Ankura Bets UK AI Consulting Breaks Down on People, Not Tech
A new London-anchored practice from U.S. advisory firm Ankura targets the organisational gap between AI ambition and actual deployment - arriving just as UK CEO confidence in AI ROI hits a credibility floor.
The Adoption Problem Nobody Wants to Invoice For
Ankura Consulting Group launched its "AI by Design" practice out of London on 30 September 2026, pitching it as a tech-agnostic advisory service for EMEA clients who have bought the AI story but can't make it land inside their own organisations. Consultancy.uk covered the launch on 7 October.
The timing is not incidental. The firm is stepping into a gap that the market has been talking around for a year but billing very little to fix. As Catriona Campbell MBE, practice lead for Ankura AI by Design, put it: "Most enterprise AI stalls because organisations are not ready to adopt it, govern it, or redesign work and systems around it."
That is not a fringe view. It is, at this point, an inconvenient consensus.
What the Numbers Say About Who Is Actually Getting Value
The Management Consultancies Association's 2026 member survey found that 77% of UK consulting firms have integrated AI into their own systems or enabled staff to use AI models. Growth forecasts from the same survey put sector expansion at 5.7% in 2026 and 7.4% in 2027, with AI strategy and implementation cited as the primary driver. That sounds healthy.
But it sits next to a stubborn counter-reading. More than half of CEOs, according to a PwC study cited by Consultancy.uk in January, said they had seen "no benefit" from AI investments. Only 12% reported both cost savings and revenue gains simultaneously. Spend is growing at 26% annually in the global AI consulting market, which Business Research Insights valued at roughly USD $14 billion in 2026 and projects to reach USD $116 billion by 2035. The delta between spend growth and outcome attainment is the structural problem Ankura is pitching against.
Professional and business services as a whole shed 11,000 jobs in September alone in the US, a figure Newsweek attributed partly to AI tools replacing administrative and support roles. The irony: the same sector selling AI transformation is absorbing the displacement it enables.
The Proposition: Three Pillars and an AI Factory
Ankura's new practice is built around three stated pillars: AI strategy aimed at topline growth opportunities for leadership teams, governance and operating model redesign, and workforce transformation. Underpinning all three is what the firm calls an internal "AI Factory": a build-and-test environment designed to move clients from strategy to deployed system rather than stopping at the deck.
The partner ecosystem is deliberate. Decoded handles AI literacy and workforce reskilling. Seymour-Powell brings human-centred design. Inference Group covers AI engineering and delivery. Together they form a supply chain for the non-technical half of AI implementation.
Hywel Ball, former EY UK Chair and now an AI Advisory Council member for the practice, summarised the thesis bluntly: "AI transformation programmes usually break down due to organisational challenges rather than the underlying technology itself."
Dr Laura Gilbert CBE, a senior AI adviser to the UK government and industry, joined the Advisory Council, reinforcing the focus on human and organisational design as the discipline the private sector needs.
Trademark Activity Points to Contracting Education Market
AI by Design's explicit focus on workforce reskilling, via partner Decoded, arrives against a complicated training market backdrop. According to AIBD analysis of IPO trademark data, Class 41 UK filings (covering education, training and instruction services) reached only 763 in Q4 2026, a fall of 91.6% against the prior period. That is a sharp contraction in formal trademark registrations for new training brands, suggesting that whoever wins the corporate reskilling brief in the near term will be an incumbent player extending existing IP rather than a new entrant building from scratch. Ankura and Decoded are positioning accordingly.
The ROI Measurement Problem
There is a sharper version of the CEO dissatisfaction story that consultancies rarely lead with in their own marketing. Revenue and service-delivery impact from AI is currently concentrated below 10%, per Consultancy.uk's analysis of available data published on 7 October. The piece concluded that most AI business cases are measuring the wrong outputs: activity and efficiency metrics rather than revenue or margin expansion.
That is a measurement design failure as much as a technology failure. It also creates a recurring revenue opportunity for the advisory layer, which is presumably not lost on Ankura's partners.
The UK already has 1,159 AI consulting firms tracked by RevenueBase as of August 2026. Boutique firms are taking market share from Big Four incumbents on speed and implementation success rates. The MCA's own data shows AI is simultaneously the sector's largest growth driver and its most cited operational challenge, with 52% of consulting firms flagging higher technology and training costs as the leading pressure point.
Ankura is entering a crowded market with a specific thesis: that organisational readiness, not model selection, is where engagements fail. It brings a named practitioner bench with credibility across government, industry, and the Big Four. Whether that thesis translates into billable hours at scale is the only question that counts.