The contract data just flipped: being the incumbent is now the disadvantage.

New work is up about 20 percent while renewals fell about 24 percent. Buyers are redesigning the operating model, not re-signing the vendor.

Start with the number, because it reverses a rule the industry has treated as permanent. In the first quarter of 2026, brand-new work put out to market reached about 8 billion dollars, up roughly 20 percent from a year earlier. Renewals and extensions, the contracts a firm already holds, came in around 3.2 billion dollars, down about 24 percent. ISG's Stanton Jones, who tracks these contract flows for a living, drew the blunt conclusion: in this market, being the incumbent has become a disadvantage.

This is not a story about one firm losing to a better pitch. Enterprises are not switching vendors so much as refusing to re-sign. Instead of renewing the contract they already hold, they are taking the work back out to the open market and redesigning how the function runs. Jones's read is that buyers want their providers to lead on AI, and many will happily rebuild their processes to get a better result, but most are not yet ready to govern the operating model that comes with handing agents the work. The willingness is ahead of the readiness, and that gap is exactly where the renewal revenue is leaking.

The old advantages have not disappeared, they have stopped converting. An incumbent still holds the relationships, the account knowledge, and the board access, and when it does win it can still roll adjacent work into a single deal that runs five, seven, even ten years. But the renewal line is down roughly a quarter. Tenure used to be the safest revenue a firm carried. In the current data it is the softest.

Jones expects the pattern to hold through the rest of 2026 as providers compete hard for wallet share in a market growing only in the low single digits. Read plainly, the money is moving toward firms that can answer the harder question the redesign raises: once the client rebuilds the operating model, who is accountable for the agents running inside it. The firms still leaning on the renewal are competing for the line that is shrinking.