A couple of years ago, a management consulting firm in the City had sixty-eight active contractors. A year later, thirty-nine. A few months after that, thirty-one. The trajectory points toward fifteen within the next contract cycle.
There is no dramatic layoff story here. That is kind of the point. No restructure was announced. No consultation period, no press coverage, nothing for a journalist to stand outside of. Individual contracts ended and were not renewed, one at a time, each with a polite email. Some contractors were told the project had concluded. Some were told the client had brought the work in-house. The firm’s head of resourcing has a phrase for it, natural attrition in the contractor base, and I would guess they half believe it.
This is what I mean when I say the displacement happens in the background. Everyone is waiting for the big visible event, the factory-gates moment, thousands of people walking out with boxes. And while they wait for that, the actual mechanism is a spreadsheet with a number that goes down every quarter. Contracts that would have been renewed are quietly allowed to lapse. Teams that would have been backfilled are not backfilled. Each individual decision is unremarkable, which means the aggregate never quite becomes news, and so it is genuinely hard to see while it is happening. You have to already be looking.
The contractors themselves can see it, obviously. What happened to one of them when he went back into the market, how many roles he applied for, how many came back, and what the rates looked like when they did, is in Chapter 4. So is the question the spreadsheet raises that nobody at the firm has had to answer yet, because natural attrition is doing all the talking for them. Chapter 4 puts five of these stories side by side, the contractor count being the least personal and, I think, the most quietly alarming of them, because it is the one that scales.
This is from Chapter 4 of The Next Rung, my book on what AI displacement actually looks like from inside. It’s open for pre-order now: