I don't think AI will have much of an impact on management consulting, since it's really just executive insurance. If anything, management consulting might be the perfect use for generative AI in its current state.<p>If you're a CEO running a company, you can go out and hire McKinsey and tell the board, "I'm a great CEO, that's why I brought in McKinsey. They're the BEST". McKinsey then proceeds to charge you a bunch of money and leaves you with some very slick powerpoints containing a bunch of advice, roadmaps, org charts, and action items.<p>If your company has a few good quarters after that you can say, "Look at what a great CEO I am, I brought in some best in class consultants and now our stock price is through the roof!". If on the other hand your company struggles, misses earnings targets, etc., you can say, "It's not my fault we're doing badly, I brought in a team of best in class consultants and even THEY couldn't help us turn things around yet - it must be the macro economy, industry headwinds, etc. Imagine how much worse we'd be doing if I didn't bring McKinsey in!"
> Welcome to management consulting in 2025, where much of what you see on a consultant’s deck has been outsourced to generative AI tools—including, funnily enough, the deck itself.<p>I’m sure they are talking about the <i>meaning</i> of the deck, but they’ve already long offshored the creation of the decks to India. They make notes during the day, send the notes to India, receive decks the next morning.<p>Dunno about the rest, can’t see it.
I'm close with someone who is on the Digital side of McKinsey, and they said they attended some meeting where a partner was asked what he was excited about for the future, and he said something like "the opportunities from AI agents replacing software developers". The audience was a room full of McKinsey's software devs.
I thought this would go without saying, but once SWE jobs are automated by AI (if it were to happen), then every job can be automated.<p>Even sales - I hear of companies building bots that do outreach with human voices.<p>But the professional careers that were once considered "prestigious" (strategy consulting, investment banking, law, medicine) will be the most disrupted bc labor costs are the highest in those.<p>Imagine a lawyer doing discovery in minutes, rather than days or weeks. Imagine a doctor that can diagnose you from your smart phone.<p>The world is not ready for those changes.
A lot of very dismissive takes on consulting within this thread.<p>That said, the article is on point about how junior and associate roles are now on the line.<p>You can be dismissive all you want on here, but at the end of the day, FAANG, MBB, YC, and BBs - not MBAs - are the LDPs of the 21st century, and if you don't like leadership at companies today, it's only going to get worse, because the people who survive this will be even more mercenary.
> Instead of making their life easier, AI has resulted in drastically reduced timelines and ebbing appreciation for creativity.<p>I've felt this personally as a dev. We are getting squeezed to move and deliver faster because we have AI.
What stops these consulting firms from replacing the bulk of their consultants with AI if the associates are all just outsourcing every detail anyways?<p>These people should be a lot more worried lol.
Instead of overpaid and incompetent Consultant-people making choices on the payroll of politicians using taxpayers money, to implement costly and enshittified project recommendations. That the actual end-user that was never asked anything about. We can now replace the cuntsultants with an incompetent AI making the same faulty recommendations at ten times the speed and same cost, but ten times wider profit margin.<p>Splendid.