nicholas Mukhtar on the Outside Voice as Clients Question Consultants

“Consultants are on a collision course with their clients over the cost of giant IT projects, as companies look to artificial intelligence (AI) to cut spending on external advisers.” The Financial Times opened its Aug. 31 report on the consulting business with that sentence.

Six months earlier, Nicholas Mukhtar, who advises corporate executives, business owners and family offices through his Fort Lauderdale firm, Tera Strategies, sat for an interview in which McKinsey came up by name.

December 2025: A $400 Billion Forecast and a Reported Job-Cut Plan

Source Global Research forecast that technology consulting would pass $400 billion in revenue for the first time in 2026, Consultancy.uk reported on Dec. 19. The same research group said generative AI remained “largely at an experimental level,” with fewer than a fifth of companies making extensive use of it across their organizations.

Four days earlier, Semafor reported that McKinsey was planning thousands of job cuts, “part of a larger slowdown across the industry.” It credited Bloomberg with the original report, said EY and PwC had also slimmed down in recent years and said clients, including businesses and governments, had grown more cost-conscious.

February 2026: Nicholas Mukhtar Makes the Case for an Outside Voice

Nicholas Mukhtar founded the Detroit nonprofit Healthy Detroit and ran it for seven years. His consulting practice has operated as Tera Strategies since 2019, advising clients on corporate governance, business operations, and marketing and strategy.

Asked how systems-level thinking from public health carries over to business problems, he sorted companies into large, established institutions and startups. He said: “For large institutions, you have to think outside the box and get creative. There’s a lot of cynicism about companies using McKinsey and outside consultants, but the rationale is sound: you bring in an outside voice that isn’t ingrained in the day-to-day, and can actually think creatively.”

Startups, Nicholas Mukhtar said, should study what larger institutions built and how they got there, and where they went wrong. He added: “Every entity and every person is unique, and you have to treat it that way.”

June 2026: Accenture Cuts Its Forecast

HFS Research reported on June 19 that Accenture had lowered its fiscal 2026 revenue growth forecast to a range of 3% to 4% in local currency, from 3% to 5%. Its shares closed June 18 at $127.98, down 17.97%.

Accenture’s stock had lost 27% for the year by late August, including a sharp drop in June, when the company said some clients had delayed giant IT transformation projects, the Financial Times reported. Capgemini’s had lost 31%.

August 2026: Banks, Drugmakers and Consumer Brands Ask to Pay Less

UniCredit, in Italy, cut what it spent on outside consultants by 24% in the first half of 2026. Société Générale, in France, put its own decline at 9%. At Commerzbank, the No. 2 lender in Germany, a €600 million AI budget running through 2030 is meant to save €500 million a year. Oliver Dörler, its head of AI, said consultants often “learn more from us than we learn from them.”

Jochen Kamp, who is leading an IT overhaul at German drugmaker Bayer, said: “Consulting resources will be needed in very different numbers and also with different skills. The traditional consultant as we know them today will certainly have to change. Fewer and fewer of them will be needed.”

Bristol Myers Squibb has leaned on its advisers to charge less, or to trade hourly billing for fixed-price or performance-based fees. Greg Meyers, its chief digital and technology officer, told the paper: “I’m totally fine for this to be margin-expanding for them as long as we get to participate in the downside. If we’re not satisfied, it has never been easier to take that work in-house.”

SharkNinja, which reported $6.4 billion in revenue last year, had just finished an eight-week project using Palantir technology to analyze sales promotions and media spending. Mark Barrocas, its chief executive, said: “What we have found is working with these technology partners, together with the hands-on business leaders running these departments, has proved to be much more effective than bringing in a third-party consultant that doesn’t necessarily know the business.”

The Market Still Grew, and the Argument Is Over How Much

Source Global still expects clients to put $420 billion toward technology consultants in 2026, 8% more than last year. About $140 billion of that pays for advice on new technology, AI included, and $236 billion for implementation. Just a third of the clients it surveyed called an IT transformation project run by outside advisers a complete success, and the Big Four accounting firms, Deloitte, EY, PwC and KPMG, scored worse for satisfaction than IT specialists such as Accenture.

Nicholas Jotischky, Source Global’s head of market trends, said buyers increasingly want to cut out middlemen. “There’s a feeling of, why can’t I just go straight to a technology firm or sub-vendor with whom the Big Four is partnered?” he said. He also noted that 55% of clients still plan to use the Big Four more over the next 12 months, down from 80% a year before.

SAP says coming changes to its systems could shrink clients’ outside-consultant bills by as much as 50%, and its chief financial officer, Dominik Asam, predicted AI would “massively displace” parts of consulting. “It’s ambitious,” said Aiman Ezzat, chief executive of Capgemini. “We don’t see 50 per cent. But definitely we have redesigned the way we deploy SAP to be able to reduce the cost of implementation and to speed it up.”

British American Tobacco said external consultants were “more important” as it works through a three-year cost-saving program focused on AI.

October 2026: Nicholas Mukhtar on Deliverables and AI

Asked in a second interview this October for an unpopular opinion about how consultants and advisers operate, Nicholas Mukhtar said: “Too much consulting rewards the presentation rather than the outcome. A brilliant strategy that never gets implemented has limited value. I’d rather leave a client with three clear decisions they can act on than a sixty-page report that sits on a shelf.”

His pick for the business trend getting more credit than it deserves was “the idea that AI tools alone will fix a company’s productivity.” Mukhtar said: “AI amplifies whatever process you already have. If the process is broken, you just get the wrong answer faster. Fix the workflow first, then automate it.”

“Earlier this year I was working with a client who I felt was too reliant on AI,” Nicholas Mukhtar said. “I advised him to focus on his company’s processes and people, and stressed that AI should simply fill in the gaps.” He added: “In some ways, I probably underestimated how valuable AI could be for his company, and so I had to walk back some of my advice as I learned more about the different ways AI can help companies. I don’t think my advice to focus on people and process was wrong per se, but I do think AI can play a valuable role in both those areas.”