TL;DR

AI is making generic consulting output easier to produce and harder to defend. For Dr Karsten Ballüder, Partner at Deloitte, the firms that remain differentiated will not be those that choose between account-led relationships and expert-led depth, but those that know how to combine both. Trust still opens the door, but real expertise is what makes that trust commercially durable.

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A few years ago, Dr Karsten Ballüder watched a project he was responsible for begin to go wrong.

He had been brought in early to shape an IT implementation program, which is the kind of modernization work he knew well. His view was that the project needed to be set up differently. But the account relationship was strong, the client wanted the familiar approach, and the decision went another way. Karsten remained formally responsible for delivery, but without the authority to steer the setup he believed the work required.

The project was eventually delivered, but not easily.

“When the project was finally delivered, much delayed, to be honest, it cost us a lot of money,” Karsten says. “There were some really tough discussions along the way.”

For Karsten, the lesson was straightforward. Relationships matter, but they cannot carry complex work on their own. They create trust, access, and commercial momentum. But when the work is difficult enough, the right expertise has to be in the room early enough to shape the promise being made.

Dr Karsten Ballüder is a Partner at Deloitte and leads the firm’s European Application Modernization practice. His work focuses on the systems large organizations depend on most, such as core banking platforms, insurance engines, logistics infrastructure, and other mission-critical technology that has often been running for decades. These are not projects clients start because they are excited by change; rather, they are projects clients delay until delay becomes the bigger risk.

At this level of work, consulting is not just selling capacity. It is selling confidence.

“You could think of it providing extra capacity to get stuff done,” Karsten says. “But I think it’s more. It’s a promise to deliver something that our clients can’t deliver on their own. So it’s not a question of just capacity. It’s also a question of having the right expertise and providing the confidence that we know what we’re doing and that we have the experience.”

For a long time, consulting firms have built that confidence through trusted client relationships. The account leader knows the client, the politics, the decision makers, and the anxieties that never make it into the procurement brief.

But relationships have a limit. They may create access, but they do not automatically create credibility for the problem waiting behind the door. And as AI makes generic knowledge and polished output easier for everyone to produce, that distinction becomes harder to ignore.

The consulting advantage worth protecting is not the relationship alone. It is not expertise sitting somewhere inside the firm, invisible until someone remembers to call it in.

It is the combination: client trust strong enough to create access, and real expertise deep enough to deserve it.

Why Client Relationships Still Matter

In consulting, there are few commercial assets more valuable than a client who calls again.

The first engagement is hard to win. The second is easier. By the third, something more important than revenue has been established. The client knows who picks up the phone. They know who understands the political texture behind the brief. They know which partner will still be around in six months to see the work survive its first real test. Familiarity like that does not come from a proposal.

Account-led growth has always had gravitational pull inside large consulting firms because it creates more than revenue. It creates continuity, which is a commercially compounding relationship where each project makes the next one easier to win and each conversation carries the weight of shared history.

Karsten understands that logic well. He does not dismiss it.

“If you get onto the right account, and you have a strong account relationship as a partner, in any consulting firm, and manage to use that relationship to provide that client with more and more services, then that is probably a faster way to sell services and to grow your career,” he says.

The best account leaders are not simply mining a captive audience for whatever work the firm happens to have available. They are reading the client over years. They know when a transformation program is losing executive support before it becomes visible in the quarterly review. They know which internal sponsor is genuinely committed and which one is only lending their name to something they doubt.

That knowledge is not available to anyone entering cold. Step into an unfamiliar organization and you see the org chart, read the brief, meet the key stakeholders, and form a view about the problem. It is not nothing. But the account leader sees the politics around the problem, the decision path behind it, and the people who will determine whether any solution survives contact with the organization.

For a young consultant looking at the road to partnership, the account path has an obvious appeal. It gives structure to ambition. There is a client to learn, a set of relationships to build, a growing commercial story to tell internally. The pipeline does not require rebuilding from scratch with every new engagement.

Karsten is pragmatic about this. If a young manager came to him for career advice, he would not romanticize the expert path for its own sake.

“If you’re a young manager in consulting who’s keen on having a rapid career, ask me for advice. I’d say find an account that you have fun with and you find interesting, and get in there and learn all about them and run with it. And it will work.”

The mechanism behind it is simple and human.

“It’s human nature,” Karsten says. “I like working with people that I’ve worked with before. So even if it’s not always a perfect fit, I like to take the same team along to the next project because I know that they deliver and they grow with it.”

Even if it is not always a perfect fit.

The same force that makes account-led growth powerful can also make it brittle. Familiarity accelerates. It lowers friction. It makes the next sale feel natural. But it can also tempt a firm to stretch the relationship across territory where it has not yet earned the right to stand.

Think about a long-standing relationship inside a major bank. The account partner knows the CFO, the COO, the head of transformation. The firm has delivered well on regulatory programs and finance restructuring over several years. Then the client raises something almost in passing — a core banking platform that has been running in the background for twenty-five years. Nobody wants to touch it, but the pressure is beginning to build.

The door is open because of the relationship. What happens next depends on whether the right expertise enters the room. This includes situations such as a core banking platform that has been running in the background for twenty-five years, which nobody wants to touch, but where the pressure is beginning to build.

The account relationship becomes the bridge that allows expertise to be believed before it has earned trust on its own. Karsten knows that when he enters a new client situation as a specialist, the client does not automatically know whether he and his team can deliver. They may know Deloitte. They may know the account partner. They do not yet know him.

