Slalom is repositioning its consulting model around a simple premise: AI transformation has outgrown the pilot phase, and the bottleneck is now organizational, not technical. Speaking at Google Cloud Next, Slalom’s Daniel Prager and Sean Everhart described how the firm now arrives at client engagements with working prototypes instead of slide decks, fields cross-functional teams rebuilt around agentic platforms, and points to a manufacturer warranty-claims pilot that generated nearly $1 million in savings from just 1% of workflow volume as the kind of measurable business impact<\/a> C-suites are now demanding.<\/p>\n The companies most exposed here are those still running AI as a portfolio of disconnected pilots with no clear owner above the VP level. Slalom’s framing, that governance, talent, and org structure are the actual rate limiters, rings true precisely because those three things sit above the CIO’s unilateral control. If your transformation program hasn’t yet generated a number your CFO will recognize, the issue probably isn’t the model or the cloud vendor. It’s who’s accountable for connecting the two.<\/p>\n The legacy modernization claim deserves a harder look. Everhart’s “three months to four hours” figure for COBOL codebase analysis is striking, and the underlying capability is real: AI-assisted code inspection has genuinely compressed discovery timelines. But compressing discovery is not the same as compressing delivery. The organizations that will confuse the two are the ones that greenlight full modernization programs on the strength of an impressive prototype, then find that the hard part, data migration, integration testing, change management, didn’t get faster at all. The acceleration is real and lopsided, which makes it more dangerous to misread, not less.<\/p>\n Worth noting: this segment was sponsored by Slalom, which means the “services partner as the missing link” argument is the thesis of a firm that sells services partnerships. That incentive doesn’t make the argument wrong, but it does explain why governance and talent gaps, problems that require a consultant to fix, get more airtime than vendor tooling or in-house capability building. The CIO reading this should weigh whether their org’s friction is genuinely structural or whether it’s a prioritization call they can make without a new engagement.<\/p>\n The leading indicator to watch is whether Slalom’s “ideas backlog” framing catches on inside your own C-suite. If your CEO is already asking why execution can’t keep up with ideas, the conversation has shifted from “should we invest in AI” to “who owns the execution engine,” and that’s a different budget and org design problem than most IT shops are currently set up to answer.<\/p>\nWhat this means for your business<\/h2>\n