Consulting is a delicate contract: endure two challenging, formative years – and in return, get a golden ticket to anywhere. Firms like McKinsey tout themselves as the “CEO factory”, and boast they’re “not surprised” to be consistently named the best place for future leaders.
The skills they promise to build – synthesis, sharp analysis, crisp communication, client-readiness, hypothesis-driven thinking – have enticed every generation’s top graduates. Get an offer from a place like this, and everything else will fall into place: about as clear a guarantee of future success as you could get fresh out of a bachelors. These firms spent decades marketing themselves as production houses of excellence, and until recently, they were.
But that value proposition no longer holds in the age of AI. Analysts are “either using AI for their own efficiency or being told to”, Zain Mobarik, a former consultant, put it to me. Another former consultant, speaking on the condition of anonymity, recalled a year-one analyst on her team asking if she could help him get the work done. The conventional approach would be to carve time for coaching, a “give me two minutes and I’ll work it through with you,” the way that all of us learned. He corrected her: “No, could you just send me the prompts to put into AI?” She did. His output gleamed well beyond his year of experience.
“The business analyst programme was the best possible training ground in existence 10 years ago,” Romil Depala, former analyst now at a London-based PE fund, told me. In the years before AI, the role mostly fulfilled that promise: stuck right into challenging client work, taught to turn around clean financial models in a couple of days and polish decks to crisply communicate our razor-sharp analysis. Analysts would learn by owning their own corner of knowledge, getting in the weeds deeply enough to “crack” something, then present it in front of a client. Your progression, and your learning, was contingent on that ownership.
Now, this execution lies mainly with an AI. With the likes of BCG’s Deckster, Bain’s Sage or McKinsey’s Lilli – GenAI for internal knowledge management that can answer 500,000+ prompts each month – entry-level roles (for those lucky enough to still get them) have essentially become factchecking. There’s a question mark over the whole apprenticeship model – it’s unclear how analysts will build skills like we used to, while the skills we did learn (developing your own framework, creating work plans and creative ideation) are redundant when AI can replace them all anyway.
Firm leaders frame this as getting junior colleagues up the ladder faster. “They’re just going to be doing things that are more valuable to our clients,” one senior partner told Bloomberg. But this is just spin. Firms are trimming their workforces and freezing salaries, while the people getting promoted are AI-fluent and high-churn – the ones that grease the…
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