“That new client doesn’t know me yet,” he says. “They don’t trust me. They don’t know whether my team and I can deliver this, but they might trust an account partner that has their trust and says, ‘Look, I know these guys can deliver.’”

Expertise may create credibility, but the account relationship often creates the first permission to demonstrate it.

If the account leader treats the moment as simply another extension of the trusted relationship, the firm may win the conversation and weaken the work. If the relevant expert is brought in too late, after expectations have hardened and scope has been shaped, the firm inherits risks that should have been surfaced before the contract was signed. If the internal credit question makes collaboration feel more expensive than it is worth, the client may never see the person best equipped to help them.

None of this reflects badly on account leadership as a model. Karsten is clear about that. The account path is not wrong, and relationship-driven growth is not less legitimate. The relationship and the expertise are not competing models. They are a dependency.

“No one’s going to believe, not anymore, I hope. No one’s going to believe the consulting partner that tells the client that he can do everything,” he says. “If you sell your clients finance transformation today and Salesforce tomorrow, and a big cloud migration in six months’ time, it’s not going to work. They will look at you and say, ‘You’re the finance transformation guy. What do you know about Salesforce?’”

The strongest account leaders do not protect the relationship by pretending to cover every domain. They protect it by knowing precisely when to bring someone else in. The client’s trust is not preserved by maintaining control of every conversation. It is preserved by making sure the right conversation happens at the right time.

That sounds obvious. Inside large consulting firms, it is rarely simple.

The account relationship is not only a client asset. It is a career model, a revenue model, and an incentive model. The same relationship that creates opportunity also creates ownership. The same ownership that drives accountability can make genuine collaboration commercially inconvenient.

Relationships still matter enormously. But relationships alone do not answer the harder question now pressing on every consulting firm.

When the door opens, what exactly walks through it?

Why Karsten Chose to Go Deep

There is a role senior consultants can fall into when they are trusted, capable, and commercially reliable. They become the person who holds the room steady. They know enough to ask good questions, manage the client relationship, assemble the right team, and keep anxious stakeholders calm. The work is visible. The value is real. The career continues to move.

But over time, the connection between the person and the substance can begin to thin.

Karsten remembers that feeling with unusual honesty. He had spent years in financial services doing work that was, as he puts it, "vaguely IT related." This was adjacent to the technology that had originally drawn him into the industry, but no longer quite inside it. His background was in physics and software development. He thought of himself as an IT person. But by the time he reached director level at Deloitte, some of his work had become something different: reassurance management for programs where the technical depth sat largely with the team around him.

“I was the director at Deloitte who was holding the CEO’s hand, telling them, ‘Don’t worry, my team knows what they’re doing,’” he says. “So I had the right team, and I didn’t understand half of what we were doing myself. But I provided that reassurance, that trust.”

Karsten is not suggesting the role had no value. It did. The client needed reassurance. The team needed leadership. The program needed someone who could hold the relationship together while the technical work sat with others.

But for Karsten, it was not enough. The distance between who he was — an IT person, technically curious, drawn to the substance of how systems actually work — and what he was doing had grown too wide. The work was still senior. It still counted. But the part of it that had once made the work interesting had disappeared.

Then came an opportunity that looked, on paper, like a sideways move.

Deloitte offered him the chance to take on leadership of the firm’s Center of Excellence for Application Modernization. This is a practice focused on a problem much of the market preferred to avoid: the modernization of mainframe and legacy systems that large organizations had been running, and dreading, for decades. It was not the obvious fast track. The domain was unfashionable. The clients were not excited to start the work.

What the role gave him was something account growth alone had not, which was a subject. This was not a capability he could claim from a distance, and not a market he had read about and could speak to fluently enough, but a real domain (deep, specific, and technically grounded) that he could build genuine understanding around over years of repeated exposure.

“I like going into the nitty gritty details sometimes,” Karsten says. “I know I shouldn’t, and I can drive my project teams crazy with stupid questions because I try to understand things. And I don’t always, but they know that.”

That detail describes a different form of consulting credibility. Not the confidence of the generalist who always has a ready answer, but the confidence of someone who stays close enough to the material to ask the questions that sharpen their own understanding, even when those questions are inconvenient.

Senior consulting roles can create distance from detail. Some of that distance is necessary. A partner cannot operate simultaneously as developer, architect, analyst, and project manager. But if the distance becomes too complete, something important is lost. The client may still hear fluency, but they no longer feel depth.

Karsten’s move into application modernization reversed that drift. It placed him back into a domain where he could absorb enough from the experts around him, namely people who were technically far ahead of him and always would be, to build real pattern recognition. Not mastery of everything, but the accumulated exposure to know what tends to go wrong, which questions reveal the real risk, and where the early warning signs appear before the project registers them as problems.

“So doing something where, over the years now, I’ve picked up quite a lot of depth and expertise around it because I keep learning from my teams who are so much better at it than I would ever be,” he says. “But I pick up more expertise from it and can transport it across to clients, and that gives me credibility.”

That last phrase matters: it gives me credibility. Karsten is not describing mastery. He is describing something more useful in practice: the ability to stand between client anxiety and delivery complexity and translate both directions without losing the truth of either.

For clients, that distinction matters on the kinds of programs Karsten describes. A thirty-year-old core system is not simply a technical problem. It is a history. Every workaround tells a story about a decision someone made under pressure.

