ABP Consultancy started as practitioners of the original business process management methodology. Continuous improvement, tied to business outcomes. Then, in the words of its Chief Outcome Officer Mark Robbins, "as all consulting organizations have to, we've seen that core evolve."

When he joined 3 years ago, their core was task automation. Over half the business, approaching 70% in some markets, and the requests coming in were always similar: "Help us eliminate duplication and manual work from our workflows."

That work was profitable and the pipeline was healthy. But it also put a company of around 100 people, delivering nearshore, into a price fight with large offshore providers who could quote lower.

Mark calls that a “sustainability problem.”

TL;DR

• Task automation was more than half of ABP Consultancy's business when Mark Robbins joined, approaching 70% in some markets. It was profitable, it was selling, and it was turning into commodity work.
• Commodity work put a 100-person nearshore company into a price fight with large offshore providers. Mark calls that a sustainability problem rather than a margin problem.
• The value had already moved. On a Jabra engagement, color recognition took image matching above 95% and made the business case. The automation around it did not.
• ABP refused the vendor pilot route and rewrote its own vocabulary in business language. Stopping was harder than refining would have been.
• The target is two-thirds advisory, with the methodology handed to the client at the end. ABP now equips clients to need it less, because that is what clients are asking to buy.

Why Clients Keep Asking for the Easiest Work to Sell

By the time Mark arrived at ABP, robotic process automation was everywhere, and outsourcing had pushed it there. Large outsourcing contracts were building task automation into the deal, and ABP's own numbers reflected that.

Saying yes to that type of work was easy.

"At the time, we viewed task automation as very tactical, because it doesn't get you to the business outcomes that automating an end-to-end journey or an end-to-end business process does. But it also requires significantly less structural change inside the organization to deliver those outcomes."

Less structural change means less disruption, faster mobilization, and a number at the end. That’s pretty appealing to both the vendor and the customer.

Task automation gave clients a number for how many hours were saved, but it also gave their leadership nothing substantial to report to the board. Across the market, "there was a strong pull to much more tactical digitalization and much less strategic digitalization".

ABP’s client, Flutter, was an exception to that rule.

Task automation had run for over 4 years inside a wider transformation program. Net Promoter Score moved 56 points across those years, with roughly 8% top-line growth using the proxies most people apply in the market.

That engagement was measuring a customer metric with a revenue line attached to it. Most of the portfolio, however, was measuring hours removed.

What Happens When a Client Compares What They Paid vs. What You Delivered?

You will not see commodity work in your pipeline. You will see it in who the client compares you against on price.

"We tested ourselves in the years where we shifted to more task automation and more commodity type work, because we're a nearshore organization, we're small, so we were competing with large offshore organizations that were able to differentiate on cost. We were differentiating on value, but we always recognized that we had to fix that sustainability problem."

ABP had around 100 people and delivered nearshore, and it was being priced against providers who could quote a lower rate and were large enough to hold it there.

Inside a client relationship, that turns into a simple calculation.

One specialty insurer had 27 task automations live. The savings were real and quantified at £190K a year in hours. ABP had a landed team on site, and that team cost the client somewhere around £500K a year.

"Their equation doesn't stack up, because the value that's being delivered is at the end of the chain. In this case, that was capacity release from the marine underwriting team, 1.2 FTE. And additional premium written by having an additional 1.2 FTE of capacity within that marine division."

Additional premium written is the real number that insurer's board cares about, and it was never featured in ABP's report.

"So that value was always there. It just wasn't shown in the story."

The work produced the value, but nobody measured it, so nobody could claim it.

Attribution also gets harder the more tactically you work. If you deliver an end-to-end process, the boundaries of your change are clear enough to instrument. If you embed capability into a process the client is already changing in other ways, it gets more difficult to attribute the outcome directly to your work.

To do that, you need a proxy that both sides agree on before the work starts.

