They’re after your payroll

When a company senses that AI is getting beyond it, it has an old, reassuring reflex. It calls a big consulting firm. They’ll tell us what to do, we’ll sign, they’ll install, and we’ll be able to sleep. In 2026, that reflex is a trap. And to understand why, you have to look at what these firms have become.

Consulting is no longer neutral, it’s an interested party

For decades, the big firms sold one thing: intelligence. Analysis, strategy, recommendations. That was their bread and butter, and they charged top dollar for it.

But remember the formula from Mistral’s CEO, encountered earlier in this guide. Intelligence, now, is electricity converted into tokens. It’s produced in near-unlimited quantities, for a fraction of yesterday’s price. In other words, the product the firms sold at the highest price is becoming a commodity. They are threatened at the very heart of their business.

So they do what any rational, worried player would do. They keep selling you intelligence, but now their partners’. The kind that lets them stay in the loop and keep billing. The problem is that this choice is no longer neutral. And those aren’t my words — the financial arrangements themselves say it.

The facts, and they are public

In May 2026, OpenAI launched a company dedicated to enterprise deployment, endowed with four billion dollars, financed by some twenty investors. Among them, consulting firms themselves: Bain, McKinsey, Capgemini. Read that carefully. The firms are no longer merely service providers for the tool they recommend to you. They are shareholders in it.

Right on its heels, OpenAI bought a company to pick up roughly a hundred and fifty deployment engineers in one stroke, those profiles who come settle inside your walls. The goal is explicit: capture the implementation margin on top of the model margin. Translated for you: the vendor no longer wants to sell just the engine, it wants to bill for the installation, the tuning and the maintenance too.

Anthropic announced its own deployment joint venture, backed by major financiers, openly copying the model that made Palantir. They’re all following the same trail, because it leads to the same place: the inside of your company.

Why they’re after your payroll

Let’s take Mensch’s formula all the way. If intelligence is now manufactured elsewhere, from electricity, then the value your teams produced is shifting too, toward those who manufacture that intelligence. Mensch said it before the French National Assembly with a chilling figure: a potential deficit of one trillion euros per year for Europe, the equivalent of ten percent of its payroll.

That is what’s really at stake. These alliances aren’t trying to replace your management software. They’re trying to capture the share of value that until now flowed through salaries. When someone installs a system that does the work of ten people, the system’s invoice replaces ten lines of payroll.

And this is where everything plays out: on price. Because people are willing to pay far more for a service that replaces labor than for mere software. Silicon Valley has theorized it perfectly. In a talk I strongly encourage you to listen to, bluntly titled Software is Eating Labor, a partner at the Andreessen Horowitz fund explains how software pricing has moved from price per user to price per outcome. His thesis is limpid and chilling: software first changed the way we store information, and its next act is to change the very nature of the economy, capturing trillions of dollars along the way. Translation: those trillions are today’s salaries. When you bill for an outcome and not for a tool, you can charge almost as much as the salary you eliminate, while still staying cheaper than it. That’s the heart of the model that’s coming.

The lock-in trap

And this is where the reassuring reflex snaps shut. When a team spends six months integrating a system deep into your data, your processes and your compliance, that system becomes load-bearing infrastructure. You can no longer rip it out without bringing everything down. You then depend, for maintenance and every evolution, on whoever installed it. The trade press has a phrase for this: becoming hostage to endless consulting costs.

Let’s be fair, the lock-in isn’t a done deal. Consulting remains a multi-vendor market, and companies want to integrate AI with everything they already have, which no lab can do alone. The attempt is real; its success isn’t yet. That’s precisely why the window is open now.

The textbook case I know by heart: LinkedIn

Want to see what total, already-installed dependence looks like? Look at recruiting, it’s my trade. LinkedIn holds the structured data of more than a billion people. No competitor will ever beat it. Even a system five times better would lose, for a very simple reason: a billion people are not going to retype their career history by hand into a new tool, and LinkedIn won’t let go of them. The data is the moat, and it’s uncrossable.

The result, you know it if you buy those licenses. Every year, at renegotiation time, the price goes up. It’s a cash cow, because the dependence is total. And the supposedly magical solutions that present themselves as alternatives often live only off LinkedIn data retrieved through third-party vendors, by means whose legality and compliance could raise questions. One thing is certain: prices keep climbing. It’s painful, but the dependence is locked in. Remember the mechanism, because it’s going to repeat itself, identically, with AI.

The economic lock, and the arbitrage to come

Because here’s what awaits you. Once a company’s systems are juiced up on one particular vendor’s AI, getting out costs so much that nobody does it. And I guarantee you one thing: the price of the token is going to shoot up. The giants haven’t all found their footing yet, they’re trading blow for blow. Anthropic has just reached profitability and raised billions once more, while OpenAI, despite enormous revenue, is still losing around fourteen billion dollars for the year and doesn’t expect to break even before 2030. As long as the sector’s business model isn’t stabilized, their interest is crystal clear: make you dependent, then run up the bill.

And here’s the trap, the real one. The gains are such that doing without will be impossible anyway. You will arbitrate, line by line, between a salary paid to a human and a token invoice. And even when the invoice goes up, it will remain cheaper than a salary, and it will produce more intelligence. It’s mechanical, it’s cold, and that’s why you have to see it coming.

Hence one final vigilance, which is the heart of survival. The more you delegate to these systems, the more speed you gain, but the more skill you risk losing. And the day you’ve delegated everything without keeping anything, you’ll be exactly where they want you: unable to do without them, and unable to judge what they’re billing you. Delegate, yes. Amputate yourself, never.

What not to do, and what to do

I’m not telling you to ban the firms. They have real skills, and depriving yourself of all help would be absurd. I’m telling you not to hide behind them. Not to ask them what to do while signing with your eyes closed, letting them bill you millions and install their systems everywhere.

Challenge them. Ask which model they’re installing, and why that one. Ask who owns what in the arrangement. Ask what happens the day you want to switch. Keep your hands on your data and on the choice of your tools. And above all, don’t be fooled by the calendar: things are moving fast precisely because it’s in their interest that you sign before you’ve understood.

The real protection isn’t finding the right vendor. It’s leveling up enough to no longer be at their mercy. Being able to judge, arbitrate, and decide for yourself. The exact opposite of the dependence they’re trying to sell you.

Taking back control — we’ll get there, that’s the whole point of the end of this guide. But before knowing what to do, you have to follow the money to the end, and look at who really captures the value. That’s the next chapter.