The $11.5B consulting shift, and what it means for a Central Coast business

On 4 May, OpenAI and Anthropic both announced multi-billion-dollar consulting ventures.

OpenAI launched a $10 billion deployment company. Anthropic announced its own services firm, backed by Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and Sequoia. The same week, Anthropic launched Claude for Small Business with 31 pre-built workflows plugged into QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, and Microsoft 365, and rolled out a free training tour across ten US cities. Combined, that is $11.5 billion targeting the consulting industry in a single week.

The two most valuable AI companies in the world just spent $11.5 billion agreeing that you cannot deploy AI without humans embedded in the business. The technology is not the bottleneck. The deployment is.

The value gap

This is the thing I have been turning over in my head all year.

95% of generative AI pilots fail to deliver measurable value. That came out of an MIT study in mid-2025, looking at enterprise AI pilots across the US. Nineteen out of twenty pilots, no measurable return.

88% of organisations are using AI. Only 6% are capturing meaningful value from it. That came out of McKinsey's State of AI 2025, surveying almost 2,000 organisations across more than 100 countries.

Eighty-eight percent in. Six percent out.

More recent research has confirmed the pattern. Writer published their 2026 AI Adoption in the Enterprise survey in April. 2,400 knowledge workers, 1,200 C-suite executives, across the US, UK, Ireland, Benelux, France and Germany. 79% of executives now report struggling with AI adoption, up from 60% the year before. A double-digit increase in a single year.

Adoption is near-universal. Value capture is rare. These numbers are wild.

So what is going wrong, and what can we do to fix it?

Three things have to be aligned

If we look at how AI adoption succeeds when it succeeds, this is what we know.

Three things have to be aligned for AI to deliver value.

Domain expertise. The knowledge of your industry. How your business runs. What the regulations require. What the operational rhythm of a season looks like for a plumber in winter, an accountant in October, a vet across kennel-cough season.

Human adoption. How your team actually works in practice. The trust your staff need in a tool before they will rely on it. The accountability your customers expect. The policy that gets followed, not the one that sits in a folder nobody opens.

Technology. The models, the platforms, the integrations, the audit and governance layer.

When all three come together, AI adoption succeeds. When one is missing, here is what happens.

If you have domain expertise and human adoption, but no technology, you get invisible adoption. People use ChatGPT on their own phones with no structure, no governance, no organisational benefit. This is most small businesses on the Coast right now.

If you have domain expertise and technology, but no human adoption, you get built but unused. The tool gets bought. The subscription gets paid every month. Nobody uses it.

If you have human adoption and technology, but no domain expertise, you get the wrong problem solved. Generic AI applied to a specific operation. The wrong solution provided. This is what happens when a vendor leads.

Pre-built is the floor. Local-fit is the ceiling.

Pre-built workflows like Anthropic's Claude for Small Business are useful. What they cannot do is understand the rhythm of a Coast trade business in school holidays, the way an Erina accountant handles BAS season, or how a Gosford clinic juggles intake. Pre-built is the floor. Locally-fitted is the ceiling. The work we do via the Blueprint and Blueprint Execution sits between those two.

Most Central Coast business owners already have a head start on two of the three. You understand your business deeply. You know how to bring your team along through change because you have done it through every other tool that came before.

What is missing is the integration piece. Taking what you know about your operation and translating it into how AI gets deployed inside it. That is the bridge most local businesses have not yet built. Vendors do not have your operational knowledge. Your team does not yet have the AI knowledge. The integration sits in the middle, and that is the work.

This is where I think the 95% figure comes from. Pilots fail when domain knowledge and AI capability never meet.

What this means for a Coast business this quarter

The $10 billion the labs are spending tells you where they think the value sits. Not in better models. In getting those models into businesses correctly. If you are a small business owner watching this from Woy Woy, here is what it actually means.

The gap is widening faster than it looks from the outside. Businesses that have put one or two AI workflows into their operation are pulling ahead of those that have not. Not by orders of magnitude. By small compounding increments, week after week.

The first move is small. One workflow. One quick win. Not a strategy document, not a digital transformation. The right first project is usually the most repetitive, lowest-stakes task in your week. Customer enquiry triage. Quote drafting. Invoice chasing. Booking confirmations.

It is worth making the move this quarter, not next year. Twelve months from now, the customers asking AI assistants for recommendations on the Coast will be a meaningful slice of your enquiry pipeline. The businesses that have done the work, both on AEO and on internal AI, will be the ones surfaced and the ones operating with margin to spare.

Where to start

The first conversation I have with most Coast business owners is the same. We sit down, walk through a week in the business, and find the one task that is repetitive enough to be worth automating and low-stakes enough to be safe to start with. That is what the Find your AI quick wins email goes to. No pitch, no charge for the first conversation. Just one good place to start.