That puts 3 requirements at the start of an engagement rather than the end:

1. Get everyone to believe the value framework. Not just accept it. Every line of business whose numbers will judge the work has to believe it.
2. Be honest about which value levers you can really move. If you claim all of them, the client will believe none of them.
3. Instrument the solution for benefits realization while you are still scoping it. If you leave it until after go-live, you are reconstructing evidence nobody captured.

Why does that so rarely happen?

"If you look at the Project Management Institute stats even today, probably 80 or 90% of all projects have business cases because it's how funding models work. But still, less than 40% of projects have benefits realization embedded into them. And it's not a new science. It's not anything related to technology. It's having the discipline to do things properly."

Finding the Part of Your Work That Really Makes the Difference

Jabra, the Danish headset and audio brand owned by GN Group, wanted to honor a customer promise on out-of-warranty returns.

Mark sums up the business driver like this: "We're disenfranchised from our customers. If we make it easy for them to return a headset which is out of warranty, then we get to engage with our customers in a moment that matters."

The customer sends a refund request with a photograph of the headset, and Jabra adjudicates. Simple enough, except for the color issue.

Jabra produces so many special editions (pink, green, yellow, etc.) that matching a photograph to a product number was close to impossible. So, one of the clever solution architects at ABP put object detection and color recognition into the flow.

Matching went above 95%.

The color recognition solution is what delivered real value to this client, not the task automation that surrounded it.

The same pattern repeated as machine learning became cheaper to deploy and to scale. "We just saw that pattern just increasing and increasing."

"What we recognized quite quickly was the differentiating use cases and where the value was coming from increasingly was around integrating pattern recognition, machine learning models, into tasks and task automation. And so we were increasingly shifting our focus from the task piece, which was commoditized, to the data assimilation context and understanding piece."

One advantage here came from ABP's history rather than its strategy. Data assimilation, context and understanding is advisory territory, and advisory is where the company began.

"As a firm that has advisory roots, we found that the market was coming back to us."

What to Sell When Delivery Capacity Stops Being Differentiating

ABP already does more end-to-end automation and advisory work than RPA, and plans to focus two-thirds of its business on advisory, with a small number of specialist teams delivering first-of-a-kind use cases.

Pure advisory companies do the thinking. They understand operating model gaps, build value frameworks, produce prioritized roadmaps, and then hand it over, saying, "Right now you just need to go execute that."

Delivery partners take that plan and run it, but they didn't invent that plan. Product providers supply capability.

ABP wants to integrate all of those things.

This means running from business strategy and value framework through to use cases, roadmap, maturity assessment, delivery of the first of a kind, and then handing the methodology over.

Interestingly, client demand has been moving the same way.

"We're increasingly seeing that customers don't want their business partners to deliver for them. They want their business partners to enable them to continuously deliver."

Collective Decisions

ABP's executive team is built with deliberate skills overlap between the CEO, the CTO and the Chief Product Strategy Officer. Enough overlap that they can argue about each other's territory.

"So we always think-tank. We always put our heads together, and we make decisions together. So whether it's a revenue decision or a go-to-market decision or a technology shift decision, it's always as a collective."

No single owner declares their own service line a commodity. A revenue leader will not do it, a delivery leader will not do it, and a technology leader has no standing to. The decision only gets made if the people who would each lose something by making it are in the room together, and none of them owns the outcome alone.

Adaptive MVPs: The Workaround For “Change-Fatigued Clients”

ABP is a certified UiPath service provider with years of vendor relationships behind it, and running a pilot or a POC on a platform partner's terms costs nothing and arrives ready-made. Mark says that "actually stopping and resetting rather than refining" was the hardest thing the company did.

What replaced it had to clear one commercial constraint. "You go into a business and they're delivering so much change that they don't want another change program."

A change-fatigued client will sign a small piece of work tied to a single outcome, and nothing larger. That rules out the multi-phase transformation program, and it rules out the vendor pilot too, because a pilot proves the technology works rather than proving the business gained anything.

