Business Services AI Study 2026 (Simon-Kucher)

Summary

• 90% of Business Services firms are already active with AI or will be within 12 months.§1
• 93% see AI as a growth opportunity and 67% already have a formal AI strategy.§1
• Roughly 18% of respondents qualify as Front Runners, and 44% of them already sell AI-enabled offerings to the market.§2
• 30% of Front Runners use subscription models for AI-enabled offerings, compared with 14% across the broader market.§4
• 86% of AI-active firms now allocate technology costs at least partly at the project level.§5
• Only 16% of firms run fully differentiated project-level allocation, rising to 25% among Front Runners.§5

Key insights

1. AI is improving how work gets delivered faster than firms are adapting how that work gets monetized.§1
2. Front Runners are six times more likely to be very confident about achieving their business growth targets.§2
3. Time & Material pricing is not significantly declining, and value-based pricing has not gained meaningful traction across the broader market.§4
4. Pricing complexity and insufficient sales enablement are the two largest commercial bottlenecks to scaling AI-enabled offerings.§4
5. Most firms have used AI efficiency gains as a margin buffer rather than a pricing lever, which is a structural risk in the medium term.§5
6. Front Runners are experimenting with subscription models, outcome-based pricing and Virtual FTEs to decouple price from human effort.§6