A general account relationship may get a firm into that conversation. But the moment the client begins to ask how the work will actually happen — where the complexity sits, what tends to break, what the early danger signs look like — the room changes. The client is no longer evaluating only the firm’s brand or the partner’s warmth. They are evaluating whether anyone in the room has genuinely been through this before.

This is where the expert path earns its place. It is also why, as Karsten acknowledges, it can move more slowly.

An account leader can stay with one client for years, compounding the same set of relationships into a larger commercial story. A specialist moves from client to client, account team to account team, sometimes country to country. Each time, some portion of the trust has to be built again. The client may know Deloitte. They may not yet know Karsten. The account team may know the client well. They may not yet know what Karsten’s practice can change for them.

“If you’re someone who’s deeply interested in a particular topic, and maybe a more analytical person, someone who likes solving a specific type of challenge, then I’d say do what you’re most passionate about,” Karsten says. “Maybe it’s going to evolve a little bit slower. But if you’re passionate about something and if it adds value, your career will follow either way.”

Most firms say they value expertise. Fewer are structurally designed to make expertise commercially powerful. The account path is visible. The numbers are attributable. The growth story has a clean narrative: this person is building this client; this client is growing; here is the revenue.

Expertise is harder to track — until the moment it is missing.

Karsten’s path points to a different reading. Expert knowledge is not a supporting act to the real commercial work. In complex, high-stakes consulting, it is part of what makes the commercial promise credible in the first place.

The account relationship may carry the firm into the room. But in the moments that matter, someone still has to make the client believe the firm has earned the right to stay there.

What AI Makes Harder to Defend

For most of consulting’s history, the information gap between a firm and its client was commercially useful.

A consulting team could gather market data, benchmark competitors, structure a complex problem, and turn scattered inputs into a coherent recommendation faster and better than most client organizations could manage on their own. That did not make the work shallow. Often it was not. But part of the value came from a clear advantage: the firm had more people, more methods, more pattern recognition, and more capacity to produce something polished and well-organized from raw material the client did not have time to work through themselves.

AI weakens that advantage from the bottom up.

Research is easier. Drafting is easier. Summarization is easier. Producing a credible first version of almost anything — a market overview, a strategic options paper, a project plan, a procurement response — has become faster and more accessible than at any point in the industry’s history. Clients can do more themselves. Smaller firms can appear more substantial. Larger firms can produce more output with fewer people.

“What does AI give you? It gives you easy access to all the publicly available information. All the LLMs have been trained over the entire internet. And it gives you an incredible performance productivity boost for whatever you do, especially in software development.”

The productivity gain is real. A small, well-equipped team can now do work that previously required a much larger one. Karsten has thought about that possibility and does not dismiss it.

But he is also clear about what it leaves out.

“What that misses is the experience and the trust aspect,” he says. “And we come back to that.”

What is the client actually buying when the project is dangerous?

There is a difference between reading about a difficult modernization program and having lived through one. The first gives you the vocabulary: dependencies, data quality, business disruption, integration complexity, stakeholder resistance. The second gives you something harder to replicate. It tells you how those risks appear before they are formally visible. It tells you which reassuring project dashboard is probably too clean. It tells you when a team is using complexity as cover for a decision no one wants to make openly.

That knowledge is often never written down. Not because firms are careless with it, but because experience does not arrive in neat, reusable form. It lives in the memory of people who have been through enough difficult programs to recognize patterns before they can fully explain how they recognized them.

“If you know the entire internet, that still doesn’t give you the experience of having done that specific type of project and knowing the early warning signs of why it might fail,” he says. “That is experience. That is hands-on experience.”

AI becomes uncomfortable for consulting firms not because it produces nothing valuable, but because it can make faster production look like stronger differentiation. If every firm uses similar tools trained on broadly similar public knowledge, then a polished AI-assisted output from one firm begins to look a lot like a polished AI-assisted output from another. If the underlying knowledge is drawn from the same generic pool, the difference between firms becomes harder for the client to see — and harder for the firm to defend.

“If we rely only on the AI to tell us what to do, we become completely interchangeable,” he says. “A Deloitte consultant using the same AI tool is going to be no better than an Accenture consultant using the same AI tool.”

Efficiency can make a firm look more like its competitors, not less. Not in every situation. Not inevitably. But when the main effect of AI adoption is that everyone produces the same category of material faster, the market does not see more differentiation. It sees more sameness at greater speed.

Before AI, deep expertise was valuable because it improved quality and delivery confidence. After AI, it becomes valuable for another reason: it gives the firm something to contribute that the machine does not already have. The productivity gain is available to everyone. What the firm adds on top of that gain — knowledge that is not public, experience that is not searchable, judgment formed by repeated exposure to the same class of difficulty — is what creates distance from the competition.

“I think where it becomes really interesting,” Karsten says, “is when you take this productivity boost that you get out of that and you combine it with the experts who bring knowledge that’s not publicly available.”

This is not AI replacing expertise. It is AI amplifying what the firm actually knows. That distinction matters because knowledge only becomes defensible when it contains something the client and the competitor cannot get from the same public pool.

Large firms should have an advantage here. Not everything a firm like Deloitte knows exists in white papers or external publications. Much of it lives in internal delivery systems, proprietary tooling, project histories accumulated over decades, and — most importantly — in the heads of people who have been through enough of the same kind of program to know what the textbook version misses.

But that advantage only matters if it reaches the client.