So the unit of work got smaller and the measurement got stricter. ABP calls it the adaptive MVP: a minimum set of meaningful events the organization can filter for and positively affect, taken through to a measurable customer outcome.

It runs through 5 phases:

1. Sense
2. Contextualize
3. Understand
4. Respond
5. Learn

Which outcome you aim at depends on the client's value framework, so that is where every engagement starts.

"Start with the value framework. Understand how you measure and what good looks like," says Mark.

Most organizations already have one, so the question is whether anyone uses it. Is it applied on live engagements? Are the measures still current? When did anyone last revisit it? Or, in the phrasing Mark uses with clients, "Are you getting the juice out of the juicer?"

One consequence changes what a consulting company can bill for. Capability maturity assessment, data gap analysis and business-to-technical capability mapping are embedded inside the MVP rather than run alongside it, even though most companies sell that work as a separate advisory engagement.

"If you do it as a separate exercise, it can become an academic exercise. It can become a noun…. whatever we do, we're not searching for nouns, we're searching for verbs." A value framework nobody opens is a noun. A value framework you assess outcomes against is a verb.

The term ABP puts over all of it, and takes to clients, is the adaptive enterprise. More events happen in a market than any organization can absorb, so a business needs 4 abilities running in parallel.

"They need to be able to filter for relevance. They need to be able to respond to events that matter for them and for their customers. And they need to be able to adapt."

The idea comes from biology, and it deliberately stands above whichever term the market is using this year.

"The answer is not AI. It's not agents. It's all of the things that sit behind that. They're just vehicles to make the fundamentals happen."

ABP used all of it internally before selling any of it. Business process management runs the company's own time recording and project management. Robotic process automation handles intercompany transfers between the operating companies. Power BI and Copilot handle personal productivity. The executive team tests its own solutions on itself.

The 30 Minutes of Preparation That Replace Your Credentials Deck

Two words carry the go-to-market rebuild: Relevance, and velocity.

"The case study is dead. The 'tell me who you are' is dead, in our opinion. It's relevance. So if you can arrive at a call, having sent a sensible briefing note, there's no point in sending information that's going to take time to consume, because everyone's busy. Send something that will allow you to frame the conversation in deep context and understanding. Then you don't need to establish credibility. You've already done that."

ABP sends a short briefing note about the client's own operation instead of a standard credentials deck.

The material for that note is cheaper to find than most companies expect. ABP works heavily in customer experience and customer operations, because those connect to growth levers like Net Promoter Score, which feeds cross-sell and upsell. Much of that sentiment is already public. Trustpilot reviews show how a client's own customers experience their processes, and the client cannot dispute the data, because the client did not write it.

"It's not very often that people go and put a review on Trustpilot because they're super happy. It's often frustration, but you can apply those filters and you can normalize."

Then comes the rule, and it is the one thing in this article a partner could apply this week.

"You have to pay them the respect that if you want to have a 30-minute discovery conversation with them, you should have spent at least 30 minutes deeply understanding their business so that you are coming to the conversation, adding value from the initial sentence."

Anything less asks the client to educate you at their own expense.

Velocity is the same discipline applied after the meeting. If the client gives permission to record the conversation, ABP runs the recording through models built on the company's own ontologies and design patterns, and can "very quickly assimilate meeting context, evolve deliverables and play that back easily within 24 hours". The client checks your understanding before anyone drafts a proposal against it.

What changes in your next discovery meeting:

1. Send a briefing note instead of credentials. Base it on something specific about their operation, not about yours.
2. Spend at least as long preparing as the meeting will last.
3. Run discovery around pain points, points of friction, capability maturity and their focus areas for the next 12 to 24 months, rather than around your service lines.
4. Ask for permission to record, and play back your understanding inside 24 hours.

What Should CRO Really Stand For?

