I’ve been in rooms where everyone knows what needs to be said, but nobody wants to say it.

The quarterly business review where the pipeline numbers don’t add up. The leadership offsite where “market headwinds” becomes the explanation for everything. The one-on-ones where a trusted colleague asks how things are really going, and you pause a beat too long before answering.

This is that conversation.

I’m not trying to sell you anything. I don’t have a product, a platform, or a consulting engagement to pitch. After 34 years in this industry - developer, architect, project manager, VP of Consulting, General Manager, CTO - what I have is a pattern I’ve watched play out before. And I’m genuinely concerned for colleagues who may not see it clearly yet.

What I’ve Watched Happen

A few years ago, I helped build a firm that got acquired by one of the large global integrators. Good firm. Strong culture. Talented people who knew how to deliver.

Within eighteen months, over a hundred consultants and several hundred offshore developers had walked out the door. Not because they were forced out. Because the integration didn’t work. The culture didn’t translate. The things that made the firm valuable in the first place got diluted in the machinery of a 300,000-person organization.

Here’s the part that would be funny if it weren’t so expensive: a significant portion of that talent landed at another firm. And now that same global integrator is acquiring that company too.

They’re paying twice for the same people.

This isn’t a story about one bad acquisition. It’s a pattern. Big firms try to buy capabilities they can’t build organically. The talent that made those capabilities valuable doesn’t stick around. The acquirer ends up with a brand, some IP, and a much smaller team than they paid for.

I watched this happen from the inside. I stayed through my commitment, saw how the sausage gets made, and eventually moved on. It taught me something important about how the industry actually works versus how we talk about it in press releases.

The Retooling Is Real

While I’ve been writing these posts, the large integrators have been making moves that should get your attention.

One major firm just reorganized their entire company into a single “Reinvention Services” unit. They cut 11,000 jobs in the same quarter they announced billions in AI bookings. Another is acquiring one of the largest independent cloud practices in the market, bolting on 21,000 certified specialists to build what they’re calling an “AI builder strategy.”

These aren’t experiments. They’re not innovation labs or pilot programs. They’re fundamental restructurings of how these firms go to market.

The bigs see what’s coming. They’re spending billions to reposition. They’re cutting traditional roles while doubling down on platform plays and hyperscaler partnerships.

And here’s the uncomfortable question: if Accenture and Cognizant are retooling this aggressively, what does that mean for a 200-person regional consulting firm that’s still selling Agile teams?

Why This One Is Different

I navigated the Agile transformation in 2012. It was disruptive, but it was survivable. The shift happened over five or six years. Firms had time to retrain people, adjust their go-to-market, figure out what the new engagement model looked like. Some firms died, but most adapted.

This one is faster.

The AI productivity tools are already in your clients’ hands. Their developers are already more efficient than they were eighteen months ago. The pipeline softening you’re feeling isn’t a temporary budget cycle. It’s a structural shift in how much help your clients actually need.

I’ve talked to architects who still dismiss AI-assisted development as “vibe coding.” I’ve heard the objections about code quality and enterprise governance. And I understand the skepticism. I really do.

But the firms shipping 10x faster with “good enough” code aren’t waiting for the skeptics to come around. They’re capturing market share while traditional delivery models are still debating whether the tools are production-ready.

The Window

Right or wrong, here’s my read: you have maybe 18 months to reposition. Maybe less.

That’s not enough time to completely transform your firm. But it’s enough time to start. Enough time to carve out a P&L and test a new model. Enough time to figure out what you’re actually selling when clients don’t need as many developers as they used to.

The firms that use this window to experiment will have answers by 2027. The firms that spend it waiting for the market to stabilize will be playing catch-up in a market that’s already moved on.

I’ve watched careers end because people didn’t read the signals. Good people. Smart people. Leaders who built real things and had every reason to believe their experience would carry them through. But pattern recognition only works if you’re willing to act on what you see.

I’m Not Asking You to Believe Me

Look, I could be wrong. The market has surprised me before. Maybe AI tools plateau and the traditional consulting model gets another decade of runway.

But if I’m right - if the pattern I’m seeing is the same one I saw in 2012, just compressed into half the timeline - then the cost of waiting is a lot higher than the cost of starting to adapt now.

I’m not asking you to believe me. I’m asking you to look at your own numbers.

Look at your pipeline trends over the last twelve months. Look at the average team size on your proposals compared to two years ago. Look at what your best clients are saying about their internal development capacity. Look at what they’re not saying about their future needs.

The conversation nobody wants to have is the one where you admit that the model that got you here might not be the model that gets you through the next three years. It’s uncomfortable. It’s scary. And it’s necessary.

I’ve been having this conversation with myself for the past year. That’s why I started writing.

The question is whether you’re ready to have it too.

John Doucette is the founder of The Disruption Brief, where he writes about the AI transformation reshaping IT professional services. With 34 years in the industry - from developer to CTO - he’s focused on helping PS firms navigate disruption before it’s too late. Connect with him on LinkedIn.