Why McKinsey Stopped Selling Consulting and Started Selling Execution
- Milind Soni
- June 8, 2026
- Blog
- 0 Comments
The world’s most known consulting firm just stopped selling consulting.
Three days ago, McKinsey announced a partnership with AppliedAI to deliver agentic AI workflows in regulated industries. Not a new practice. Not more consultants. A platform, Opus, that turns McKinsey’s transformation method into a repeatable, governed execution engine.
Their own research sets the context: 64% of organisations are experimenting with AI agents. McKinsey’s senior partner, Abdellah Iftahy said it plainly: “Ambition without execution creates frustration, not value.”
So they stopped selling ambition. They built the execution layer.
The proof is in the numbers. A joint deployment with a European chemicals manufacturer cut a two-week vendor onboarding process to under five minutes. 99%+ reduction in manual effort.
That’s not a typical management consulting engagement – with strategy and advice.
That’s a complete solution. Not just “do what I say”… Let me do it for you.
Some people are calling this AI enabled services or AI native services.
Here’s what most services companies miss when they read this news: McKinsey didn’t become a solution company overnight. They took their most repeatable, high-value delivery methods transformation execution, analytics, AI implementation and wrapped them in reusable IP.
That’s the move. Not building a SaaS from scratch. Not raising a round. Just finding the part of your delivery that you do the same way every time, for every client, and making it something that works without you in the room.
The services companies getting squeezed right now aren’t losing because of bad talent. They’re losing because they’re still billing for time in a market that’s starting to pay for execution and outcomes.
If you run a consulting company and want to figure out what’s worth productizing in your current model using AI, that’s exactly what we do at ProdZen.
DM us.
