Tag Archives: Consulting

AIML, Consulting

Information Asymmetry vs. Information Symmetry: AI is Changing the Rules of Competition

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Financial markets have long recognized that the free flow of non-proprietary information improves price discovery, market efficiency, and competition.

A similar transformation is now unfolding in knowledge industries.

As AI democratizes access to information, research, analysis, coding assistance, design, and content creation, competitive advantage is shifting away from simply possessing knowledge toward executing faster, integrating expertise effectively, and delivering measurable business outcomes.

This evolution creates unprecedented opportunities for AI-native small firms to compete with much larger consulting and technology services organizations.

Some of the reasons include:

  • AI significantly increases the productivity of every knowledge worker, enabling smaller teams to deliver work that previously required much larger organizations.
  • Routine tasks such as research, documentation, coding, testing, proposal writing, reporting, and knowledge management can be partially automated, reducing delivery costs and turnaround time.
  • Small firms can rapidly adopt new AI models and workflows without the organizational complexity that often slows large enterprises.
  • AI agents can act as virtual specialists across domains, allowing lean teams to access capabilities that previously required hiring multiple experts.
  • Modern cloud platforms and AI services allow businesses to scale globally without proportionally increasing headcount or infrastructure.
  • Specialized expertise, deep customer relationships, and faster decision-making become more valuable than organizational size alone.
  • Lower operational overhead enables smaller firms to experiment, innovate, and pivot more quickly in response to changing customer needs.

Rather than attempting to compete with large firms across every service line, AI-native companies can establish leadership in carefully chosen niches, build highly differentiated intellectual property, and gradually expand into adjacent markets.

As they mature, these firms can leverage AI-driven automation, standardized delivery frameworks, reusable assets, and platform-based services to scale without traditional linear growth in workforce size.

Large consulting organizations will continue to possess significant strengths—including global delivery capabilities, trusted brands, extensive client relationships, governance, regulatory expertise, and the ability to execute large-scale transformation programs. These advantages remain important.

However, AI is reducing many of the historical advantages that came primarily from information access, organizational scale, and labor-intensive delivery models.

The next decade is likely to reward organizations—large and small—that combine deep domain expertise with AI, automation, proprietary data, reusable intellectual property, and exceptional execution.

The future competitive advantage will belong not to those who simply know more, but to those who can learn faster, execute better, innovate continuously, and scale intelligently.

Concept Credit: Neil Harwani (Article)

Creation Help: ChatGPT

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Sales

Sales – From Showing up to Consulting and Design thinking

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Over the years Indian IT industry has had success in getting and executing projects from the western world. Indian IT industry is now US$ 160+ billion a year in exports and domestic market combined. With India largely importing electrical & industrial machinery, oil and few other items like precious stones, it stays as an economy that needs large exports to cover it’s imports especially oil & electrical / industrial machinery. Overall it stays a net importer as of 2018 with a current account deficit which needs FDI / FII / External debt / Foreign exchange reserves to cover the same directly / indirectly.

You can get more details about economy, export and import of India in below links:

https://globaledge.msu.edu/countries/india/tradestats

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India

Services & IT industry have been a large net exporter and medium to earn precious foreign currency. It has also created a large middle class of employees who have uplifted themselves out of lower income groups moving to upper middle class and taking up further education to move up the value chain of IT industry.

Till few years back IT industry sales was relatively normal process compared to what it’s now.

  1. Show up at the right company in the western world
  2. Showcase good past projects or capability around IT and domain if required
  3. Consider doing a Proof of concept / Small project / Consulting assignment
  4. Finalize the contract and your project would start
  5. Expand it into a larger back office extended development center for maintenance and support. You now have steady revenue
  6. People & Technology / Delivery issues in terms learning, salaries, churn, attrition, renewals of contracts, compliance and similar were the main problems
  7. Price and skills around project delivery were the main criteria for customers

In came Agile, Cloud, DevOps, Scaled agile, Digital transformation, Bigdata, Automation, Analytics & recession. The paradigm from customer’s side now has changed to:

  1. What is the value you bring to my program ?
  2. Why should I outsource to you ? How many jobs are you creating in my country ?
  3. How well do you know my domain / industry ?
  4. How can you help me in my company’s success via increased sales or operational efficiency ?
  5. Will you deliver quality output for code, domain, knowledge transfer and maintenance ?
  6. Will you follow best global practices ?
  7. Can you provide help in my local timezone in my geographical area ?
  8. Instead of sales pitches do you have a consulting and design thinking mindset ?
  9. Are your employees skilled in digital, analytics & cloud to begin with and are they willing to pick up more skills as we go ahead and evolve ?
  10. What products / intellectual property do you bring to the table ?
  11. How will you align to my business model or upgrade it ?
  12. Cost is no longer one to the top 3 criteria, it’s the above questions that matter.

In response to this existential change in IT industry many firms and employees are going through reskilling and updating their knowledge / way of working.

Result will be in terms of two groups:

  1. The ones who accept the change and upgrade themselves whether it’s a company or set of employees
  2. The ones who can’t accept this change, they will be sidelined and move to other industries or roles that don’t need to cater to this evolution

Indian IT industry is changing and there is no looking back !!! Rather than thinking cost and basic skills think of the newer questions above. That is the only way to collaborate with clients and take the industry forward.

Reach out to me at neil@TechAndTrain.com if you want to discuss Data Science / R / Java / Python / etc. or want to conduct a training for MBA / BE / MCA / MSc students or are interested in having a workshop for on Data Science / R / Java / AWS / Excel / etc.