Automating Consulting Services: Re-Evaluating Online Consulting

Abstract

The jury on online consultancy came back a couple of years ago, way ahead of all the evidence being presented, to conclude that the defendant was guilty as charged. Online consulting — by which I mean replacing the face-to-face interaction of conventional consulting with a series of web-based tools enabling clients to conduct the various stages of a consulting project for themselves — was never going to amount to much more than a niche service, provided by a particular segment of the market. Offline consultancies were largely safe: some would develop an online component to their business, but it would never account for more than a fraction of their total revenue.