Large firms should have an advantage here. Not everything a firm like Deloitte knows exists in white papers or external publications. Much of it lives in internal delivery systems, proprietary tooling, project histories accumulated over decades, and, most importantly, in the heads of people who have been through enough of the same kind of program to know what the textbook version misses.

AI does not solve that organizational problem. It exposes it.

Once the generic layer is easier for everyone to produce, the client’s question changes. It is no longer enough to arrive with a well-structured document. It is no longer enough to sound informed about the landscape.

The question becomes: what do you know that I cannot find myself?

“It is generic content, and no one pays for that anymore,” he says. “Our clients can do it themselves, to be honest.”

That is not a prediction about some distant future. It is already visible in the kinds of programs Karsten describes. Clients running mission-critical modernization projects are not looking for a tidy summary of modernization options. They are looking for someone who can sit across from them and explain, with credibility, where the hidden risk lives. Someone who can identify why a technically elegant solution may fail organizationally. Someone who can recognize the early signs of trouble because they have seen them before, even with a different client and different names on the steering committee, but the same underlying pattern.

AI may help that person work faster, structure their thinking more clearly, and produce better supporting material. But it does not create the authority those conversations require.

That authority still comes from the same place it always has. Someone has to have been there before. And in a market where generic output is becoming cheaper and faster, the firm’s ability to put that person in the right room before the client has to ask whether they exist becomes a form of differentiation that is hard to imitate.

Why Expertise Has to Be Visible

Large consulting firms often know considerably more than they can use.

Somewhere inside the organization, there is usually someone who has seen the problem before. Someone who has delivered the difficult program, recognized the warning signs too late on one project and early enough on the next, and carried that pattern recognition into every client conversation since. The problem is rarely the absence of knowledge. It is the distance between the knowledge and the moment it is needed.

A client sees one firm. A brand, a logo, a proposal. Inside, the firm is a network of practices, geographies, account teams, service lines, alliances, and personal relationships, each operating with its own commercial logic. Knowledge does not move through that system automatically. It has to be found, recognized, trusted, and brought into the right room before the work has already been shaped without it.

For an account leader, the commercial path is relatively direct. They are close to the client. They hear the concerns as they form. They can develop a conversation before it hardens into a formal request.

For a specialist like Karsten, the route is more indirect.

He may be precisely the person a client needs. But he does not own every bank, insurer, logistics company, or government department that might be sitting on an aging core system. He cannot simply wait for the market to announce itself in a neatly written procurement document.

“If I’m responsible for a specific service like I am, then I basically have two options,” he says. “I can sit there and wait till someone brings me an RFP. Talking about mainframe modernization, you might sit there for two years before the next RFP comes.”

That is passive expertise: the knowledge exists, the market need exists, but nothing connects them at the right moment. The client continues living with the problem. The account team may hear pieces of it without recognizing what they mean. The expert remains invisible.

Karsten’s response is to treat expertise as something that has to be actively marketed inside the firm before it can be sold outside it. That may sit uncomfortably with experts who prefer to believe the work should speak for itself. But inside a large firm, work rarely speaks unless someone gives it a channel.

“I need to market my service to the account teams,” he says. “I need to make sure I’m recognized as part of the service portfolio of Deloitte.”

This is not internal theater or self-promotional noise. It is making the expert capability legible to the people who own client access. Account leaders do not need a technical education in mainframe modernization. They need to know what to listen for. They need to understand which client comments carry weight. They need to hear a passing complaint about an aging COBOL system and recognize it as being the beginning of a modernization conversation rather than just an IT operations grumble.

Karsten calls this his early warning system.

“If they talk to their clients and they hear them complain about some old COBOL system, say, ‘Yeah, that’s why I need to talk to Karsten about it,’” he explains. “And then we can develop that.”

The expert is not asking account leaders to become technical specialists. He is asking them to become better sensors, so that they carry enough pattern recognition into client conversations that important signals do not pass as background noise.

A client mentions over lunch that one of their core systems has become increasingly difficult to change — slow, expensive, fragile under any new demand. An account leader without the sensor hears an IT complaint and moves on.

With the sensor in place, the account leader asks two more questions. Within a week, the right expert is in a conversation that is still exploratory and still open to being shaped. Nothing dramatic has happened. But the firm’s likelihood of winning, and of doing the work responsibly, has changed.

“By the time clients have written an RFP, they often have already an idea of how they want to do it and who with and so on,” Karsten says. “So it’s an uphill battle. The earlier you get in that process, the more you can influence it and steer it in the right direction.”

Expert-led and account-led growth become inseparable here. The account leader creates proximity to the signal. The expert interprets what the signal means. The account leader earns the right to ask the next question. The expert makes that question useful. Without account access, the expert may understand the issue but never hear the signal. Without expert awareness, the account leader may hear the signal but not know what it is worth.

Karsten also works with hyperscalers — the major cloud platform providers whose teams are often embedded inside the technology organizations of the same clients Deloitte serves. Their interests align naturally with his. They want clients to move off older platforms and onto modern cloud infrastructure. His practice exists to navigate that transition.

“I get the hyperscalers involved. I get our account teams involved,” Karsten says. “And at the end of the day, I end up treating our account teams like my clients, at least from a marketing perspective.”

Treating account teams like clients does not diminish the actual client. It recognizes that in a large consulting firm, internal adoption is often the first sale. Before the external market can buy the expertise, the people closest to that market have to understand it, remember it, and reach for it at the right moment.

