Traditional consulting engagements often come with long procurement cycles and rigid team structures that fail to adapt as an enterprise project evolves. For Fortune 1000 and private equity leaders, waiting months to deploy a multi-tiered team from a legacy firm can stall critical operational momentum. Pat Petitti’s work at Catalant focuses on providing an alternative model he calls "Consulting 2.0." Born at Harvard Business School, the platform connects enterprises directly with a network of over 70,000 independent consultants and boutique firms, allowing companies to quickly bring in specialized talent exactly when a project requires it.

As Co-Founder and CEO, Petitti has spent over a decade changing how major corporations execute their most critical transformation and operational mandates. An alumnus of MIT and former consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton and Vantage Partners, his approach bridges the gap between deep corporate problem-solving and the speed of the modern independent workforce. In this conversation with The Consulting Report, Petitti discusses why traditional partner-to-analyst handoffs no longer work for fast-moving businesses, how private equity operating partners use independent networks to drive value on compressed timelines, and why the rise of AI makes senior human judgment more critical than ever. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Consulting Report: How does Catalant’s model meet the needs of both enterprise and private equity clients?

Pat Petitti: We built Catalant to serve the problems that matter most to our clients, who are either Fortune 1000 enterprises or private equity firms and their portfolio companies. 

Roughly half our business is with enterprises and half is with portfolio companies of private equity firms. Enterprise clients love our ability to start small, stay flexible, and bring in people who have solved their problem before. While they’ve always struggled with the implementation challenges of large firms, the veneer and protection of going with a big brand name has disappeared in the past several years, and our clients are now turning to us as the best alternative to the old, broken model.

On the private equity side, operating partners were among the earliest to recognize that the traditional consulting model doesn't work for PE. The timelines are too compressed, the stakes too high, and the need for senior-level judgment too immediate. They need experts who can drop in, get oriented fast, and drive value on a defined timeline. That's exactly what we're built for. We have deep relationships with many leaders across the operating partner community, and that partnership has become a core part of who we are.

Across both enterprise and PE, we've built seven Centers of Excellence: Operations, Digital & AI, Sales & Marketing, Transformation & Value Creation, M&A/Integration & Separation, Strategy & Finance, and Organization & People. Each represents a concentrated community of experts who have run these plays before at the highest levels.

Right now two areas are dominating the conversation: supply chain and procurement resilience, and AI integration. Not AI strategy decks, but actual AI transformation, whether that's function-level embedding or full organizational rewiring, not simply a productivity level but always tied to ROI and in support of the organizational strategy. That's where the demand is, and that's where our expert community is deepest.

“We built Catalant because today's leaders need something fundamentally different: direct access to people who have actually solved the problem they're staring down.”

The Consulting Report: What makes Catalant’s model different from the legacy consulting model?

Pat Petitti: The legacy consulting model is broken. It was built for a world that no longer exists: one where clients had months to wait, where a partner sold the work and then handed it off to a team of junior analysts, and where the sheer volume of slides somehow justified the invoice. That world is gone.

We built Catalant because today's leaders need something fundamentally different: direct access to people who have actually solved the problem they're staring down. No pyramid. No hand-offs. No billing for on-the-job training. Just the right experts, at the right moment, doing the work.

More than a third of our consultants are alumni of MBB and the Big 4 who reached engagement manager or partner level. They know better than anyone what's wrong with the legacy model, and they chose something different. The other two-thirds are former senior operators, mostly from the Fortune 500 and private equity-backed companies, who bring a kind of ground-level judgment that no consulting firm can replicate. Our consultants average 20-plus years of experience. They've seen the movie. They know how it ends.

The result is what we call Consulting 2.0—purpose-fit, fast, flexible, and a fair value. Companies stop planning and start solving. That's the point.

“AI can produce a compelling strategy document in minutes. What it cannot do is look across your organization, understand your culture, read the political dynamics in the room, and tell you whether that strategy is actually executable.”

The Consulting Report: What kind of culture has Catalant built around its Consulting 2.0 model?

Pat Petitti: We're a company of insiders who got tired of the inside. That creates a very specific kind of energy, the kind that comes from genuinely believing the thing you're building is better than what came before, and we have the receipts to prove it.

Our team spans four generations, and we draw from all corners: former MBB partners, tech-first platform builders, Fortune 500 operators, and people who've been reimagining this industry since day one. That breadth could easily produce noise. Instead, it produces conviction. Because despite the different backgrounds, we're all oriented around the same north star—making consulting faster, smarter, and more accountable than it has ever been.

What I'm most proud of is that our clients and consultants feel it immediately. They walk in expecting a corporate process and they get something that feels genuinely alive. We're not managing the status quo. We're replacing it. That energy is hard to fake, and we don't have to.

The Consulting Report: Has the increasing prevalence of AI changed the types of client mandates you are hired for?

Pat Petitti: Absolutely—and in two ways that I think are underappreciated.

The first is that AI is raising the stakes for human judgment. AI can produce a compelling strategy document in minutes. What it cannot do is look across your organization, understand your culture, read the political dynamics in the room, and tell you whether that strategy is actually executable. It can't identify when it's wrong. The hallucination problem isn't just a technical nuisance. In a consulting context, it's dangerous. The value of having a human in the loop who has seen this movie before has never been higher.

The second is that AI is opening up an entirely new category of mandates. We're increasingly being called in not just to help clients use AI, but to help them transform around it—rethinking operating models, restructuring functions, and figuring out where human expertise remains irreplaceable and where it doesn't. These are complex, high-stakes initiatives. They require people who have lived inside large organizations and understand the human side of change.

If anything, the AI era has made the Catalant model more relevant. The last thing you want when you're making a bet-the-company AI decision is an army of generalists running frameworks. You want the person who's done it, knows what kind of change is required, and can help drive the ROI.

“That balance between conviction and humility, between holding a vision and staying genuinely open, is everything in this job.”

The Consulting Report: Is there a book, mentor, or mantra that has influenced how you lead your organization?

Pat Petitti: Kipling's "If" hangs in my office and I read it every day (the block of oak it’s carved into was given to me as a gift by a former employee). It's been a constant for me across every stage of building this company. When we were early and scrappy, when we hit hard stretches, and when things went better than expected.

What strikes me about the poem is how universal it is as a leadership standard. Don't panic when things go wrong. Don't get arrogant when things go right. Hold your conviction even when others are doubting you. Stay clear and focused regardless of the noise outside. That's exactly the kind of steadiness you need to build something that matters.

There's a line that stays with me: "If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too." That balance between conviction and humility, between holding a vision and staying genuinely open, is everything in this job. Catalant is a contrarian business. We're saying the consulting industry is due for a fundamental reset. That’s of course obvious today, but for the first five years of the company we were really the only ones who believed it. To maintain that conviction through the hard moments, you need a compass. That poem serves as mine.