McKinsey just cut roughly 4,000 people. Its largest reduction since the 2008 financial crisis.
It’s not a signal that consulting is shrinking. It’s a signal that the model itself stopped working.
For decades, the math was simple. Ten to fifteen junior associates for every partner. Those associates billed clients $200 to $400 an hour and earned $50 to $80. That spread, multiplied across thousands of engagements, was the business.
AI just closed that spread. McKinsey’s internal tool cuts research time by 30%. Deloitte’s Zora AI platform does information processing that used to take junior teams weeks. BCG’s Deckster builds full decks in minutes.
Deloitte didn’t just cut jobs. It scrapped the analyst-to-manager title system for all 181,500 of its U.S. employees. The career ladder that defined the industry for fifty years doesn’t exist anymore.
Here’s the deeper shift. Consulting made money on an information gap. Clients paid for research and analysis they couldn’t do themselves. That gap is closing fast, and it’s forcing every firm, and every leader who buys their services, to ask what’s actually being paid for.
The answer is judgment, not analysis. And judgment shows up in specific places.
It shows up in organizational change leadership, getting people inside a real organization to adopt a new way of working. It shows up in AI governance, deciding which decisions AI owns and who’s accountable when it’s wrong. It shows up in executive alignment, getting senior leaders who disagree on the problem to actually reach consensus.
It shows up in program leadership, owning a transformation end to end instead of a slice of it. It shows up in M&A integration, the human and cultural work no financial model predicts. It shows up in crisis and reputation management, where judgment built from prior experience matters more than any framework.
It shows up in culture diagnosis, spotting the informal dynamics quietly blocking a strategy the board already approved. It shows up in innovation management, having the conviction to bet when the data is incomplete. It shows up in regulatory strategy, knowing how a specific regulator actually behaves because you’ve sat across from them before.
And it shows up in leadership development, building judgment and resilience in people through direct coaching, not a course.
None of that gets replaced by a tool. All of it gets more valuable.
This Week
What exactly are you paying for?
Ask that about the last consulting engagement your organization ran. Was the deliverable something your team could have produced with the right AI tool? I’d genuinely like to hear what you find.
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