Every proposal gets one test before it leaves. ABP is "testing all of your messaging to make sure it's ‘outcome focused’, not ‘internally focused.’” I.e. Is the document about the client's problem, or about how you are going to deliver change?

He then pointed that test at his own job title.

"The CRO role has existed for many years. It's very clear what your accountabilities are. It gives you a very clear focus inside the organization. But it is an internally focused label. Revenue is an internally focused label."

"The right label, if you look at it from an outcome focused perspective, is Chief Outcome Officer because, actually, what you're delivering to your clients is the outcome. And if you deliver the outcome to your clients, then you will get revenue. So revenue is a function of delivering for your clients, which is what consulting organizations do."

A second option came up, one that keeps the acronym: Chief Relevance Officer.

"I think, for every organization, the sustainable competitive advantage comes from relevance. How do we maintain relevance in our market and how do we continue to increase our relevance to our customers? That's essentially what we do. You can take the industry out. You can take the function out. You can take the scale out."

Relevance is also the thing AI now lets you filter for accurately, which is why Mark believes relevance is going to be the new competitive advantage. He accepts that nobody reading his profile would immediately know what a Chief Relevance Officer does. He would rather a client stopped and asked than skimmed past.

Relevance only holds as an advantage if it does not live inside whichever model you happen to be running. ABP separates the knowledge layer from the execution layer, so one use case can run on Copilot and another on a different model with agentic capability, while "the differentiation comes from the ontologies, the design systems, the knowledge" built around use cases and value frameworks.

He has spent time with some of Booking.com's team, and points to them as an organization living the same thesis, having "completely rebuilt their entire organization around journeys" with an operating model aligned to them. He expects vertical silos to dissolve as functions reorganize around how change reaches the customer.

Take your last 3 proposals and count the sentences about your methodology against the sentences about the client's outcome. If methodology wins, the document is I focused, whatever the covering email says.

Watching the Right Signals Before the Results Arrive

Ask how he knows the rebuild is working, and no number comes back.

The adaptive hypothesis went out as a why deck, a how deck and a methodology deck. ABP tested it first on trusted customers, technology partners and other consulting companies, and told them plainly, "We're not selling it to you." Some of those clients came back saying it made sense, and asking to do it.

Beyond that, "we're not being super religious about putting measures around the flow of opportunity yet because we're testing many different things." He watches net new propositions, pipeline, qualified pipeline and deal cycle time, but what he does with them is "macro observation of, is it resonating?" Are opportunities moving in this direction. The early signs are positive, and he stops there.

A repositioning will not give you clean attribution in its first year, for the same reason a tactically embedded automation will not. Too much is moving at the same time.

So the executive team set itself a different kind of test. You are on a client site, heading to a meeting, and someone steps into the lift with you. It is the CEO. "Oh, ABP, yes, we're working with you," she says. "Could you remind me what you guys do?"

"And it's like you're in a lift. So it has to, literally, be a sentence that falls out of your mouth."

Out goes the outcome-focused advisory company. In comes delivering relevance. Getting that understood across the whole company is still work in progress.

Try it on your own executive team before your next client visit. If the answer needs a preamble, it is a sentence about you.

Which Of These 3 Modes Have Your Clients Put You In?

None of that was free. "I think probably the hardest thing was having the courage to stop and relabel everything and use different terms, and essentially go against the grain."

Scale made it possible. "One of the advantages of having an organization that's around the 100 mark is that you have enough to be impactful, but you can pivot." If you run 400 people, or 4,000, the same rebuild is a different proposition.

The speed does not transfer. The question underneath it does.

Which of 3 things is your company right now: an advisory business that hands execution to someone else, a delivery business executing plans it did not write, or something that spans both?

How a client responds depends on how mature that client already is.

Most organizations already own their value framework. What they want from a partner is outside-in validation of it, based on industry understanding.

