PALLIATIVE CONSULTING

I. The Numbers

The German consulting market reached a volume of €51.4 billion in 2025. That sounds like success. It is the opposite.

2022: plus 16 per cent. 2023: plus 7.3 per cent. 2024: plus 5.9 per cent. 2025: plus 2.8 per cent. The curve is not declining — it is plummeting. From double-digit growth to stagnation in three years. Dietmar Fink, scientific director of the WGMB and the authority on the German consulting market, says: "The boom is over."

But that is not the real news. The real news is in another WGMB study, and it is more devastating than any growth figure: only one in four consulting projects produces a discernible impact.

One in four. That means: 75 per cent with no measurable effect. In a €51-billion market, that is approximately €38 billion per year. €38 billion for PowerPoint presentations that disappear into drawers. For workshops after which nothing changes. For "recommendations" that nobody implements. For "transformation programmes" that accomplish the only transformation the consultants truly care about: the transformation of client money into consultant accounts.

€38 billion per year. In a country that complains it can no longer afford its infrastructure.

II. The Business Model

The business model of the consulting industry was never knowledge. It was the simulation of knowledge.

Take: a 26-year-old MBA graduate. Give him a week to read up on an industry that a Mittelstand entrepreneur has built over forty years. Put him in a dark blue suit. Let him spend three weeks conducting interviews with people who know their business better than he ever will. Distil the findings into a presentation of 80 slides, of which 60 are clipart diagrams that McKinsey has been using since 1985 — only with updated year numbers. Write an invoice for €400,000.

This is not a caricature. It is the standard model. Everyone who has ever experienced a consulting project — on the client side or the consultant side — recognises it. The few who do not recognise it have either never worked with consultants or are consultants themselves.

The model worked as long as three conditions were met: first, the client had to believe in the superiority of the external perspective. Second, there had to be no cheaper alternative that delivered the same or better. Third, the results had to be difficult to measure — for only what cannot be measured cannot be exposed as ineffective.

All three conditions are eroding. Simultaneously.

III. The Breakfast Directors

There is a type that is at home in the consulting industry like nowhere else: the breakfast director. Someone who holds a title, occupies a position, attends meetings, distributes business cards — and delivers nothing. No idea. No risk. No own money. Just presence and the expectation of being paid for it.

In the consulting industry, the breakfast director is not the exception. He is the business model. The partner who acquires the client but never visits the project. The manager who signs off the presentation that an analyst wrote. The "senior advisor" who puts his name on the proposal and shows up at the kick-off meeting — and then disappears.

Anyone who has spent forty years as an inventor trying to bring a technology to market knows the type from personal experience. You sit at a table with people who have titles and business cards and a reputation — and contribute nothing except the expectation of sharing in a success they did not help create. Three breakfast directors who get up in the morning, put on their title, and go to the next meeting, where they nod with serious faces and say "fascinating."

The consulting industry did not invent this type. But it perfected, standardised, and scaled it to industrial proportions. €51 billion a year — that is a lot of breakfast.

IV. The Machine That Does Not Have Breakfast

And then came AI.

Not as a revolution. As a creeping recognition. The recognition that a substantial portion of what consultants sell can be delivered by a machine. Not all of it — but enough to shake the business model to its foundations.

Market analysis? An AI can process in one hour what a junior consultant needs two weeks for. Benchmarking? An AI has instant access to more data points than any consulting team. Strategy presentation? An AI produces 80-slide decks that are indistinguishable in format, language, and structure from McKinsey decks — because it was trained on McKinsey decks.

The decisive difference: the AI does not cost €2,000 per day. It costs €20 per month. It needs no hotel room. It does not fly business class. It has no bonus expectation. It submits no expense report. It does not take the CEO to dinner to maintain the relationship.

And it produces results no worse than what 75 per cent of consulting projects deliver — for zero measurable impact is a low bar.

The WGMB calls it "realignment." The business is shifting from strategy development to "implementation support." Technological and social competencies are gaining importance. New partnership models are emerging.

