AI Consulting Tops Partner Revenue Charts as SaaS Fatigue Sets In Across the Channel

The data landed quietly on Tuesday, but the message is loud enough to rattle any consulting partner whose growth plan still runs through SaaS licence renewals. Futurum Research's 2H 2026 Ecosystems, Channels and Marketplaces Partner Survey, 400 respondents with fieldwork completed August 2026, confirms that AI, cloud and cybersecurity remain the three primary revenue engines for the partner community. What has shifted is the composition of that engine room.

AI consulting now sits at the summit of services partners actually sell. Infrastructure hardware is surging back as a category after years of being dismissed as low-margin commodity work. And software partners are feeling, in Futurum's own language, "increasingly weary" about the outlook, with enterprise application reselling taking the steepest decline in growth expectations of any category surveyed.

Why SaaS Is Losing the Room

Four forces are converging to make software selling harder. Rising AI token costs are eroding the economics of SaaS products that embed generative AI functionality. Hardware price inflation is squeezing implementation budgets. Cloud marketplace disintermediation, where hyperscalers sell direct through their own procurement ledgers, is cutting partners out of deals they previously owned. And AI-assisted custom application development is giving clients a credible alternative to buying packaged software at all.

That last point deserves more attention than it typically gets. Futurum's 1H 2026 Enterprise Software Decision Maker Survey of 830 executives found that 38% said SaaS vendors were missing the mark on competency, specific needs, implementation timeframes and pricing terms. Only 14.2% of respondents reported ROI exceeding expectations on recent software purchases, against 29.7% who said ROI fell below expectations. That gap between vendor promise and delivery outcome is the opening through which services firms are walking.

For consulting practices registered under SIC 70.22 (management consultancy activities, with over 292,000 UK companies on the register) this is both threat and opportunity, depending on how fast the pivot is made.

The Infrastructure Rebound and What It Means for Consulting

The return of infrastructure as a growth driver is historically significant. During the SaaS era, hardware and on-premise work was treated as legacy territory best avoided. That consensus is unwinding, partly because agentic AI systems require serious compute, and partly because enterprise clients have discovered that cloud-only architectures carry their own cost and latency problems.

For UK consulting firms, the practical implication is a need to rebuild infrastructure competency that was allowed to atrophy. Firms that exited on-premise delivery five years ago now face a skills gap at exactly the moment clients are willing to pay to close it. The MCA has projected sector growth of 5.7% for 2026 and 7.4% for 2027, driven primarily by AI strategy, implementation and governance mandates: numbers that assume firms can actually staff and deliver what clients are buying.

Deloitte has upskilled over 25,000 professionals in AI-focused learning programmes. KPMG has made AI use mandatory for all staff. The Big Four and top strategy houses have collectively invested over $10 billion in AI since 2023. Smaller and mid-market practices are watching those investments and asking whether they can compete on implementation depth rather than brand.

The Services-First Partner

Futurum's survey explicitly flags that services remain "a resilient growth safe-haven", suggesting a future in which the channel ecosystem is defined more by what partners do than what they resell. Custom application development was the second-highest growth category after AI consulting. Both are high-touch, high-margin, and much harder for hyperscalers to commoditise than a SaaS licence.

This aligns with what ONS data shows happening at the demand side. Among UK businesses with 10 or more employees, AI adoption climbed from around 12% in late 2023 to around 35% by June 2026, a 23-point rise in under three years. For firms with 250 or more employees, the adoption rate is 49%. Large language models for text generation, used by 17% of businesses, are the most common deployed technology, followed by visual content creation at 14%.

Around 36% of UK workers now report using AI, placing the UK ahead of France, Germany and Italy within Europe, though still behind the US, where 43% of workers reported generative AI use for their jobs in early 2026, per Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis research. The volume of demand is not in question. The question is who captures the advisory and implementation spend that follows.

The Brand Problem in Class 45

There is a related signal in the intellectual property data. According to AIBD analysis of IPO trademark data, UK Class 45 filings, covering legal and personal services and the class most directly associated with professional advisory and compliance work, reached just 1,211 in 2026 Q3: a fall of 23.9% against the prior period. That is a meaningful contraction in new brand registrations across the professional services category at exactly the moment when differentiation ought to be a strategic priority.

One plausible reading: firms are deferring brand investment while they work out which proposition actually sticks in an AI-reshaped market. A less charitable reading is that the segment is consolidating faster than new entrants can replace departing ones. Either way, the trademark data is a useful leading indicator of confidence. Right now it points downward.

The Uncomfortable Arithmetic

For consulting practices still deriving meaningful revenue from SaaS resale margins and software implementation fees tied to packaged products, the Futurum numbers are a utilisation problem waiting to happen. If enterprise application work contracts and the skills required for AI consulting and infrastructure delivery are not yet in the talent base, billable hours fall before new revenue replaces them.

The firms best positioned are those that treated services as the core offering all along and technology as the delivery vehicle, not the other way around. That is a structural advantage, not a tactical one. It cannot be replicated in a single hiring cycle.