“Do we need armies of business analysts creating PowerPoints? No, the technology could do that.”
That’s not a prediction from an AI startup founder. That’s Kate Smaje, McKinsey’s global leader of technology and AI, describing what their internal platform Lilli already does. Over 75% of McKinsey’s 40,000 employees now use AI tools that automate the research synthesis, benchmarking, and deck creation that defined junior consultant work for decades.
If you’re a partner, director, or principal at a consulting or advisory firm, this matters more than the headlines about entry-level disruption suggest. The pyramid that built your career – and your compensation structure – just lost its base.
The Warning Signal Sector
Professional services isn’t just another industry facing AI disruption. It’s the canary in the coal mine for every executive whose value proposition involves packaging human thinking.
Consider what’s happened in the past eighteen months. PwC eliminated approximately 3,300 roles between September 2024 and May 2025 – their first major cuts since the 2009 financial crisis. Deloitte UK slashed over 1,200 advisory positions. KPMG cut 330 from audit. Even EY is cutting partners – not just associates, but equity partners.
If the firms that advise other companies on transformation can’t figure out how to transform themselves without mass layoffs, what does that tell you about the advice they’ve been selling?
This isn’t a cyclical downturn. The pandemic-era hiring boom created bloated headcounts, yes. But the reason firms can cut now – and still maintain output – is that AI has made the traditional consulting leverage model obsolete. When Lilli can produce a first-draft strategy deck in minutes that used to take a team of analysts a week, the math changes permanently.
For every executive whose work involves analysis, synthesis, research, or recommendations, professional services is showing you your potential future. The question is whether you’re paying attention.
What’s Actually Being Automated
The conversation about AI in consulting usually stays vague – “AI will automate repetitive tasks” – as if that means filing expenses. The reality is far more specific and far more threatening to senior professionals.
Here’s what McKinsey’s own leadership admits their AI platform now handles: competitive benchmarking, research synthesis across their 100,000+ document knowledge base, proposal drafting, slide creation, and even tone-of-voice editing to match firm style guidelines. Junior analysts who once spent six to ten hours assembling a first-cut deck now answer three or four prompts and receive a draft in minutes.
BCG’s Deckster fine-tunes presentations. Bain’s Sage chatbot powered by OpenAI handles research queries. PwC’s Strategy& unit runs on Microsoft Copilot.
This isn’t fringe experimentation. This is core workflow transformation at every major firm.
The activities being automated aren’t peripheral. They’re the exact work that justified the pyramid structure – legions of associates doing research and analysis, supervised by managers, directed by partners who maintain client relationships. When the bottom two layers shrink, what happens to the economics that supported partner compensation?
The consulting pyramid wasn’t just an organizational structure. It was the business model. Automate the base, and the whole thing needs rebuilding.
The Partner’s Dilemma
If you made partner in the past five years, you probably assumed you’d reached safety. The up-or-out pressure was behind you. Your compensation reflected decades of demonstrated value. Your network was concentrated in one firm and one industry.
Now consider your actual position.
Your value was built on managing the work that’s being automated. You’re exceptional at reviewing analyst output, shaping research into client-ready recommendations, and maintaining the relationships that keep engagements flowing. But if AI handles the first two, and your firm needs fewer partners to maintain the same client relationships, what exactly are you a partner in?
The Leverage Loss trap: Many partners continue managing teams producing AI-replaceable deliverables, believing their “oversight” is the value. But firms are already reducing partner-to-staff ratios. When there’s less to manage, your management value disappears.
The Intellectual Property Illusion: “Our proprietary frameworks and methodologies will protect us.” This made sense when frameworks required human judgment to apply. Now AI applies standard frameworks as competently as junior consultants did – and faster. The moat was never the framework. It was the relationship trust and judgment that came with it.
The Firm Will Protect Me: EY cutting partners should have ended this assumption. Partnership was historically the safe harbor. It no longer is.
The financial complexity compounds everything. Partnership buy-ins, deferred compensation vesting over years, equity stakes you can’t liquidate quickly, lifestyle scaled to partner income. You can’t just pivot tomorrow even if you wanted to.
PURPOSE AUDIT™ for Consulting Professionals
The distinction that matters isn’t “will AI affect consulting” – that’s settled. The distinction is between the tasks you perform and the purpose you serve.
Run through your typical week. What percentage is task execution that AI now handles comparably?