The romantic image of the deep specialist is someone so capable that the organization naturally surfaces them when needed. Reality offers no such guarantee. Expertise that is not visible operates, commercially, exactly like expertise that does not exist.

“You have to make sure people are aware of it and you have to create visibility,” Karsten says. “Otherwise you’re invisible. If you’re invisible, you won’t get involved. You’ll be ignored. And then there’s no career. There’s no, there’s nothing.”

No career. Nothing. Not because the expert lacks value, but because value that cannot be seen cannot be mobilized. In a large firm under commercial pressure, whatever cannot be mobilized in time may as well not exist.

AI makes this problem more important. When generic content becomes easier for everyone to produce, the firm’s ability to surface and deploy its non-generic knowledge becomes the critical variable. The expert may be somewhere in the network. The question is whether the account leader knows that before the client needs them — not after the RFP has arrived, not after the scope has been written around someone else’s assumptions, but early enough for the expertise to shape the work.

AI cannot solve that on its own. This is a human and organizational problem. It is solved by experts who understand that visibility is part of their job, not a distraction from it. And it is solved by account leaders who are curious enough about the firm’s capabilities to carry a few more questions into client conversations.

The best consulting firms may end up looking less like libraries of knowledge and more like nervous systems. Signals from the edge of the client relationship travel toward the people equipped to interpret them. Expertise moves back toward the client before the problem hardens into a procurement exercise no one can reshape.

Karsten’s world makes that concrete. A client mentions an old system. An account leader recognizes the phrase. An expert enters before the RFP. The conversation changes while it is still possible to change it. This happens because the right expertise was brought in early.

That is how expertise becomes more than a credential on a capability slide.

It becomes part of the firm’s ability to earn the work — before the market has reduced it to a process.

When Internal Incentives Get in the Way

In theory, everyone inside a consulting firm wants the right expert in the room.

No serious account leader would argue publicly that a client should receive a second-best team because the internal economics are more convenient. No expert would claim that relationships do not matter. No partner would say, in a formal setting, that collaboration is optional when the client’s problem is complex. On paper, the model is clear: account leaders bring trust and access, experts bring depth and credibility, and the firm wins because the client sees the best of both.

Then the numbers arrive.

Revenue credit. Sales attribution. Delivery margin. Partner scorecards. Utilization targets. These mechanics are not designed to be malicious. They create accountability, make performance visible, and reward the behaviors the firm needs at scale. But once they exist, they shape behavior in ways that are rational, predictable, and often at odds with what collaboration requires.

“All these systems are designed to incentivize us to perform and work really hard and reward us for working really hard,” Karsten says. “But they also somehow incentivize us to compete.”

Large professional services firms are built on shared brand, shared delivery capability, and shared client relationships. They are also built on individual books of business, individual targets, individual recognition, and individual advancement.

That does not make collaboration impossible. It makes collaboration expensive.

Consider the internal calculation an account leader faces when a client raises something adjacent to their core domain. They could deliver something credible. Not perfect, perhaps, but commercially defensible. Bringing in a deeper expert would almost certainly improve the work, but it would also complicate the picture. Credit would have to be shared. The expert might develop their own relationship with the client. The internal story of who “owns” the opportunity becomes harder to tell.

“If I have a really strong client relationship and the client is asking me some things that I think I can competently deliver, do I really want to involve someone who could deliver that even better and share the relevant KPIs with him, which would be better for the firm and for the client? Or do I want to deliver it myself because I can do it and it would be okay?”

That final phrase — it would be okay — is where the danger lives. Not disastrous. Not negligent. Not a decision anyone could easily challenge after the fact. Just okay.

The client may not notice at first. The proposal is polished. The relationship is warm. The account leader is trusted. But somewhere inside the engagement, the firm has chosen adequacy over depth because adequacy was easier to own commercially. That is not only a quality problem. It is a margin problem, a reputation problem, and eventually a trust problem — the very thing the account relationship was supposed to protect.

Karsten lived that sequence directly. The project from the opening of this article — where he was overruled on a setup he did not believe in, while remaining formally responsible for delivery — was not just a story about one difficult client or one bad decision. It was a story about what happens when commercial ownership and delivery authority are separated without anyone naming the gap.

“I’m not going to go along with the setup that I don’t believe in,” he says. “I’d rather stay away from a project that I believe is set up the wrong way, or where I’m not given the authority to steer it, than to go along for the ride because it helps my KPIs.”

This is not a statement of principle for its own sake. It is a practical survival rule. Responsibility without authority is dangerous in complex delivery. It exposes the partner, the team, the client, and the firm to risk that is often invisible at the point of sale and very visible once delivery is underway.

The conflict sharpens further when price enters the room. Karsten describes a more recent conversation with an account leader who wanted him to support a project at a fixed price based on assumptions Karsten considered far too optimistic. From the account side, the logic was clear. Fixed price is easier for the client to buy. It creates certainty on their side. It may be what wins the deal.

From the delivery side, the risk looked different.

“That’s wonderful. That’s a great idea to get it sold,” Karsten recalls saying. “But there’s no way I would ever go along with that. Not based on what I know today.”

The phrase “based on what I know today” is the expert’s natural brake against commercial enthusiasm. Not obstruction. Not risk aversion. The accumulated memory of what optimistic assumptions look like once delivery begins. The specific knowledge of where that category of program tends to underestimate complexity, and what that underestimation eventually costs.

