The Future of Consulting: Why Junior Roles Are Shrinking in the AI Era

Strategy Consulting is dead.

This is one of the many death warrants people on LinkedIn have dished out in the recent past. The ground-level reality of the industry has a lot more nuance to it though.

I worked with a global strategy consulting firm for a few years, and have friends and students who work in the MBBs and Big 4s of the world. Based on my own experience and my conversations with consulting professionals, I can say that AI has not assassinated Strategy Consulting yet. I can also say that the realm of consulting is evolving in a big way due to AI and I expect demand for junior-level consulting roles (analyst/consultant) to shrink immensely in the near future.

So, why will the demand shrink? Let’s dig in deeper.

On a strategy project, the work of a junior-level strategy consulting professional can be broken down into 3 main steps:

1. Digging into the existing organizational knowledge repository to derive relevant research data, case studies, frameworks, POVs and KPIs.

2. Using one’s experience and intelligence to deploy data and content from step 1 to solve the client’s business problem.

3. Putting the solution from step 2 into a deck that looks sleek, shiny and sophisticated.

Step 1 used to consume a lot of time and entail a lot of effort, mainly because most junior-level strategy consulting professionals are often B-school hires with little or no industry experience.

Gen AI is now being used by some consulting firms to significantly reduce this time and effort. A good example of this is McKinsey’s Gen AI tool – Lilli. They call it “a researcher, a time saver, and an inspiration”. They add that “it’s a platform that provides a streamlined, impartial search and synthesis of the firm’s vast stores of knowledge to bring our best insights, quickly and efficiently, to clients”.

Step 3 also used to consume a lot of time and entail a lot of effort. There are more than enough AI tools out there that now help you create fancy decks in no time.

With step 1 and step 3 reducing the time and effort for junior-level roles in a big way, it’s no surprise that consulting firms have laid off a significant number of their employees in recent times. Some firms have cut down on campus hiring at top B-schools too.

Those firms that are hiring big at Indian B-schools are not doing it due to increased demand but due to role migration. In other words, employees in expensive parts of the world like London and New York are being laid off and the gap is being filled by hiring in cheaper geographies like India and Malaysia.

All in all, consulting is not dead and I don’t expect it to die anytime soon. However, the industry will change in a big way and opportunities will be fewer. Volatile global macro-economic factors will only add to the chaos, confusion and lack of certainty. At best, the situation can be described as interesting.