{"id":6929,"date":"2026-07-28T10:53:47","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T14:53:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/2026\/07\/ai-finance\/crosscountry-consultings-new-co-ceos-say-billable-hour-is-waning\/"},"modified":"2026-07-28T10:53:47","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T14:53:47","slug":"crosscountry-consultings-new-co-ceos-say-billable-hour-is-waning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/2026\/07\/ai-finance\/crosscountry-consultings-new-co-ceos-say-billable-hour-is-waning\/","title":{"rendered":"CrossCountry Consulting\u2019s new co-CEOs say billable hour is \u2018waning\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Share with your CFO<\/h2>\n

CrossCountry Consulting’s newly appointed co-CEOs Amy Bjarnason and Neil Smith<\/a> are betting that the billable hour is structurally finished as AI compresses the time consultants spend on research, analysis, and presentation work. The firm is actively shifting toward fixed-fee and outcome-based pricing, where fees tie to agreed business results rather than hours logged. On talent, CrossCountry has abandoned the up-or-out promotion model in favor of multi-track careers that reward cross-functional fluency over narrow domain depth, as AI absorbs more of the structured analytical work juniors once owned.<\/p>\n

What this means for your business<\/h2>\n

CFOs who buy consulting services stand on both sides of this shift at once. You’re the buyer who benefits when a firm puts skin in the game on a finance transformation or ERP rollout, and you’re the finance leader whose own function is the subject of that transformation. The firms moving fastest toward outcome-based pricing are, almost by definition, the ones confident enough in their AI-assisted delivery to accept the accountability. That confidence gap between firms willing to take a success fee and those still defending time-and-materials is probably the most useful signal available when evaluating consulting proposals right now.<\/p>\n

The talent restructuring CrossCountry describes has a direct cost implication for consulting buyers. The old billable-hour model was partially self-correcting because junior staff doing commodity research were cheap to deploy. As AI handles that layer, the consultant mix on any given engagement shifts toward senior, cross-functional professionals who cost more per hour and carry higher fixed-fee floor prices. Outcome-based pricing softens that sticker shock if the results materialize, but it also means scope definition becomes a genuine negotiation, not a formality. Finance leaders who arrive at that conversation without a clear, measurable definition of success will hand pricing leverage to the firm.<\/p>\n

The framing from CrossCountry’s leadership, plausible though it is, comes from a PE-backed mid-market firm with an incentive to position outcome pricing as a virtue rather than acknowledge it’s also a hedge against clients who will eventually demand AI-driven discounts, as KPMG’s audit clients already have. If outcome-based contracts become standard, the firms that win are those whose delivery models are tight enough to protect margin at fixed prices. Firms that can’t will find “shared accountability” is a slogan that cuts both ways. Watch whether CrossCountry discloses what percentage of revenue is actually booked under outcome arrangements, not just time-and-materials, within the next two years.<\/p>\n

Based on reporting from CrossCountry Consulting\u2019s new co-CEOs say billable hour is \u2018waning\u2019<\/a>, originally published 2026-07-28 10:00:00.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Share with your CFO CrossCountry Consulting’s newly appointed co-CEOs Amy Bjarnason and Neil Smith are betting that the billable hour is structurally finished as AI compresses the time consultants spend on research, analysis, and presentation work. The firm is actively shifting toward fixed-fee and outcome-based pricing, where fees tie to agreed business results rather than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6930,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[150],"tags":[190],"tmauthors":[],"class_list":["post-6929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai-finance","tag-cfo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6929\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6929"},{"taxonomy":"tmauthors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tmauthors?post=6929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}