The Consulting Obelisk

For seventy years the consulting business model was a shape: the pyramid. A few partners sold; many juniors produced. The client paid for the whole shape — the research hours, the slide hours, the leverage. It worked because analysis was scarce and producing it required people.

That scarcity has ended. The document review, the market scan, the first-draft deck — the base of the pyramid is exactly what AI agents now do, faster and without overtime. The incumbents know it: the largest firms are cutting thousands of the junior roles their model was built on, and at least one has publicly abandoned the billable hour. This is not a downturn. It is a geometry change.

From pyramid to obelisk

What replaces the pyramid is taller and narrower: a small senior core — judgment, relationships, accountability — operating a fleet of agents that do the production. Call it the obelisk. It has no junior base to defend, no leverage ratio to protect, and no incentive to bill slowly.

The economics are uncomfortable for incumbents precisely because they are attractive for clients. When production cost approaches zero, you can price the outcome instead of the effort. You can publish your prices. You can take on the mid-market clients — the clinic, the exporter, the county program — that pyramid economics priced out.

The pyramid's revenue depended on the inefficiency the technology removes. The obelisk's revenue depends on the outcome the technology delivers.

What an obelisk firm must prove

Strip away the leverage model and three things remain that clients still rightly pay for. First, deployed systems rather than recommendations — advice you can't operate is decoration. Second, verification: agent output at scale needs adversarial review built into the pipeline, not appended as QA theater. Third, accountability — a named human who answers for what ships, especially where law and reputation are at stake.

This is why we run everything we sell on ourselves first. Our newsroom publishes daily without staff; our marketing stack ships real client sites under real advertising law; our satellite pipeline writes real field reports. The practice is the proof, and the proof is inspectable.

Where the obelisk wins first

Not at the Fortune 100, where incumbents will defend governance-heavy transformation for years. The obelisk wins first in the markets the pyramid never reached: Chinese-speaking mid-market firms, Southeast Asian SMEs, African exporters, public programs with implementation budgets but no implementation partner sized for them. These clients don't need a smaller pyramid. They need a different shape.

Seges is our attempt at that shape — built in the open, priced in the open, and operated by the same agents we deploy. Intelligence, harvested.