McKinsey has said roughly a quarter of its global fees now come from outcome-based pricing rather than from billed scope and duration. Clients arrive with a result they want, and ask the company to price against delivering it. Reporting in August 2026 described the center of gravity in consulting moving away from generalist teams producing research and decks, and toward building tools and systems. KPMG's vice chair of advisory pointed to client demand for subscription-style products alongside advice.

On sequencing, ABP made a deliberate choice that runs against most change management advice. "We're doing practice before culture." Build the artifacts, deliver with clients, establish the operating practices, build momentum. Only then open the conversation about internal reboots and restructuring. ABP had already moved from practices to small agile pods, built around ideating, delivering and discarding, and those pods are what make the specialist delivery teams possible. Which structure best serves helping clients become adaptive is a question Mark says his team has not yet asked.

How ABP Fixed the Talent Economics Commodity Work Created

Years of commodity work left a problem that no repositioning solves on its own. A nearshore company competing against offshore providers on price needs reliable access to good people without competing on salary. ABP's answer was to build that supply itself.

The School of Automation was set up inside the group as a separate company, run to all intents and purposes as a not-for-profit. It offers vocational, certifiable knowledge tracks to young professionals who cannot afford higher education, or who are neurodiverse, or who come from ethnic minority and underprivileged backgrounds. It works with government institutions in England, Scotland and Wales, which matters commercially because much of ABP's client base is public sector, including NHS trusts and NHS England. It is a registered training and apprenticeship provider, working alongside the Department for Education, the UiPath Academic Alliance and SS&C Blue Prism.

Funding is tied to placement, and that disciplines the whole model. On Mark's own example, a cohort of 20 graduates through a 30-week program is funded against placing 50 to 60% of them into long-term employment. Nobody pays ABP for training people. They pay for where those people end up.

Graduates go into ABP and into clients, and ABP offers the same training to client organizations for their own teams. That could look like cannibalization. It is not. "We provide that deeper senior expertise and guidance whilst those young professionals do a lot of the heavy lifting for their clients." Public sector clients get something they struggle to buy any other way, which is sustainable access to young automation talent. Bringing people in early also produces real loyalty through the formative years of a career.

The syllabus has followed the same curve the business did, moving from RPA and BPM toward AI fundamentals, design thinking and agentic design practices. ABP is adjusting it alongside universities that are themselves clients.

Some of the company's best people arrived through the School of Automation, "which is evidence that you don't need a higher education degree to be incredibly successful in your career."

ABP also practices reverse management, bringing graduates into executive meetings as peers to challenge the thinking. Mark's argument for it: "embrace deeply the bottom level of your organization because it's the generational shifts that change how thought processes work." Those graduates also tell him whether his message survived the trip down through the company. Executives decide what the message is. Junior staff receive whatever version reaches them. Only the junior staff can tell you how far apart those 2 versions have drifted.

The Bigger Picture

It comes down to 3 things, in no order. "Courage, relevance, velocity, in any particular order you like. Points on a triangle."

None of it can be learned at a distance. Applying leading-edge technology is a participating sport. "You don't learn that sport by observing it. You learn it by being on the pitch, on the court." You can watch it, you can understand it intellectually, and you will still not know the technique.

That retires a strategy most consulting companies are still running by default. Fast follower used to be sensible: let someone else absorb the learning curve, then arrive with the answers. It stops paying, because "all of the differentiation comes from learning the processes and learning the failures." The learning is the advantage.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does commoditization look like in a consulting service line?

The work still sells, still delivers and still shows a return, but what the client is buying becomes indistinguishable from what a cheaper provider offers. Mark Robbins describes task automation reaching over half of ABP Consultancy's business while pushing every conversation toward hours saved rather than business outcomes. The clearest signal is who you are being compared against on price. A nearshore business priced against large offshore providers on rate is in a commodity market whether or not the pipeline looks healthy.

Is RPA still worth selling in 2026?

