Needless to say, it depends. 馃檪
I think for enterprise-level initiatives, the push is to hire employees. This because enterprise knowledge graphs aren't set and done once they've been created, and the skills of knowledge engineers, ontologists, taxonomists et al. are going to be required into the future to keep the graph maintained, growing and of growing usefulness. As well, it can take a fair chunk of time to get even an experienced person onboarded with a particular domain, and that doesn't lend itself to contractors.
On the other hand, for PoCs and/or smaller initiatives and/or organizations with very constrained use cased there are situations where a consultant's skills can get an outfit up and running with the required graph, with the enterprise determining at that point whether their needs or met, and if not - or if they want to grow that initial KG, make further forays, etc. - whether or not it's more consultant help they need, or the acquisition of some in-house talent.
