Capgemini: The Global Consultancy Quietly Outsourcing the End of the World
Capgemini: The Quiet Colossus Outsourcing the Apocalypse—One Spreadsheet at a Time
PARIS—While the rest of us were doom-scrolling through 2023’s greatest hits—wildfires, coups, AI-generated pop songs—Capgemini celebrated its 56th birthday by quietly adding another 30,000 humans to its payroll. That’s roughly the population of Liechtenstein, give or take a tax haven. Not bad for a company whose name still sounds like an off-brand antidepressant.
Headquartered in the 16th arrondissement, a neighborhood so bourgeois it apologizes when the champagne runs dry, Capgemini has spent half a century turning management-speak into a multibillion-euro art form. Its 340,000 employees—spread across 50+ countries like existential glitter—now babysit everything from your bank’s creaking mainframe to the app that can’t decide whether your flight is “on time” or “boarding in an alternate dimension.” In 2022 the firm raked in €21 billion, enough to buy every avocado toast in Brooklyn and still have change for a modest yacht.
How did a French outfit founded by an ex-IBM salesman and two old-school engineers become the Switzerland of global IT? Simple: it learned to surf the four horsemen of modern capitalism—cost-cutting, regulatory panic, digital FOMO, and executive vanity. When Europe realized its 1970s COBOL was held together by prayer and nicotine patches, Capgemini offered “digital transformation,” a phrase that sounds uplifting until you realize it means teaching 60-year-old bureaucrats how to right-click. When American banks needed to prove they weren’t laundering money for oligarchs, Capgemini consultants parachuted in with PowerPoint decks thicker than Tolstoy and twice as tragic.
The genius lies in never owning the mess. Like a Michelin-starred caterer at an impending divorce party, Capgemini simply shows up, plates the hors d’oeuvres, and exits before the screaming starts. Indian code, Polish cybersecurity, Brazilian analytics, Canadian politeness—each cog slotted into the planetary gizmo we call “business as usual.” Meanwhile, C-suite executives get to brag about “leveraging synergies” while quietly offloading tomorrow’s blame onto some poor sap three time zones away.
Of course, geopolitics keeps things spicy. Sanctions turn Russian delivery centers into ghost Slack channels overnight; China’s data-localization laws require firms to treat information like radioactive sushi; and Brexit means UK clients now need separate contracts for “the continent” and “that island still arguing with itself.” Capgemini’s response has been to franchise agility: hire where it’s cheap, lobby where it’s expensive, and pray the VPN holds.
Environmentalists like to point out that all those cloud migrations still run on coal-fired electrons somewhere. Capgemini counters with glossy ESG reports pledging net-zero by 2040—roughly the same year the last polar bear signs up for LinkedIn. Still, the firm did launch a “Sustainable IT” practice, presumably to help clients feel less guilty while binge-training yet another large language model to write limericks about supply-chain optimization.
The darker joke is that Capgemini’s real product isn’t software; it’s plausible deniability. When the chatbot starts quoting Mein Kampf in Swahili, no one blames the CEO who green-lit it—blame lands on the vendor, the subcontractor, the intern who pressed “deploy” at 3 a.m. in Pune. It’s the corporate version of Russian nesting dolls, except each doll is pointing at the next one and shrugging.
Yet for all the gallows humor, the company embodies something oddly hopeful about our fractured planet: 340,000 people who can barely agree on lunch somehow keep the lights on for everyone else. They patch the same buggy humanity we all share—just with better slide transitions. And if, as projected, Capgemini hits €25 billion by 2025, it will have proven that the most lucrative commodity in the 21st century isn’t oil or data but organized schizophrenia.
So here’s to the unsung heroes toggling between French bureaucracy and Silicon Valley hallucinations, quietly ensuring that when civilization finally collapses, at least the PowerPoint will autoplay. Santé.
