Has AI killed consulting?

AI was supposed to kill consulting. Instead, it's killing the consulting model and Independent Consultants may just be the winners.

The doomsday narrative (and why it sounds convincing)

Spend ten minutes on LinkedIn or in the business press and you'll find no shortage of obituaries for the strategy consulting industry. And while reports of its demise may be exaggerated, there is some case against the incumbents.

• The pyramid is being eaten from the bottom. Research synthesis, modelling, slide production and data wrangling is the work that justified armies of analysts and associates. And it’s precisely what generative AI does best. Internal tools like McKinsey's "Lilli" (reportedly saving consultants ~30% of research and synthesis time) and BCG's "Deckster" have automated much of the junior workflow.
• The economics are under pressure. Analyses suggest AI can already handle the large majority of a junior analyst's typical output, in seconds, raising the question clients are now asking openly: why pay for hours of junior leverage when the leverage is software?
• The workforce data is real. McKinsey's headcount has reportedly fallen from 45,000+ to around 40,000, and Bain, BCG, Deloitte and KPMG have all trimmed headcount or slowed hiring. Forrester found firms using AI report productivity gains of around 40%, and those gains may translate directly into fewer junior seats.

If you run a firm whose profit model is built on the spread between what a client pays for a team and what that team costs to staff, this is genuinely scary. But the threat narrative overstates what AI actually does, and the issues mimic what is being observed in all workforces,

The more interesting data point, and the one doom-mongers tend to skip, is that the realised impact of AI on white-collar workforces has consistently fallen short of predictions. In McKinsey's 2026 State of AI survey, only 14% of organisations using AI reported an overall decline in workforce size in the past year. That’s less than half the 32% who had expected reductions. And only 13% of employees agreed with the statement that "AI makes me feel anxious about my career prospects." Even among those who expect headcount declines in the coming year, expectations have repeatedly overshot reality.

Why? Because in the case of consulting projects, the tasks AI compresses are not the tasks clients actually pay for, or at least, not the ones they should be paying for. Strip away the research decks and the formatted slides, and the durable value of a senior consultant remains stubbornly human:

1. Judgment under ambiguity: knowing which questions to ask, which analysis matters, and what to ignore.
2. Client trust and political navigation: getting a board,an exec team, or a PE operating partner, or indeed any stakeholder, to actually act on advice.
3. Implementation and accountability: staying until the recommendation becomes a P&L outcome, not just a deliverable.
4. Domain pattern recognition: having seen fifty transformations, diligence processes or carve-outs and knowing what success and failure look like before they happen.

AI compresses the production of consulting, not the judgment, trust, and accountability that constitute its real product. The general consensus is increasingly coming to the idea that AI will automate and compress the labor-intensive parts of consulting, meaning smaller teams, faster timelines, and different project economics. The value doesn't vanish; it migrates up the pyramid to exactly the people who used to sit at the top of it.

Consulting capabilities are unbundling, not disappearing.

To be positive, what we are really seeing is  an unbundling of consulting capabilities. It becomes a storyof liberation. The traditional consulting firm bundled three things:

• access to vetted expertise
• junior labour for production
• a brand that signalled safety to the buyer.

AI is destroying the economic rationale for junior labor. And both vetted expertise and brand security  are now available outside the pyramid.

• Clients increasingly want senior-only teams, outcome-based fees, and specialists who've done the exact thing before. EY's leadership has openly mused that AI pushes consulting toward a "service-as-software" model where clients pay for results, not labour.
• Talent at the senior end has been unbundling for years. Experienced ex-MBB, Big Four and industry operators are going independent because the tools that once required a firm's infrastructure, namely research, analysis, benchmarking, document production, now fit in a laptop.

 This is the "Consulting 2.0" thesis: generative AI acts as a force multiplier that lets independent consultants execute the high-volume analytical work that used to require a large analyst bench. Value shifts from headcount to strategic impact and speed. Lean, expert-led teams can now deliver what once needed a forty-person engagement.

In other words: AI replaces the reasons consultants needed firms.

High5: infrastructure for the post-pyramid consultant.

 If the winning unit of consulting delivery becomes "one to three senior people, amplified by AI, engaged flexibly," the remaining friction is in how do clients find these people, vet them, contract them, and scale teams up and down?

It's exactly the gap a curated marketplace closes, and it's where High5 has fit since its formation as the home of consulting talent, with a model that is designed for this unbundled world.‍

• ‍Curation over open marketplace. High5 isn't a free-for-all gig board. Consultants need proven business experience and often a recognised consulting-firm background to be approved, which preserves the "signal of quality" that clients previously bought from firm brands.
• AI does the matching, humans do the work. Each consultant builds a "Talent Passport," and AI matches projects to their experience and notifies them when they're a strong fit. Note the inversion oft he industry anxiety: here AI isn't replacing the consultant, it's replacing the business development and staffing overhead that used to keep independents dependent on firms.
• Built for the new economics of consulting. High5 supports project, interim and SOW engagements, which are precisely the flexible, defined-scope, outcome-oriented formats that are growing as hourly, pyramid-based engagements shrink.
• A bridge for the traditionally trained. For consultants with a "traditional background" like MBB, Big Four, in-house strategy, High5 is arguably the lowest-risk path from employed to independent: your reputation, sector depth and senior judgment become the product; the platform handles discovery, vetting, contracts and global reach, benefiting both clients and consultants.

The verdict

The debate about "AI killing consulting" confuses the institution with the value. The institution is the pyramid, the billable hour, the leveraged team and it is genuinely under threat. The value is the experienced judgment, trusted advice, delivered accountability and this is in the middle of a demand shift toward exactly the senior, flexible, AI-amplified profile that defines the modern independent consultant.

 So the optimistic reading isn't just spin: AI is redistributing consulting value from firms to individuals, and platforms like High5 are the infrastructure making that redistribution practical at scale.

The future of consulting doesn't belong to the biggest pyramid. It belongs to the best judgment, delivered lean, matched well and increasingly, that means independents.

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Sources consulted for this review include McKinsey's Stateof AI 2026 survey, industry analyses of consulting's AI disruption, the Catalantexpert perspective on GenAI and independent consultants, and High5's insights at high5hire.com.

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