Article: Wanted: Bold CEOs to tap AI to break the consultant ‘straitjacket’
Author: Tony Boyd
Summary of Article: ICG has again been featured in a major article in Australasia’s leading business newspaper.
The article, an opinion piece by Tony Boyd discusses how Agentic AI has revolutionized industries worldwide by ending decades of innovation suffocation caused by the dependency on tech consulting firms and software vendors.
Boyd makes his case citing three thought leaders: Julian Birkinshaw, dean of the Ivey Business School in Canada, professor (on leave) at LBS and author of Fast Forward;Jason La Greca, University of Technology executive author of The Capable Organisation; and ICG’s very own global CEO, David Moloney.
When discussing how companies can use AI to end their third-party dependency, La Greca remarks that vendors are not companies’ friends, as they are incentivized to create dependency (to increase earnings via return clients) rather than building client capability as a one-off. This is particularly notable on the case of software and complex system vendors.
David is quoted in the article as follows:
“I think these vendors have been a straitjacket for innovation because any large piece of industrialised software is filled with constraints. They have to make design choices, so they don’t have the flexibility to achieve outcomes that companies have been seeking. So, there’s a whole range of trade-offs that come with the selection of any software package, and I think what AI does is remove the straitjacket.”
The key, as Birkinshaw explains in Fast Forward, is to be able to move faster than your competition.
Shedding the straitjacket is a core step, as David mentions, “to start getting stuff done really quickly.”
Boyd further quotes David further with two important points:
“Then there’s going to be a level of innovation, which will be really exciting because we’ll see a lot of whole new things that people have been frustrated about and not been able to achieve or build because it’s been too expensive, or they’re constrained by the technology solutions that they’ve had to deal with.
“But then I have a darker thought, which is when people create innovation and create something which is new with AI, one of the problems is it’s very easily copied. I think the penny will drop that monetising that innovation is going to be much harder because everyone will be infinitely adaptable.”
Actions:
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The below link for the full article may not work due to a subscription being required, however, searching “Wanted: Bold CEOs to tap AI to break the consultant ‘straitjacket’” in google may bring an unprotected link.
📰https://www.afr.com/technology/wanted-bold-ceos-to-tap-ai-to-break-the-consultant-straitjacket-20260607-p604kh
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