That is the language of an industry writing its own obituary and marketing it as a relaunch. "Implementation support" is the consulting word for: we are no longer the smartest people in the room, so at least we will stay in the room. "New partnership models" means: we are doing the same thing, only we call it something different.

It is not realignment. It is palliative care.

V. The Cost of Not Knowing

It would be too easy to describe the consulting industry purely as a racket. It has also created value — occasionally, partially, in every fourth project, if one believes the WGMB. The problem is not that consultants are incapable. The problem is that what they are capable of is not worth €51 billion.

For the real costs of the consulting industry are not the fees. The real costs arise from what does not happen because consultants are there.

A company that engages McKinsey buys itself a year. A year in which nobody has to make a decision because "the consultants are still working on it." A year in which the board need not speak an uncomfortable truth because one can "wait for the study results." A year in which the CEO need not confront the supervisory board because he can say: "We have engaged the world's best consultants."

Consultants are not problem solvers. They are decision preventers. They provide the perfect excuse to do nothing — and to pay half a million for it. It is not the analysis that costs. It is the delay.

A Mittelstand company facing a technological decision — say, whether to adopt a new manufacturing technology — can engage a consulting team that will spend six months producing studies, conducting benchmarks, moderating workshops, and ultimately delivering a recommendation that has a 75-per-cent probability of producing no measurable effect. Or it can call the inventor of the technology. He answers the same day. Or he does not — but then at least the answer has not cost half a million.

VI. Reaction as Usual

There is a test by which you can recognise the quality of a consultant, a manager, a partner: send them a piece of information and wait for the reaction.

Those who react are thinking. Those who do not react are protecting themselves.

Silence is not rudeness in the consulting world. It is strategy. Those who do not answer need not take a position. Those who take no position cannot be wrong. Those who cannot be wrong keep their title, their position, their breakfast.

The silence of managers and consultants in response to uncomfortable information — market data that does not fit, technologies that threaten the business model, articles documenting the decline of their own industry — is not arrogance. It is fear. The fear of the breakfast director that someone will notice the plate is empty.

"Reaction as usual" — no reaction. That is the standard response of an industry that has spent decades telling others what to do and is itself unable to respond to a change that concerns its own survival.

VII. What the Consultants Would Tell Their Clients

One need only apply the industry's own advice to the industry itself. It is an exercise in irony.

"Disruptive technologies require a radical realignment of the value chain." — Yes, and the disruptive technology is called AI, and it is currently destroying your value chain.

"Companies that sleep through technological change will disappear from the market." — Precisely. And who advises the advisors?

"Cost consciousness is not a nice-to-have but essential for survival." — Then why does a day of consulting still cost more than a skilled tradesman earns in a month?

"Tomorrow's customer will no longer accept opacity." — When have consultants ever been transparent about how many of their recommendations were actually implemented? How many worked? How many were worth the money?

"In times of crisis, the wheat is separated from the chaff." — Correct. And the WGMB says: 75 per cent of projects are chaff.

The consultants have spent thirty years preaching to others what they themselves do not practise. This is not hypocrisy — it is the business model. You sell medicine you do not take yourself. As long as the patient does not ask whether the doctor is healthy, it works.

The patient is asking now.

VIII. What Replaces the Consultants

Not AI alone. AI is the tool. What truly replaces the consultants is a shift in knowledge.

For thirty years, consultants had a structural advantage: they saw many companies, many industries, many problems. The individual manager saw only his own company. The consultant could say: "We have seen this at fifty other clients, and the solution is X." Whether that was true, nobody could verify — for the fifty other clients were confidential.

This advantage has vanished. Not because consultants have become worse. But because knowledge has been democratised. Every manager today has access to the same studies, the same benchmarks, the same frameworks that ten years ago were the monopoly of the consultants. Harvard Business Review is online. The McKinsey frameworks are in every MBA textbook. The BCG matrix can be applied by any student in their third semester.

