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CEO / Insourcing

What if a good supplier helps you need less of them?

A supplier’s value can include the capability that remains after they leave.

One thing to try ↓

TIP’s approach to capability transfer

TIP encourages customers to build the capability to use and scale the approach themselves. The aim is for your people to frame problems, challenge assumptions, check evidence and improve work without needing TIP in every conversation.

The assumption worth revisiting.

That is a useful test of your own sourcing—and your own offer. Some services create dependence on repeated production; others make the customer more capable. AI can change the balance and the reasons a customer will continue to pay.

What should we be able to do independently after this relationship has worked?

Give the capacity a purpose.

Choose where the organisation should own repeatable capability and where outside experience continues to add something distinctive. Include learning and handover in the work you buy.

How this fits the capacity allocation →

Use AI to challenge your first interpretation

Help me explore this question: What should we be able to do independently after this relationship has worked? Identify the assumptions in our current approach. Offer alternative explanations, including one that challenges our preferred answer. Separate hypotheses from evidence and suggest what we should ask the people affected.

Treat the answers as possibilities to test with people and evidence.

Go deeper into the evidence.

UK Government Commercial Agency / Government Commercial Function · Official decision framework

The framework compares internal, purchased and mixed delivery using whole-life costs, capability, risks and outcomes.

Public-sector guidance, not evidence that insourcing saves money or a general legal requirement for private companies. Applying the method here is TIP’s interpretation.

Klarna Group plc · Company annual filing; company-reported attribution

Klarna reports a $7m Q1 2024 reduction in external marketing-supplier spending versus Q1 2023 and attributes 37% of that decrease to AI. Named services include translation, production, CRM and social agencies. The filing also describes workforce reduction alongside AI efficiency, cost optimisation and normal-course employee attrition.

Management attribution, not an experiment. Supplier reduction is not proof every service moved in-house. The filing does not establish that every leaver went unreplaced, that there were no layoffs, or that all workforce changes were caused by AI.

podcast

Agentic AI and the future of global business services

McKinsey · McKinsey Talks Operations

A useful prompt to reconsider the boundary of shared services: which decisions and activities could move closer to internal operating knowledge?

Listen or watch for: Would moving more work inside improve the complete process, or simply move a bottleneck?

About this resource

Consultancy examples and forecasts. The episode does not establish that insourcing is always cheaper or that predicted headcount reductions will occur.

Turn the question around.

Your customer’s insourcing opportunity could change your own business model. Explore which part of your offer they could own, and the value they would still want from you.

Explore the commercial risk →
How TIP applies this to itself →

Connect the capacity choices · Insourcing → Cross-functional growth

Where could this question lead?

If customers can own more of the work, explore the outcomes for which they will still value a partnership.

What customer outcome is nobody able to own alone? →

Follow the connection

Who else needs to think about this?

A useful next step

Take the question into STRATEGIC.

Start with the action above. If it reveals a decision worth exploring further, the existing pathway gives you a place to work on it.

Bring the implications into STRATEGIC. Explore what they change about customer value, business priorities and the capacity choices the leadership team needs to make together.