Why McKinsey moving to performance fees validates everything we said.

McKinsey announced a shift toward performance-based fees in late 2025. The financial press treated this as a strategic innovation. It is not. It is an admission.

The billable-hour model survives on information asymmetry. Clients do not know how long a piece of work should take. Consultants do. The meter runs. When AI removes that asymmetry (when a client's CTO can see that a task the senior partner billed 40 hours for took a Weaver AI agent 90 minutes), the model collapses.

McKinsey sees this coming. Their move to performance fees is not generosity. It is preemption.

For mid-market enterprises, this has one practical implication. The window to negotiate outcome-based pricing from large consultancies is now. They are willing to have a conversation they were not willing to have two years ago. Use it.

But the more important implication is structural. Performance-based fees require measuring performance. That requires defining outcomes before the engagement begins. That requires a financial model. That requires the kind of rigour that Weaver has always built into Phase 1, before a single line of production code is written.

The industry is catching up to what fixed-fee, production-first delivery looks like. We have been here since the beginning.