IT Services and Consulting in 2024: Traversing GenAI Pressures, Talent Challenges, and Regulatory Waves
2024 Predictions is a series of special reports examining market trends and business changes TBR’s analysts expect in the coming year. In the professional services edition, our team looks at expectations for the predictable uncertainties of 2024, including the impacts of GenAI hype and outcomes-based strategies for IT services vendors and consultancies.
Top 3 Predictions for Professional Services in 2024
- The 2023 focus on reskilling and training will pay off in accelerated revenues in 2024
- Generative AI will create a pivot to outcomes-based pricing
- Regulations will become a major pain point for all
Embracing Change, GenAI Hype and the Imperative of Outcome-Based Strategies for IT Services and Consultancies
As they say, nothing in life is certain except for death and taxes. And change. And data overload. And hype about technology and disruption. Predictions provide a perfect platform for big leaps and wild guesses, but at TBR, we are seeing more of the same for 2024, including taxes, data overload, and technology (read: generative AI [GenAI]) hype.
IT services and consulting stubbornly remain a people-centric business, despite advances in automation, analytics and AI, and vendors most adept at attracting and retaining good people continue to outperform peers. Keeping good people when the hype around GenAI suggests that many task-oriented jobs will disappear requires vendors offer training in new skills and develop new career paths.
Concurrent with these pressures on talent, GenAI will pressure contracts — with greater transparency comes greater opportunity to pay for exactly what you got. IT services vendors and consultancies that embrace outcome-based pricing models will increasingly find their clients, particularly those enamored with GenAI (although, who isn’t?) open to creative pricing and reluctant to continue business as usual once GenAI has pushed the client’s procurement office out the door.
Additionally, governments continue to lean into regulation to mitigate societal risks and to tame or unleash (depending on your political views) commercial activities. After the last three years of dealing with the pandemic, war, and the emergence of robot overlords (read: again, GenAI), we can reasonably expect governments will increasingly seek the security blanket of tighter regulations.
Add a splintering of global approaches to trade, finance and geopolitics, and companies face not just more regulations but also overlapping and potentially conflicting compliance obligations, varying wildly by jurisdiction. Death and taxes, indeed.
For IT services vendors and consultancies, 2024 looks a little boring. Reskill and train your people so you’ve got the right folks ready to deploy at scale to address your clients’ toughest problems. Let someone else handle the easy problems until they get replaced by GenAI. Start baking outcomes-based pricing into every engagement, underpinned by AI and analytics that demonstrate unquestionably what value you are bringing your clients. And lean hard into governance, risk and compliance (GRC), unless you do not have those skills already, in which case, find a partner.
To read the entire 2024 Professional Services Predictions special report, request your free copy today!