And now comes an AI that not only knows the frameworks but can apply them to the client's specific situation. That needs not three weeks to understand the industry but three minutes. That does not produce 80 slides to package three insights but writes three sentences — and then asks whether the client wants details.

The 26-year-old MBA graduate in his dark blue suit has a new competitor. And the competitor does not have breakfast.

IX. The End of Asymmetry

The consulting industry lived on information asymmetry. The consultant knew — or claimed to know — more than the client. The client paid for access to this knowledge. That is how the business worked.

AI destroys this asymmetry. Not completely — there are areas where human experience, judgement, and relationships are irreplaceable. Restructuring, crisis management, political advisory — areas where it is about people, not data. But these areas account, according to the WGMB, for only about 4 per cent of the market.

The remaining 96 per cent? Market analyses. Strategy presentations. Benchmarks. Process optimisation. Organisational design. Due diligence. All areas where data matters more than intuition. All areas where an AI is faster, cheaper, and at least as good as a consulting team.

At least as good — for the benchmark is, one recalls, 75 per cent of projects with no measurable impact.

The consultants feel it. Fink says: "The pressure on consultants is enormous. Hard decisions must now be taken." The language reveals everything. "Hard decisions" — that is the euphemism consultants use when they tell a client he needs to lay people off.

Now they must use it for themselves.

X. The Economics of Nothing

The WGMB has published a study on the "macroeconomic effects of management consulting." Core finding: every euro invested in consulting pays back double for the economy.

That is a remarkable claim from an institute funded by the consulting industry. And it contradicts its own finding: if 75 per cent of projects have no measurable impact, then the euro invested in those projects has an economic return of zero. The "double" return must therefore come entirely from the remaining 25 per cent — which would mean the effective projects achieve an eightfold return.

Not even the WGMB believes that.

The truth is simpler and more uncomfortable: a substantial portion of the €51 billion is a subsidy — a subsidy from the German economy to an industry that sells security. Not knowledge. Not efficiency. Not results. Security. The security that someone else takes responsibility if the decision is wrong. The security that the presentation says "McKinsey" and not one's own name. The security that one can tell the supervisory board: "We engaged the world's best consultants."

Insurance against responsibility. That is the product. And it costs €51 billion per year.

XI. What Remains

There will be consulting after the end of the consulting industry. But it will look different.

Smaller. More specialised. More honest. Results-oriented rather than hours-based. Paid for impact, not for presence. Conducted by people who know something the AI does not know — because they have experienced it themselves, built it themselves, risked it themselves.

The inventor who has spent forty years developing a technology and licenses it to a client — that is consulting. Real consulting. Consulting based on experience, not on frameworks. On risk, not on slides. On own money, not on others' budgets.

The craftsman who tells a builder that the planned statics will not work — that is consulting. The doctor who makes a diagnosis — that is consulting. The old engineer who tells the young one where the mistakes will be — that is consulting.

What disappears is the industrialisation of ignorance. The packaging of platitudes in corporate logos. The monetisation of presence. The business model of the breakfast director.

€51 billion will not fall to zero. But it will shrink to a fraction — to the portion that actually produces impact. And that portion, the WGMB itself says, is 25 per cent.

€13 billion. That is the real market. The rest is air.

XII. Realignment

The WGMB speaks of "profound realignment." The consultants themselves speak of "transformation." Of "new partnership models." Of "convergence of consulting segments." Of "technological and social competencies."

These are the words consultants use when telling a client that his business model is no longer viable. When the shop must close but one may not call it that. When the truth is too expensive and the lie too obvious.

There is a more honest word for it.

They call it realignment. It is palliative care. The classic consulting model — expensive ignorance, industrialised breakfast directors, 75 per cent of projects with no impact — is dying. Not because it was bad. But because it has become superfluous. The machine does not have breakfast. And it does not send an invoice for €400,000 for 80 slides, of which 60 are clipart.