Task (automatable):
- Competitive research and benchmarking
- Data analysis and synthesis
- Framework application to standard problems
- Deck creation and formatting
- Process documentation
- Financial modeling from templates
Purpose (irreducible):
- Client relationship trust built over years
- Judgment on genuinely ambiguous problems
- Navigation of organizational politics
- Accountability for implementation outcomes
- Pattern recognition across contexts AI hasn’t seen
- Permission to deliver uncomfortable truths
Here’s a worked example. A managing director at a mid-size strategy firm spent fifteen years becoming expert at market entry analysis. She could benchmark competitive landscapes, model financial scenarios, and synthesize research into strategic recommendations faster than anyone on her team.
Applying the PURPOSE AUDIT™ for consultants, she discovered that 60% of her week involved task work – the exact activities AI now performs. Her actual purpose – the reason clients paid premium rates for her specifically – was her judgment on which market entry approach fit their organizational culture, her ability to navigate internal politics that would make or break execution, and the trust she’d built that let her deliver hard truths executives needed to hear.
The radiologist parallel applies here. When AI automated scan analysis, demand for radiologists didn’t collapse – it expanded, because faster analysis meant more patients could be served. The radiologists who thrived were those who shifted from “reading scans” to “interpreting what scans mean for this specific patient’s treatment.”
What’s your equivalent shift? If you can’t answer that clearly, you have work to do.
Your PURPOSE AUDIT™ - Pre-Built for Your Role
The Role Transformation Tracker is pre-populated for consulting and advisory leaders – benchmarking, research synthesis, and report production vs. client relationships, transformation leadership, and trust-based advisory. Takes 20 minutes.
Four Paths for Professional Services Leaders
The TRANSITION BRIDGE™ framework identifies four paths. Here’s how each applies to consulting and advisory professionals:
Transform: Become the human layer on AI-generated insights. This means intensifying client relationships, moving upstream to problem definition rather than problem solving, and positioning yourself as the judgment layer that turns AI output into implementation. Best for: partners with strong client portfolios who can evolve their value proposition within their current firm.
Pivot: Adjacent roles that leverage your expertise differently. Chief Strategy Officer roles at corporations value your analytical background without requiring the leverage model. Private equity operating partners need your pattern recognition across companies. Corporate development leaders want your M&A and strategic assessment skills. Best for: professionals with transferable skills and moderate runway who want to stay in strategy work.
Reinvent: Exit professional services entirely for industry roles or entrepreneurship. Your twenty years of seeing how companies actually work gives you operational insight most executives lack. Some former consultants are building AI-native advisory practices that compete with their previous employers. Best for: those with substantial runway and genuine appetite for complete change.
Portfolio: Combine advisory, board work, and fractional roles. Many partners have networks that could support independent practice, supplemented by board positions and interim leadership engagements. Best for: partners within five years of retirement who want to control their transition rather than have it controlled for them.
Which path fits depends on your runway, your identity investment, and your risk tolerance. A partner with unvested deferred compensation and kids in college faces different constraints than one with a paid-off house and eighteen months of savings.
Transform, Pivot, Reinvent, or Portfolio - Which Path Fits?
The TRANSITION BRIDGE™ Assessment evaluates five criteria across 15 questions to recommend your optimal career path. Takes 10-12 minutes. Get a ranked recommendation with confidence scores.
The Uncomfortable Math
The timeline isn’t “someday.” The cuts are happening now.
55% of companies that did AI-driven layoffs now regret it, according to Orgvue’s research. But that regret comes after the damage is done – and it doesn’t mean they’re rehiring the same roles. The over-automation lessons from companies like Klarna show that course corrections often mean different hiring, not reversing previous cuts.
Partner economics make this particularly complex. If you have $400,000 in unvested deferred compensation that vests over three years, walking away costs more than just lost salary. If your partnership stake requires buyout provisions, you may not control your own timeline.
This is why RUNWAY READY™ matters. Calculate your actual financial runway – not your theoretical one. How many months can you maintain current lifestyle without partnership income? What’s the minimum you’d need to transition? How much is locked in golden handcuffs?
The repositioning window is eighteen to twenty-four months for most partners. Not because AI will eliminate your role by then, but because waiting longer means repositioning from a weaker negotiating position. Acting while you’re still employed as a partner is very different from acting after you’ve been part of a reduction.
What Comes Next
Professional services built an empire on one premise: packaging human thinking is valuable. The consulting industry proved that companies would pay premium rates for analysis, synthesis, and recommendations delivered by smart people in nice suits with impressive credentials.
That premise isn’t wrong. But the definition of “packaging human thinking” is shifting. The firms automating research, benchmarking, and deck creation aren’t abandoning the premise – they’re changing what counts as the valuable human contribution.
