I often hear the question: will AI kill consulting?

There's a prevailing fear that juniors won’t be needed anymore. That consultants will be outcompeted by foundation model APIs. It's not an unreasonable thing to worry about.

But the management consulting industry has grown faster than GDP in every decade since the 1920s. Through enormous disruption like the PC revolution, the Internet, and offshoring. Each wave brought the same doomsday prediction, yet it was wrong every time.

Here's why: consulting thrives when paradigms shift. The faster the shift, the better. When the rules change, every business needs to figure out what to do next. The fastest way to accomplish that is to hire someone who's already seen it play out elsewhere. Consultants accumulate that knowledge and sell it forward. Same as ever.

AI is the biggest paradigm shift most businesses have ever faced. So it shouldn't surprise anyone that the FT just forecasted 7% consulting growth in 2026, driven by AI infrastructure and implementation projects, or that OpenAI announced implementation partnerships with BCG, Bain, and McKinsey.

A comparison in a similar professional services sector gives us a glimpse of the future. Legal AI adoption is 1-2 years further along; Harvey and Legora are already embedded globally in major law firms. And according to the FT, junior lawyers aren't disappearing.

They're upskilling faster, doing more sophisticated work, while legal salaries and job openings have both increased since the advent of legal AI tools. AI didn't shrink the profession - it raised the floor, and the same thing is happening in consulting and finance.

Yes, the balance of work within consulting firms will shift dramatically. The analyst who spent three days building a model now can use that time on other tasks. Their operating models will have to adjust. But the big consultancies will adapt fast, because they always do.

The ones that move fast; that redeploy that capacity toward higher-judgment work will come out ahead, because instead of making consulting cheaper, they will make it better. 

As the pace of change grows faster, consulting will continue to eat the world. We’re making sure consultants have the tools to stay ahead of it.