Consulting executives are considering ordering junior staff back to the office more frequently to sharpen their human skills as AI takes over a growing proportion of their technical work. Read more here:

Consulting firms: Bridge @Slack/@Microsoft Teams/@discord for every client without forcing tool changes. One hub, real-time multi-client channels. Guide: #Consulting# #TetherChat#

A $500 consulting offer to Jeffrey Epstein came with attorney-client privilege. Documents reveal how he built circles of legal secrecy with top lawyers and law firms. Read the full story: 📷: Rick Friedman/Rick Friedman Photography/Corbis via Getty Images

Whether it’s existing consulting firms, new ones that emerge, FDEs from agent vendors, or new internal agent engineering roles, the amount of work that is going to be created to implement agents in enterprises will exceed anything we imagine today. The complexity of implementing agents in any existing organizations is very real. When I talk to large enterprises, as you move from a chat paradigm to agents that participate in meaningful workflows, there are a number of things they need to do. First, you have to get agents to be able to talk to your data securely across your systems. In many cases, enterprises have decades of legacy infrastructure that contain the valuable context for AI agents. That’s going to take a ton of work to go modernize and move to systems that work well with agents. Then, you need to ensure that you’ve implemented agents with the right access controls and entitlements, the right scopes to be safely used, and have ways of monitoring, logging, and securing the work that they do. Next, you need to actually document the processes in the organization in a way that agents can utilize for doing the work. You also need to figure out what the new workflow looks like when agents and people are working together on a process, and who steps in where. Just replicating the old workflow will mute the gains. Oh and you likely need to create evals for your top new end-state processes. Finally, you have to keep up with a rapidly changing set of best practices and architectural shifts happening in the agent space. While it’s fun for people to change their personal productivity tools on a dime, it’s 100X harder to do this in a business process. The speed of change is a blessing and a curse right now for anyone trying to keep a stable system design. All of this means that individuals and companies that develop expertise on the above set of components (and more) are going to be needed to help organizations actually implement agents at scale. This is also the rationale for vertical AI agents right now that can go in deep on a business domain and help bring automation to it. This is a huge opportunity right now whether you’re doing this internally or as an external business provider.

A $185 million consulting deal that former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann signed with SoftBank upon his departure last year is no longer in place, WeWork Executive Chairman Marcelo Claure said at #WSJTechLive#

I run an 8+ figure consulting business. I’m extremely niche-specific with who I help. My primary focus is fitness, wellness, and health coaches who want to get to $100K/month. But because of the size of the business I’ve built, I constantly get coaches from other industries asking me for help. Especially when it comes to paid ads. And there’s an interesting business opportunity there. I sell 45–60 minutes of my time for $2,000-$3,000. On average, that adds another $60K–$80K/month to the business. Could I turn that into a coaching program? Absolutely. Could I build some massive offer around helping coaches in every industry scale? Probably. But I don’t really want to. I like staying in my lane. I like being known for one specific thing. And I like the simplicity of someone paying me $3K, getting an hour of my brain, implementing what I tell them, and going on their way. No 6-month commitment. No complicated fulfillment. No giant coaching community. No need to take on another 50 clients. Just: $3K → 60 minutes → solve the problem. There’s something underrated about building a business around what you’re exceptionally good at… without feeling the need to monetize every possible opportunity. Sometimes the best business decision isn’t adding another offer. It’s knowing what you don’t want to build.

FUN FACT: Morgan Stanley tracks IBM Consulting job postings as a leading indicator for Consulting revenue. As of Aug 10, daily active Consulting postings went down -53% vs end of Q2. This is a clear negative read-through for IBM's Q3 Consulting growth, contrasting with management's constructive tone at Q2 earnings.