It depends what surrounds it. Mark argues the task layer itself has commoditized, while the value has moved to data assimilation, context and understanding. On a Jabra engagement, object detection and color recognition took image matching above 95% and made the business case that the automation alone would not have. HFS Research reached a comparable conclusion about the wider services market in 2026, finding capability commoditized and differentiation moving to proprietary data, owned intellectual property and the operating model.

How does a mid-market consultancy move from delivery work to advisory?

ABP's route was to follow the value rather than announce a strategy. The company noticed that the differentiating element in its own engagements was the applied intelligence rather than the automation, and that this territory was closer to the business process management methodology it started with. Mark reports no internal resistance to the advisory move for that reason. The stated target is two-thirds advisory, paired with small pods delivering first-of-a-kind use cases and transferring the methodology afterwards.

Should we build our own methodology or use a technology vendor's?

ABP declined the vendor route deliberately, refusing to run a pilot, a POC or a proof of value on a platform partner's terms and in a platform partner's vocabulary. Mark describes writing a new methodology and new terminology entirely in business language as the hardest thing the company did. The cost is real: every term has to be invented, agreed across the executive team and then used in front of clients who have never heard any of it.

What is an adaptive enterprise?

A term ABP uses for an organization built around 4 abilities running in parallel: sensing events, filtering them for relevance, responding to the ones that matter for the business and its customers, and adapting. It is positioned deliberately above any specific technology. In Mark's account the answer is not AI or agents, which are vehicles for making those fundamentals work rather than the fundamentals themselves.

What is an adaptive MVP?

ABP's delivery unit: a minimum set of meaningful events an organization can filter for and affect, taken through to a measurable customer outcome aligned to an agreed value framework. It runs through 5 phases, sense, contextualize, understand, respond and learn, with mutual gates covering the problem statement, the value framework and the event scope. Capability maturity assessment is embedded inside it rather than sold as a separate exercise.

How much preparation should you do before a client discovery meeting?

At least as long as the meeting itself. Mark's standard is 30 minutes of preparation for a 30-minute discovery conversation, so that you add value from the first sentence rather than asking the client to educate you at their own expense. Public customer sentiment, including review platforms, gives an outside-in view of a prospect's operations that they cannot dispute, provided you normalize for the fact that reviews skew toward frustration.

How do you protect your differentiation when clients can access the same AI models?

By separating the knowledge layer from the execution layer, so the model underneath becomes swappable per use case while the ontologies, design systems and structured domain knowledge stay proprietary. Your client and your competitor can buy the same model on the same terms. What they cannot buy is the accumulated understanding of a domain, or the speed at which you can make it relevant to a specific client situation.

How do consultancies solve the automation talent problem without competing on salary?

ABP built a separate company inside the group, the School of Automation, run effectively as a not-for-profit and offering vocational, certifiable tracks to young professionals without access to higher education. Government funding is tied to placement outcomes rather than training delivered, which disciplines the model. Graduates go into ABP or into client organizations, and the training is offered to clients for their own teams.

About the guest:

Mark Robbins is Chief Outcome Officer at ABP Consultancy. He spent 13 years at IBM, including as European Insurance Practice Lead for BPM, followed by senior roles at BP3 Global and CognitiveScale, which is why he can describe a technology category moving from differentiated to standard from both the vendor and the practitioner side.

About ABP Consultancy:

Agile Business Process, founded by CEO Jorge Soares and headquartered at The Print Rooms, 164 to 180 Union Street, London SE1 0LH. Around 100 automation and advisory specialists delivering onsite, nearshore and offshore. The group also operates the School of Automation, an Ofsted-registered training provider founded in 2019 that runs vocational automation tracks in partnership with the Department for Education, the UiPath Academic Alliance and SS&C Blue Prism.

This article is based on an episode of the LEADERS IN CONSULTING Podcast, hosted by Sarah Edwards.