The partners who thrive through this shift won’t be those who pretend nothing is changing. They’ll be the ones who can articulate their purpose clearly enough that clients – or future employers – understand exactly what they’re getting that AI can’t provide.
If you’re a partner, director, or principal in professional services, you have resources most professionals don’t: analytical skills, strategic frameworks, executive relationships, and financial cushion. The question is whether you’ll use those resources to navigate your own transformation – or wait for someone else to transform you.
The PURPOSE AUDIT™ worksheet takes about twenty minutes. The consulting-specific version starts with the same question McKinsey is asking internally: which parts of your role are task, and which parts are purpose?
Consider working with career transition coaching if you need support navigating what comes next. This is exactly the kind of transformation where having a thinking partner makes the difference between strategic repositioning and reactive scrambling.
Professional services built an industry on packaging human thinking. Now thinking itself is being packaged differently. The question isn’t whether consulting changes – it’s whether you’re leading that change in your own career or reacting to it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's actually happening with AI at the major consulting firms?
McKinsey’s Lilli platform is used by over 75% of their 40,000 employees monthly. BCG, Bain, and all Big Four firms have deployed similar tools. These platforms automate research synthesis, competitive benchmarking, proposal drafting, and slide creation – work that previously required teams of analysts working for days or weeks.
Are partners really at risk, or just junior staff?
Both. EY has announced plans to cut partners – not just associates. The traditional consulting pyramid assumed leverage from junior staff doing research and analysis. When AI handles that work, the economics that supported large partner ranks no longer apply. Title doesn’t guarantee safety.
How do I know if my specific role is vulnerable?
Apply the PURPOSE AUDIT™ framework to your actual work. List what you do in a typical week, then honestly assess: which activities can AI now perform comparably? The gap between your task work and your purpose work reveals your vulnerability – and your opportunity.
What consulting tasks are being automated versus remaining human?
Automated: competitive research, data synthesis, framework application, deck creation, financial modeling from templates. Remaining human: client relationship trust, judgment on ambiguous problems, organizational politics navigation, implementation accountability, and the ability to deliver uncomfortable truths that clients will actually hear.
I have unvested deferred compensation. Does that change my options?
Yes, significantly. Golden handcuffs are real constraints. Use RUNWAY READY™ to calculate what walking away actually costs versus the risk of staying. Sometimes the unvested compensation is worth less than the optionality of moving earlier. Sometimes it’s worth waiting. But make the calculation explicit rather than assuming you’re trapped.
What's the timeline for repositioning?
Eighteen to twenty-four months is the typical window for strategic repositioning. Not because AI will eliminate your role by then, but because acting while employed as a partner gives you negotiating leverage that evaporates after a layoff. Earlier action means more options.
Should I be learning to "prompt better" or taking AI courses?
No. For partners and directors, the competitive advantage isn’t in operating AI tools – that’s a Tuesday skill. The advantage is in the judgment, relationships, and pattern recognition that AI can’t replicate. Focus your development energy on amplifying your purpose, not competing with technology on tasks.
What are the four career paths available to consulting professionals?
Transform (evolve your value proposition within consulting), Pivot (adjacent roles like CSO, PE operating partner, corporate development), Reinvent (exit to industry roles or entrepreneurship), or Portfolio (combine advisory, board work, and fractional roles). The right path depends on your runway, identity investment, and risk tolerance.
Your PURPOSE AUDIT™ - Pre-Built for Your Role
The Role Transformation Tracker is pre-populated for consulting and advisory leaders – benchmarking, research synthesis, and report production vs. client relationships, transformation leadership, and trust-based advisory. Takes 20 minutes.
Want a Thought Partner?
You’ve done the thinking. You have the data. But sometimes what you need isn’t another framework – it’s a conversation with someone who’s seen how this plays out across hundreds of executive transitions.
Cherie and Alex offer complimentary 30-minute consultations for executives navigating AI-era career decisions. No pitch. No obligation. Just a focused conversation about your situation.
About the Authors
Cherie Silas, MCC
She has over 20 years of experience as a corporate leader and uses that background to partner with business executives and their leadership teams to identify and solve their most challenging people, process, and business problems in measurable ways.
Alex Kudinov, MCC
Alex is a devoted Technologist, Agilist, Professional Coach, Trainer, and Product Manager, a creative problem solver who lives at the intersection of Human, Business and Technology dimensions, applying in-depth technical and business knowledge to solve complex business problems. Alex is adept at bringing complex multi-million-dollar software products to the market in both startup and corporate environments and possesses proven experience in building and maintaining a high performing, customer-focused team culture.
