UK-based consultancy MDC Ventures has successfully used an AI-powered platform to build infrastructure required to track, measure and evidence client outcomes. The solution, systematised with the help of TheAX.ai, offers insight into how consultants leveraging AI might adapt their pricing beyond the outdated billable hour model.
For decades, the billable hour underpinned the economics of consulting. Clients paid for time and expertise, and value was measured by how many hours a firm could stack against a project. Scale was achieved by adding people, and profitability grew with utilisation.
With the advent of AI tools, however, that logic no longer seems as air-tight. While human labour is still central to consulting, and their judgement remains a key part of the service a firm delivers its clients, the time their efforts take to produce research, analysis and insight has been compressed. With work that once took weeks potentially being delivered in hours, time becomes a far weaker proxy for value – and consultants have been scrambling to find a new billing model.
Many firms had already been shifting to deliver-based pricing – as they sought to convince clients not to offset projects in lean times, and invest in services they could demonstrate a return on. But moving to such a model is easier said than done – with so many subjective criteria at play which could see the measurement of ‘value’ widely differ between clients and consultants.
This was precisely the challenge MDC Ventures hoped to address, when it collaborated with AI consulting platform TheAX.ai. The organisations used AI to help build infrastructure which could convert founder-led expertise into a structured operating system – the MDC Growth System – designed to formally map client journeys, benchmark progress and demonstrate change over time.
Marc Cohen, founder of MDC Ventures, commented, “For a long time, I’d turn up to board meetings and give advice. It was valuable, but there was no way to show clients where they were, where they were heading, or how far they’d come. It was reactive rather than proactive. Now I’ve got a framework that maps the entire journey – and assessments that formally track progress every six months. It’s changed how I work with clients and how I talk to prospects. They can see exactly what I do before we even have a conversation.”
Development of the tool saw Cohen create a maturity model framework in the system by uploading relevant documents in TheAX’s wizard. He created reuseable assessment templates for data gathering interviews used in the data collection stage of the consulting engagements. Once the clients took the assessment, AI-augmented data analysis was shown below, before custom reports either generated with AI with human-in-the-loop or fully automated were generated for marketing purposes. At the same time, this enabled tracked outcomes and KPIs between a consultancy and their client
Within two weeks of launch, MDC Ventures generated £15,000 in new revenue through cohort-based programmes built on the platform, while shifting delivery from founder-led execution to system-led delivery. It highlights the wider implications for the consultancy sector, showing how AI infrastructure enables firms like MDC to scale by reducing repeat delivery time without increasing headcount – something the firm believes marks “a turning point in how mid-market consultancies move beyond billable hours towards outcome-based models.”
Research from Sage recently found that 83% of consulting professionals say outdated systems and a lack of technology make it difficult to scale their businesses. But MDC Ventures and TheAX.ai assert that AI-powered platforms can allow expertise and outcomes to be tracked, helping firms seeking to move beyond one-off projects towards repeatable, outcome-based growth.
Commenting on the shift Robert Streeter, CEO of TheAX.ai, added, “Most consultancies don’t have an expertise problem – they have an infrastructure problem. They know clients want outcomes, but they’ve got no system to track whether they’re delivering them. Outcome-based consulting is gaining momentum across the mid-market, and that’s the gap we’re focused on: giving consultancies the infrastructure to measure progress, prove value, and move from one-off projects to long-term client relationships.”
The development is the latest in a succession of contract wins enabled by TheAX.ai’s models. Consultants In Business (CIB Global) used TheAX.ai to systemetise its own AI-driven ‘Thrive Index’, surveying over 4,000 public sector workers, processing both multiple-choice and long-form responses into a coherent report for senior leadership. This would have taken weeks with traditional digital tools – but the firm delivered insights in two weeks.
Pitching for a workforce engagement project with the HM Government of Gibraltar, CIB Global was up against “top-tier consultancies”. However, the boutique managed to beat the big firms to the contract, thanks to the way it could demonstrate its speed and value to the client.
Jonny Cooper, founder of CIB Global, said, “TheAX helped us design a custom question-set that probed to the heart of the challenges facing a national government workforce in the 2020s. We demonstrated understanding of their organisation far beyond what they expected from an external consultancy… The lesson for boutique consultancies is, embrace AI in a way that gives you a competitive edge. The larger firms lack the agility and deployment speed to compete with your bespoke, specialist approach.”