Formal processes exist to manage these tensions. Pursuit governance. Delivery assurance. Escalation protocols. Most large firms have some version of all of them. Most large firms also know that the processes are only as effective as the behavior underneath them.

“We all know formal processes are formal processes, and reality is different,” Karsten says. “Everyone games the system.”

People learn the rules, then they learn the informal rules beneath them. They learn how credit moves, when to bring someone in, when to keep something contained, and when the formal escalation path will cause more damage than the problem it is meant to address.

This is why the quality of account leadership matters so much. The best account leaders Karsten has seen do not behave as protective owners of every opportunity that passes through their client relationship. They behave as stewards — people who understand that their authority over the relationship is not diminished when the right expert enters the room. It is strengthened.

“I have seen account leaders who ensure that the right people are being put on the right topics,” he says.

Inside a large firm, that is a significant leadership act. It means resisting the pull of commercial ownership. It means accepting that the client’s need outranks internal tidiness. It means using authority not to control access, but to improve what access makes possible.

When an account leader does this consistently — bringing in the right expertise even when it complicates the commercial picture, even when the KPI system does not naturally reward it — the model works. The client feels both known and properly served. The firm grows because the work is better, not merely because the selling is more confident.

When it does not happen, the firm’s structure begins to work against its own promise. The expertise exists but stays unused. The account grows in a way that stores up delivery risk. The project is won on terms the delivery partner already knows are wrong. The KPIs look attractive at the point of sale, and the real cost appears later in write-offs, strained teams, and the erosion of client confidence.

Consulting leaders often describe collaboration as a cultural problem. Karsten’s perspective suggests something more precise. Collaboration becomes a cultural problem after it has become an economic one. If the economics make collaboration costly, culture has to work harder than it should.

The firms that get this right will not be the ones that eliminate internal competition. Karsten does not suggest that is possible, or even desirable. A degree of competition keeps partners sharp, drives commercial effort, and ensures that people earn their position rather than simply occupying it. But the competition has to remain subordinate to the client promise.

If the account relationship is the door and real expertise is what deserves to walk through it, the firm’s internal system has one central responsibility.

It must not be the thing that stops the right person from reaching the room.

Why Experts Need a Commercial Role

Most consulting firms respect experts. They invite them into difficult conversations. They ask them to review proposals. They bring them into sales meetings when the client’s questions become too specific for the generalist story.

But respect is not the same as commercial legitimacy. Respect says: this person is valuable when needed. Commercial legitimacy says: this person is part of how the firm grows.

Expert contribution often arrives in consulting firms under the wrong label. It is treated as technical support, delivery assurance, or specialist input. Useful, certainly. Sometimes essential. But still adjacent to the main commercial machine, which is often built around account ownership, revenue responsibility, and the visible expansion of client relationships.

Karsten’s career sits inside that separation because his work does not behave like a support function. Application modernization is not a niche technical add-on to someone else’s transformation agenda. It can define a client relationship for years. It carries serious revenue, serious risk, and serious reputational consequence. The person who can credibly lead that conversation is not merely helping the account team sound more expert. They are shaping what the firm can responsibly promise.

Many expert leaders do not fit neatly into the classic partner mold. They may not want to own one large account across every possible service line. They may not be natural generalists. They may be more interested in one difficult class of problem than in the full breadth of a client relationship. Their value compounds differently: not through staying close to one client for years, but through seeing the same type of problem across many organizations, under many conditions, until the pattern becomes visible earlier than it does to everyone else.

The account leader learns the client through continuity. The expert learns the problem through repetition.

A mature consulting firm needs both forms of knowledge. It also needs to recognize that they do not show up in the same way on a scorecard.

The account leader’s contribution is easier to see. The client is named. The revenue is attributed. The growth story is clean.

The expert’s contribution is harder to attribute. They may shape an opportunity before anyone knows whether it will become revenue. They may prevent the firm from selling something that would have damaged the client relationship six months later. They may enter one meeting and change the client’s confidence in the entire proposal.

None of that is soft. It is deeply commercial. It is simply harder to measure.

If the firm values experts only when their impact is obvious, it will keep bringing them in too late: after the scope has hardened, after the price has been framed, after the relationship partner has already made commitments the delivery organization now has to live with.

The expert becomes the person called in to validate, rescue, or reassure.

Karsten’s argument points toward something more demanding: the expert needs to be present before the promise is made.

That does not mean every expert should become an account leader. It does not mean specialist careers should be forced into the same shape as relationship-driven careers. It means the firm has to create room for expert contribution to count commercially without pretending it is the same contribution.

Karsten sees some versions of this already. He mentions the Tech Fellow model, associated historically with IBM and now present in parts of Deloitte in the United States, as one way firms have tried to recognize very senior experts who do not fit the classic consulting partner role.

“A Tech Fellow is a very senior, experienced person who doesn’t fit into a classic consulting partner role,” he explains. “They are the heavyweights we bring out for the really difficult in-depth discussions.”

The example is useful not because every firm needs that exact title, but because it names the underlying problem. Some people create enormous value precisely because they are not broad generalists. They change the quality of a conversation through depth. They create client confidence because they cannot easily be fooled.

Karsten describes one such expert with clear admiration — someone near the end of a long career, with more than thirty years in the same kind of work.

“You just can’t fool him,” Karsten says. “You ask him a question, he has the right answer and you can tell it’s the right answer.”

Every consulting leader has seen some version of that moment. A meeting moves along politely. The account team frames the opportunity. The client listens with practiced caution. Then the deep expert speaks, and the texture of the room changes.

