AI consultancies split: $200-subscription agencies at the bottom, model labs becoming services firms at the top
alex_verem · x · 2026-10-26
- The AI consulting market is splitting at both ends. At the bottom, anyone with a $200 subscription can brand themselves an "AI automation agency" — ChatGPT ranks it just under e-commerce as the fastest-money business for 2026; half of them were selling life insurance six months ago.
- At the top, model labs are becoming services firms: in May Anthropic launched an embedded-engineering venture with Blackstone and Goldman Sachs (now called Ode), and a week later OpenAI launched its Deployment Company with $4B+ behind it.
- Gartner predicted in September that 70% of enterprises will abandon vendor-FDE-built agentic AI by 2028, citing lock-in via rising maintenance costs.
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