KPMG appears to be attempting to move the competitive battleground from implementation speed to governed operations. If the market evolves in this direction, partners and competitors will need to clarify their roles and demonstrate credibility in an environment where agentic transformation is treated less as a discrete project and more as a continuously governed system.
Principal Analyst & Practice Manager Patrick Heffernan and TBR’s Professional Services team discuss which macro trends will shape demand for consulting and IT services over the next five years, how companies have positioned themselves for accelerated AI adoption, and which companies will outpace peers and why.
Explore TBR’s top takeaways from PwC Australia’s February analyst day, highlighting leadership strategy, client case studies, manager-level perspectives that demonstrate how the firm’s culture, values and strategic priorities translate into real client impact across Australia and New Zealand.
A scaled managed services practice trained in spotting consulting opportunities and armed with AI-enabled solutions will unquestionably win some management consulting market share. More significantly, from TBR’s objective view, is whether the Big Four firms can manage their staffing, brand promise and technology alliances to take advantage of the managed services practices they’ve already built and use those opportunities to return to robust management consulting growth. Maybe, but probably not all four. The next two years will be telling, and TBR expects the existing differences between the Big Four will become even more pronounced.
On Jan. 22, 2026, Fujitsu Americas hosted more than a dozen industry analysts in Toronto for a day of briefings on the company’s progress, specifically in the Americas. Speakers included Asif Poonja, EVP, corporate executive officer & CEO, Americas Region; John Slaytor, VP, head of Strategy & Uvance; Durga Kota, CTO, head of Data x […]
After a period of relative softness, consulting revenues are expected to rebound to high-single- or low-double-digit growth as pervasive uncertainty pushes enterprises to seek external guidance. Demand will be particularly strong around risk mitigation, strategic planning and AI adoption, positioning forward-deployed engineers, supply chain management and people advisory services as leading revenue drivers in 2026.
TBR Insights Live session: TBR’s ecosystem intelligence experts discuss how AI-driven sales and marketing will reshape ecosystems, how AI alliances will impact operational technology and what will challenge the scaling of sovereign AI.
2026 will be a transitional year defined by technology ecosystem expansions — multiparty alliances spanning IT, OT, devices, edge and silicon; industrial/physical AI acceleration, especially at the edge and in manufacturing; and strategic bottlenecks as skill shortages and infrastructure gaps slow sovereign AI adoption. TBR expects significant changes in how technology vendors collaborate and compete, which lays the groundwork for broader, more integrated AI ecosystems. This is an optimistic prediction. Multiparty alliances require exceptional leadership, shared understanding of commercial models and transparency among partners, and AI aids only the last of these. The human component remains the most significant roadblock. IT-OT convergence and a surge in connected everything have been a TBR (and broader market) prediction for years, and while “signs point to yes,” as the Magic 8 Ball says, 2026 could be another year of disappointing progress, as hype around physical AI could far outpace reality.
The smartest IT services companies and consultancies will act on managed services as an entrée to consulting, a complete reversal of the traditional consulting to implementation to managed services model. Everyone should benefit from the increased demand for consulting in 2026. Still, most of the top IT services companies and consultancies will leverage their managed services relationships to capture new opportunities and further cement their stickiness with clients.
Aligning alliance, acquisition and industry strategies around AI and then executing on that alignment should be one of HCLTech’s strengths. Taking full advantage of the breadth and depth of HCLTech’s AI Foundry should be another. HCLTech’s efforts in these areas have positioned it well in a wildly fluctuating market. TBR has written extensively about challenges in the AI space, particularly for IT services companies and consultancies. Based on TBR’s research, 2026 should be a pivotal year for HCLTech.