From Billable Hours to Billions of Parameters: Why I’m Disrupting My Own Consulting Firm

“Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” – Dr. Seuss

In the boutique consulting world, you hire the best minds, wrap them in a methodology, and sell their time as the delivery vehicle for specialized knowledge. At SureStep, we spent 15 years doing exactly that—providing high-level GRC and technical expertise to companies around the world.

It worked. We built a good business.

About a year ago AI chatter was become difficult to ignore. Lay offs of white-collar jobs were, and still are, showing up in the news daily. Many of those jobs taken over by AI or automation functions.  And the revelations that McKinsey was the biggest ChatGPT user in the world, and that PWC were selling ChatGPT output without a hint of shame were raising eyebrows.  The consulting business was going to change. My business which had been pretty solid (with some ups and downs as I’ve relayed to you in these blogs previously) was facing an existential moment. How to survive in the AI world where information is everywhere?  Well, you turn that information into knowledge – easy enough, right? That’s the core value a boutique sells. But how do you compete and scale against firms using AI? As Greg has stated many times, if you can’t scale you need to re-examine your business model. AI was presenting an opportunity to do that.

The Aha Moment in a Hockey Rink

My path to becoming an AI-first founder didn’t start in a boardroom. It started with a side project called SportsOwl. Full disclosure – I worked at Adobe for years in software development and in enterprise systems for many more. I think it’s fair to say I have leg up on the ‘vibecoding bruhs’ of Instagram. That does not mean they’re wrong though….

I wanted to build an AI platform for hockey analytics—driven partly by my kids’ AAA schedules and partly by a personal obsession with the sport. It was supposed to be a fun distraction. But while building the architecture, something clicked. I could see just how quickly I was building software that previously would have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars to an outsourced company to make. And then I made the ‘mistake’ of looking at SureStep through that lens.

The realization hit hard: knowledge is the value. The human is just the medium.

What could I build with my company’s experience and knowledge without the costs and time associated with making software (more on that later…)? If I could move our GRC expertise into an AI delivery mechanism, I could provide better, more consistent results at a speed and scale that no boutique firm—including my own—could ever match with humans alone.

This Isn’t About “AI Productivity”

I want to be clear: this wasn’t about buying a few ChatGPT licenses and calling it innovation.

Most firms think “AI-first” means using an LLM to write better emails or summarize spreadsheets. That’s just a faster typewriter. And to be clear, that has enormous value in the workplace. What we’re building SureStep is fundamentally different.

We’re not using AI to help our consultants work faster. We’re building AI consultants.

When I look at our latest product – Onyx GRC, I’m not looking at a software interface. I’m looking at Pantheon—specialized, agentic entities designed to navigate the labyrinth of regulatory frameworks with a precision that a human simply can’t maintain over a 60-hour work week. These agents don’t just analyze. They consult. They provide tireless, deep-dive governance that helps our customers stay more secure and more compliant than a human-led team ever could.

The Governance Wall

The transition wasn’t seamless. SureStep operates in highly regulated banking environments with strict SOC 2 constraints. We couldn’t just spin up environments and tinker to our hearts’ content.

So, I founded Onyx AI Labs as a clean room—a dedicated space to build and experiment. Our very own innovation hub. It let us move from the abstract possibility of AI to the concrete delivery of AI, without putting our core business at risk.

The New Reality

This journey has fundamentally changed how I think about the business. We stopped asking “how many consultants do we need for this project?” and started asking “what kind of agent can solve this problem permanently?”

The billable hour isn’t dead yet. But it’s dying and we have other ways to monetize our knowledge now. I’m no longer running a boutique consulting firm that uses AI. I’m running an AI-first company that happens to have deep consulting roots.

In the world of GRC—and I suspect in yours too—the delivery mechanism of the future is silicon, maybe a silicon/carbon hybrid, but certainly not just carbon.

The question is: are you going to build it, or wait for someone else to build it for you?

Next, I’ll fill you in on some of the good, bad, and ugly initial steps and hopefully help you avoid some of the more egregious mistakes I did. Happily taking the lumps for the C54 Team – Mike

This is the first in a series about our transition to an AI-first company. Next up: how we built the R&D lab and where we learned that AIs are every bit as annoying to manage as humans…

1. Michael Gibbs is the Founder of SureStep and Onyx AI Labs. He can be reached at mike@onyxailabs.com or mgibbs@surestepsi.com.