For years, consulting has been one of the most desirable career paths for business school grads, but the industry is now standing at a crossroads, and the signs are impossible to ignore.
A recent Fast Company piece by Nitin Seth, CEO of Incedo and former Director of McKinsey’s Global Knowledge Centre, explains that consulting is undergoing a fundamental and likely irreversible shift.
HOW CONSULTING IS TRANSFORAMING
To understand why the industry is changing, it helps to take a step back. Consulting firms like McKinsey built their reputations in an era when information was scarce, when companies needed elite analysts to gather data, interpret it, and turn it into strategy.
Now, in the AI era, analytical horsepower is no longer enough when AI can generate insights in seconds. As a result, the industry’s center of gravity is shifting. Strategy was once seen as the most coveted aspect of consulting, with execution as a bonus. Now, in the digital and AI era, execution is deeply technology‑driven, and strategy and execution now feed into each other continuously.
Seth says this is part of an upheaval in white‑collar work due to AI. He estimated that nearly 300 million white‑collar roles will be affected globally in the next five years, with around 100 million at risk of becoming obsolete. That’s one in three of these jobs at risk.
ABOUT 30-40% PURSUE CONSULTING CAREERS
As AI transforms consulting, the ripple effects could be substantial for business students, where this field is typically a top choice. Across top U.S. MBA programs including the M7 and other leading business schools, roughly 30 – 40% of graduates enter consulting, says Lauren Wakal at Clear Admit.
This shift has fueled the rise of execution‑centric firms like Deloitte, EY, and Accenture, which offer both advisory work with large‑scale tech implementation. Their growth is roughly double that of McKinsey, BCG, and Bain in recent years, and these companies seem to be where clients are placing their bets, says Seth. Despite the company’s reputation and strengths, Seth says that McKinsey now faces a transformation challenge larger than any in its history.
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