Generative AI (genAI) and agentic AI are driving a reinvention of professional consulting services. The combination of predictive and genAI unlocks the potential to collapse the entire innovation lifecycle in a semiautomated fashion. Consulting service providers are investing in advanced, AI-powered innovation management suites and innovation leaders need to pay attention to the following market dynamics: 

  • Integrating genAI and agentic AI into the entire innovation lifecycle. While predictive AI has been well-established through trend identification and pattern recognition, the addition of genAI has quickly proven its value — especially in areas of creative design. The resulting promise of instant market signal identification and on-the-fly product design is highly attractive for data-driven and fast-paced innovation. As a result, providers emphasize and invest in AI-native operating models, AI-powered research, synthetic testing, digital twins, and the automation of ideation and prototyping.
  • Moving from experimentation to acceleration at scale. Where there’s new technology, there’s also implementation challenges. Across domains and use cases, organizations report multiple barriers to genAI adoption, and innovation management is no exception. Enterprises continue to struggle with moving from experimentation to execution, often due to organizational inertia, a lack of strategic alignment, and capability gaps in areas like data readiness and AI governance.
  • Emerging autonomous innovation platforms. The promise of a largely autonomous innovation engine that never sleeps has been unlocked with genAI. Several service providers are targeting the creation of AI-orchestrated systems that collapse the traditional boundaries between strategy, R&D, and execution. Such systems could drive research, design products and test them with a panel of synthetic users, and redesign how innovation happens, moving toward self-learning and adaptive growth engines. 

Innovation Consulting Offerings Differ By Innovation Types

While its impact is already visible, genAI is evolving rapidly and will continue to define the evolution and growth of innovation consulting services. Forrester expects that within the next three to five years: 

  • Incremental innovation will be largely automated with AI. As the market moves beyond AI experimentation to AI-native operating models — where intelligent systems are embedded across the innovation lifecycle — we expect incremental innovation in fast-paced verticals like consumer packaged goods, fashion, beauty, and entertainment to become largely automated. GenAI, agentic AI, and autonomous innovation platforms will reshape ideation, design, and scaling, making incremental innovation faster, more predictive, and more adaptive. As with most emerging tech, people and organizational change management will be the main limiting factor for this trend.
  • Adjacent innovation will be AI-informed. Expanding existing capabilities into related markets will become largely informed by AI. With its ability to process vast amounts of data and derive informed scenarios for business expansion, genAI will play an important role in identifying potential areas for adjacent growth for ambitious organizations. Innovation management suites will serve as critical tools for identifying key differentiating capabilities within organizations, suggesting new markets in which those capabilities are valuable and assessing the feasibility of market entry and commercialization.
  • Human creativity will remain the key source of disruptive innovation. Being probabilistic in nature, genAI works extremely well when iterating based on an existing canon of information in a respective domain. For most cases of market disruption, there’s no precedent. While AI will play an important role in testing assumptions and accelerating implementation, entrepreneurial vision, human creativity, risk appetite, trust, and storytelling will remain differentiating capabilities for disruptive innovation. 

Learn How To Prepare For Your AI-Enabled Innovation Journey

The evolution from the traditional innovation funnel to AI-powered and agent-orchestrated innovation lifecycles requires innovation leaders to rethink their processes, ecosystems, and partner strategies. To dive deeper, read our recently published Innovation Consulting Services Landscape and connect with me to discuss how to drive innovation with AI in your organization.