Not because they perform authority. Often, the opposite. They do not need to overstate. They can say, quietly, that a certain approach will probably create trouble later because they have seen that pattern before.

Many firms recognize that force in the moment. Fewer are designed around it before the moment arrives. Everyone appreciates the expert who helps win the deal. Fewer systems know how to credit the expert who made the deal winnable in the first place. Everyone values the expert who prevents a delivery problem from becoming visible to the client.

A firm that says it values expertise but promotes almost exclusively on account expansion is making a choice, whether or not it describes it that way. A firm that creates expert tracks but gives them weaker prestige, weaker economics, or little influence over sales decisions is also making a choice. A firm that celebrates experts in crisis but sidelines them during opportunity shaping is making perhaps the most common choice of all: treating expertise as insurance rather than growth capital.

That changes the role of the expert inside the firm.

Insurance is called when something goes wrong. Growth capital is deployed before value is created.

If expertise is insurance, the expert waits for the difficult question, the troubled project, the skeptical client, the scope that needs saving. If expertise is growth capital, the expert is part of how the firm identifies opportunity, shapes the conversation, earns credibility, prices risk, and decides what it is willing to promise.

Karsten’s own work makes that distinction concrete. A modernization opportunity is not made safer by adding expertise at the end of the sales process. By then, too many decisions may already have been made. The client may have anchored on a delivery model. The account team may have framed a price.

The expert’s value is highest before that happens — not because experts are more cautious or account leaders are too optimistic, but because different people carry different memories of risk. The account leader may remember the client’s history, politics, and appetite for change. The expert may remember the last five times this kind of program looked manageable at the start and became difficult for reasons that were visible only to people who knew where to look.

The client needs both memories in the room.

That requires a firm to treat expert leadership not as a side path for people who do not fit the main commercial model, but as one of the ways the firm creates commercial authority. The expert does not replace the account leader. The expert makes the account leader’s access more valuable. The account leader does not diminish the expert. The account leader gives the expert’s credibility a trusted route into the client.

The best version of this is not a battle for ownership. It is a more intelligent division of trust.

The account leader is trusted because they know the client. The expert is trusted because they know the problem. When those two forms of trust arrive together, the client experiences something more powerful than either one alone: the sense that the firm understands both their organization and the work itself.

That is what commercial legitimacy for expertise should mean.

Not a ceremonial title. Not a technical career lane placed beside the real partnership track. Not a specialist who is admired but economically peripheral. It means expert judgment is present when opportunities are shaped, when risks are priced, when delivery authority is assigned, and when the firm decides whether the promise it is about to make can actually be kept.

The question for consulting leaders is not whether experts are respected. Most already are. The question is whether the firm has made expert leadership consequential early enough so that this respect matters.

The question is whether the firm has made expert leadership consequential early enough for that respect to matter.

What the Future Firm Has to Combine

There is a version of this argument that is easy to agree with and easy to ignore.

Relationships matter. Expertise matters. AI is changing the landscape. Firms need both. Everyone nods. The meeting moves on. Nothing changes, because nothing had to.

Karsten’s argument does not allow either side that comfort.

An account leader who believes the relationship alone is enough will eventually introduce a team the client cannot fully trust for the problem they actually have. An expert who believes depth alone will earn visibility may spend years being right about things no one is in a position to act on.

Those outcomes rarely announce themselves at the point where the decision is made. They accumulate in the margin erosion of a project sold too optimistically, in the client who does not return after the first engagement, in the expert whose contribution arrives a month after the scope was written, in the proposal that is polished but not deeply grounded.

The combination Karsten describes is not a philosophy but an operating discipline. It requires account leaders who understand that bringing in the right expert is not a concession to their own limits. It is the most effective thing they can do with the access they have worked years to earn.

A client who trusts the account leader enough to share an unformed concern is offering something valuable. What happens to that concern — whether it reaches someone who can interpret it properly, or whether it gets handled by whoever is already closest to it — is one of the most consequential decisions the firm makes, often without framing it as a decision at all.

It also requires experts who understand that visibility is not vanity. It is the mechanism through which their knowledge reaches the people who need it. An expert who assumes reputation alone will travel through a firm of thousands of people, across countries, practices, and client relationships, is relying on a system that rarely works that cleanly.

The internal commercial work — making account teams into sensors, building relationships with hyperscalers, showing up at the right internal moments, translating capability into language the account side can carry into client conversations — is not a distraction from the expert’s real job. It is part of the job.

And it requires firm leadership to notice when incentives punish the behaviors the strategy depends on. If bringing in an expert costs the account leader credit without replacing it with something else the system values, collaboration will remain aspirational.

“The experts alone will never get through to the clients,” Karsten says. “And account leaders without the delivery capability behind them that actually knows what they’re doing won’t be successful either.”

For experts, that is a reminder that being right is not enough. The market does not reward knowledge it cannot access. Expertise has to be made legible, attached to client signals, and brought into the relationship early enough to matter.

For account leaders, it is a reminder that access is not the same as authority. The relationship is not diminished when the right expert enters the room. In the strongest version of the model, that is what makes the relationship worth having.

In Karsten’s world, this can look simple. A client mentions an aging system almost in passing. The account leader has been listening for that phrase. Within days, the right expert is in a conversation that has not yet hardened. The client’s assumptions are still fluid. The scope has not been written. The price has not been fixed. The risk is still visible enough to be named and managed.

