In February 2025, Accenture’s stock hit $394. Six months later, it was $237. A 30% collapse for one of the most bulletproof companies of the last three decades.
On the surface, this looks like a cyclical story—consulting budgets tighten, markets overreact. But look closer, and you see something else: the end of the IT services model that defined global business since the 1990s.
The Industrial Phase of IT
To understand what’s happening, it helps to zoom out.
In the late 20th century, IT services were about scale. Companies like Accenture, Infosys, and Wipro built armies of programmers and consultants to install, customize, and maintain the sprawling new software that corporations were buying. SAP, Oracle, Microsoft—all of them needed interpreters.
It was like the railroads: you didn’t just need tracks; you needed the people who could build stations, operate trains, and keep timetables. The IT services firms were those people. Their advantage was headcount.
For thirty years, they thrived by selling human effort—billable hours packaged as “transformation projects.”
When Clients Stop Wanting People
But in 2025, something fundamental changed.
Accenture is down 30%. Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, Capgemini, Infosys—down nearly 20%. This isn’t a coincidence. It’s what happens when the core product you sell—people—stops being what clients want to buy.
Why? Because AI has quietly eaten the ground beneath them.
Every major SaaS vendor—Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP—is embedding AI-native development into its products. Where you once needed 200 consultants to implement a CRM, you can now describe your sales process in natural language and get a working system in days.
Clients no longer want bloated software, endless implementation fees, and armies of junior staff learning on the job. They want AI-native partners who can deliver outcomes without the human overhead.
This is not a margin squeeze. It’s a category shift.
Shrinking Pie, New Rules
There are two simultaneous shocks hitting IT services:
The pie is shrinking. Software companies are keeping more of the value by delivering AI-native configuration out of the box.
The rules are changing. Clients don’t measure value in billable hours anymore; they measure it in outcomes, speed, and adaptability.
The IT services industry was built on the assumption that software is inert without people. That assumption is gone.
The Historical Echo
This moment looks less like a market correction and more like the fall of the medieval guilds.
For centuries, guilds controlled who could practice a craft. They thrived on scarcity and labor-intensive work. But once machines industrialized those crafts, guilds lost their power. What mattered was not how many apprentices you had, but how well you adapted to the machine age.
Today’s IT services giants are the guilds of our era. Their apprentices are the legions of fresh graduates hired every year in Bangalore, Manila, and Warsaw. Their craft is implementation. Their machine is AI.
And the machine has arrived.
The Fork in the Road
The firms that survive will look very different from the firms we know. They will:
Cannibalize their own business before AI does. Stop clinging to billable hours and start building AI-native solutions—even if it means shrinking headcount.
Shift to outcome-based pricing. If clients care about outcomes, sell outcomes. Stop hiding behind time sheets.
Retrain 100,000+ staff to work alongside AI agents. The junior consultant class must either become AI orchestrators or vanish.
Most won’t make the leap. Just as most guilds didn’t.
Disruption Meets Survival
The end of IT services as we know it isn’t about one company’s bad quarter. It’s the culmination of a decades-long shift in how we build with technology.
For thirty years, IT services was a people business. The next thirty will be a machine business.
And the winners will be those who realize that faster than their clients do.