The man-day no longer sets the price. A market note for procurement leaders.

Where does the productivity gain go?

Your consulting firms already use AI every day. For a procurement team, the real question fits on one line: where does the productivity gain go, and who keeps it?

The numbers are starting to answer. In a controlled study of 758 consultants at a major strategy firm, analysis, drafting and synthesis tasks were delivered with a quarter less time and higher assessed quality (Dell'Acqua et al., Harvard / BCG, 2023). The deliverable ships faster. The day you pay for has not moved.

Asked directly, 109 consultants at French firms place the split plainly: 62% of the gain goes to the consultant, 13% to the firm, 25% to the client (Consulting Barometer, EMLyon 2026). You are funding a productivity you never see.

Why the price holds

So why does the price hold? Because it tracks something else. Across several client portfolios we analysed, the day rate follows the cost of the team delivered, with a correlation of 0.73. The price reflects the grade of the people staffed, their number, their days. The value of the deliverable does not enter into it. And an analyst day carries 58% margin, while research, extraction, first drafts and formatting, the core of junior work, are exactly what an agent takes first. A team half made of analysts, sold by the day, makes you pay twice.

The market has changed its unit of account

The market understood this before the contracts did. Today, 49% of consulting engagements are still indexed on the number of consultants, yet only 16% of clients expect to keep that model within two years (HFS Research; EMLyon 2026). Large European banks cut external consulting spend by 9% to 24% in the first half of 2026 (Financial Times, August 2026). And 87% of clients say they would pay more for a genuinely tooled firm. What the market wants is a different unit of account: buying deliverables with a defined scope, priced as a fixed fee, a subscription or on outcome depending on their nature.

Three questions to ask before you sign

We boil the method down to three questions, to work through proposal by proposal before signing:

• What share of the days sold is automatable, line by line, grade by grade?
• What AI tooling does the firm declare, and who keeps the gain?
• Why is this deliverable sold by the day rather than as a fixed fee?

They fit on a single page. Working through them properly calls for a market reference, and that is the whole point of the white paper.

What you will find in the white paper

Inside, you will find twelve charts built on our reference portfolio, several thousand engagements over three financial years, and on public sources. Fifteen mission types ranked by exposure to AI. A reference that pairs each deliverable with its purchasing unit and the order of magnitude of days the tooling makes redundant, at constant scope and quality. And how SmartBrick Purchase works: an agent that reads a proposal, rebuilds the team day by grade, isolates the automatable days and returns a price score against the AI-adjusted reference.

The right price, not the low price

One note to avoid the wrong read. The point is the right price. Judgement is paid for: scoping, arbitration, sector expertise and change management stay on senior time-and-materials, and their price should rise. A procurement team that applies a flat discount loses its best firms. The one that reads every proposal keeps the good ones and pays the fair price.