That is not a remarkable sequence of events. It is an operating capability — if the firm has built the internal education, shared commercial discipline, incentive structures, and leadership behavior required to make it happen.

The consulting advantage AI cannot copy is not, in the end, a particular methodology or a specific domain of expertise. It is the organizational ability to move trust and knowledge toward each other before the client has to ask whether those two things exist in the same firm.

That is why the article does not end with a choice between relationships and expertise, but with the harder requirement that they arrive together.

Relationships open doors. That has always been true and will remain true. But what walks through the door now has to carry more weight than it once did.

When generic knowledge is easier to produce, when AI makes polished output accessible to almost anyone, when the client can compare one firm’s language against another’s in the time it takes to read a proposal, the question behind every relationship becomes sharper.

Have you actually been through this before? Do you know where it tends to break? Can you tell me something the market has not already told me?

The firms that answer that question well will not be those with the strongest relationships or the deepest expertise in isolation. They will be the ones that have stopped treating those two things as separate sources of advantage and started building a firm where they reliably arrive together.

Everything else, increasingly, can be imitated.

Practical Takeaways: Building a Consulting Practice Where Relationships and Expertise Work Together

The following Q&A distills the core lessons from Dr Karsten Ballüder's experience into practical guidance for consulting leaders navigating the relationship-versus-expertise tension inside large firms.

◾️ As a consulting leader, how do I know whether my firm is actually using its expertise — or just claiming to?

Look at when experts enter client conversations. If they are consistently arriving after the scope has been written, after the price has been fixed, or after delivery has already hit trouble, the firm is using expertise as a rescue operation rather than a growth asset. The test is not whether the expert is in the firm. It is whether they are in the room before the work has hardened around assumptions they would have challenged.

◾️ I lead an account. Why should I bring in a deep expert if it complicates the commercial picture and dilutes my credit?

Because the client's trust in you is not protected by keeping control of every conversation. It is protected by making sure the right conversation happens at the right time. An account leader who stretches a relationship across territory where they cannot credibly deliver does not preserve the relationship — they quietly erode it. The strongest account leaders are not those who own every opportunity. They are the ones who know exactly when the relationship needs something more than the relationship.

◾️ What is the real commercial risk of choosing the account path over the expert path — or vice versa?

The account path can move faster, but it carries a concentration risk: if the account stalls, the commercial story stalls with it. The expert path moves more slowly, but it compounds across multiple clients and builds knowledge that is genuinely hard to replicate. The deeper risk for a firm is not that individuals choose one path or the other. It is that the firm structurally rewards only one of them — and slowly loses the people, and the capabilities, it needed from the other.

◾️ How do I, as a specialist, make my expertise visible inside a large firm without it feeling like self-promotion?

Treat your account colleagues like clients. Understand what they need to know, not everything you know. Give them three things: the language to recognize when a client problem is in your domain, a concrete example of what early involvement changed in a previous engagement, and a clear, easy way to bring you in. The goal is not to make yourself famous internally. It is to make yourself reachable at the right moment. Visibility is the mechanism through which your knowledge reaches the people who need it. Without it, expertise that exists operates exactly like expertise that does not.

◾️ How should consulting firms think about AI in relation to the relationship-expertise model?

AI accelerates the generic layer — research, synthesis, drafting, structured analysis. That productivity gain is real and applies to everyone. This means the generic layer becomes less distinguishing, not more. What the firm can add on top of that gain — knowledge that is not publicly available, experience with the specific class of problem, judgment formed by repeated exposure to how that problem actually behaves — is what creates distance from the competition. AI is most powerful when it amplifies distinctive knowledge. It is least powerful when it substitutes for having any.

◾️ When should a consulting leader choose to walk away from a project rather than accept a setup they do not believe in?

When they are being asked to carry delivery responsibility for a scope, price, or structural setup they cannot defend based on what they actually know — and when they do not have the authority to change it. Responsibility without authority is not a commercial inconvenience. It is a structural risk that tends to become very visible by the time delivery is underway. The lesson is not to be difficult. It is to be clear, early, about the conditions under which your expertise can actually protect the client — and the firm.

◾️ What does good collaboration between account leaders and experts actually look like in practice?

It looks like an account leader who hears a client mention an old system and knows to ask two more questions before changing the subject. It looks like an expert who has done enough internal education that the account leader knows what those two questions should surface. It looks like a conversation that begins before the RFP — while the client's assumptions are still fluid, while the scope can still be shaped, while the risk is still early enough to be managed rather than inherited. Good collaboration is not a cultural achievement. It is an operating capability. It has to be built deliberately, maintained actively, and protected from the incentive structures that quietly make it expensive.

◾️ Is expert leadership becoming more or less important in consulting as AI develops?

More. Not because relationships matter less, as they do not, but because the part of consulting that AI makes easier is precisely the part that once demonstrated competence without requiring deep knowledge. When polished output becomes accessible to everyone, clients look harder for signals of something less reproducible behind it. The expert who has accumulated real pattern recognition in a specific domain, such as one who can tell a client not just what the options are, but which summary of those options is dangerously incomplete, offers something the machine cannot easily originate. The firms that recognize this early and build the structures to make expert knowledge commercially powerful rather than internally invisible will hold a genuine advantage in the market that is forming.

If you want to hear the full conversation behind this analysis with Karsten, you can find the episode in the podcast section: https://www.leadersinconsulting.com/podcast (https://www.leadersinconsulting.com/podcast)

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