For decades, elite consulting firms marketed a bargain that worked: survive two grueling years, and you unlock a golden ticket to the corner office. McKinsey called itself the "CEO factory." The path was clear, the promise simple. Top graduates from the best schools signed up to learn synthesis, analysis, and client strategy. Then they'd graduate into finance, tech, government, or venture capital with credentials that preceded them.
The model depended on learning through doing. Junior analysts would sink into client work, building financial models in days, iterating on decks, and owning a piece of the analysis deeply enough to crack something real. Mentorship was built into the grind. A senior colleague would spend the time needed to teach you how to think. You progressed because you owned something.
That apprenticeship is collapsing under the weight of artificial intelligence.
Consulting firms have rolled out internal AI systems designed to handle the work that once formed the spine of junior training. McKinsey's Lilli, BCG's Deckster, and Bain's Sage can now process hundreds of thousands of prompts monthly. The job that used to demand ownership now demands quality control. A first-year analyst asked a senior consultant for help with a task. Instead of a teaching moment, she was asked for the AI prompts to complete it herself. His output exceeded what his experience level should have produced.
"The business analyst programme was the best possible training ground in existence 10 years ago," said Romil Depala, who moved from a major firm to a London private equity fund. The question now haunting the industry is whether analysts can build the competencies that made the firms valuable when the tools that built those skills have been automated away.
Firm leaders tell a story about acceleration. Juniors will skip the grunt work and move to "more valuable" tasks faster, they claim. The reality is harsher. Consulting firms are trimming payroll and freezing salaries. The people getting promoted are the ones comfortable operating AI tools at speed. The people struggling are those who learned the old way.
The shift runs deeper than workflow. Client demand has pivoted toward something different: multi-year AI implementation projects that require speed and the ability to extract existing intellectual property through prompts. The work is harder to learn from. Delivery timelines are compressed. Fees are fixed to outputs, not hours. There is little room for the wandering, questioning mindset that used to produce critical thinking.
Hiring is changing to match. Interview rounds now include live tests of a firm's internal AI tools. The old language about emotional intelligence and creativity remains in recruiting materials. What firms are actually screening for has shifted: people who can manage multiple AI agents, churn through work quickly, and pull assets from the existing library faster than competitors. Not builders. Operators.
The exit path is breaking too. The whole point of the consulting contract was a two-year credential that opened every other door. That worked when consulting was rare and selective, when moving from McKinsey to Google or Goldman Sachs or a venture fund was a validation of elite status. White-collar hiring is contracting across every sector now. A former consultant put it bluntly: "a pool of 300 analysts going for the same five jobs."
Startups made less sense as a next step even before AI accelerated the timeline. To spend two years at a consulting firm now means missing the window to learn the technical stack that actually matters. The skills the market now values are either deep technical ability (learned by building AI directly) or purely human skills like empathy and judgment, which public service or nonprofit work can teach just as well.
What replaces the consulting pathway remains unclear. The machine that produced generations of capable, analytically trained generalists is being dismantled faster than any alternative is being built. The firms themselves don't have answers. Where the next class of leaders will be shaped, who will train them, and how the best young minds will gain the credibility to move between industries are open questions with no obvious answers yet.
Author James Rodriguez: "The consulting firms bet their recruitment model on a skill set they could monetize through scarcity. AI just made their entire value prop a commodity, and they're scrambling to figure out what they're actually for."
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