Consulting's AI makeover is a hiring spree, not a reinvention

The world's biggest consulting firms are spending heavily on AI. They are hiring tens of thousands of technologists, striking multibillion-dollar deals with OpenAI and Microsoft, and rolling out internal chatbots. The pitch to clients is stark: this is no longer the industry that shows up with PowerPoint decks and a plan to cut head count.

KPMG US CEO Tim Walsh put it bluntly at the World Economic Forum in January. “There is no doubt that our firm is a tech company that delivers now on audit, tax, and advisory services.” A decade ago, the firm described itself as a time-and-materials business with “smart people doing smart things,” Rob Fisher, vice chairman of advisory at KPMG, said about Walsh's comments.

Now, KPMG is embedding AI across its traditional offerings and building subscription-style products for clients to consume its expertise as a service. “We have to become more of a technology organization because clients want to consume our expertise that way,” Fisher said.

The numbers backing that claim are large. Accenture has added nearly 40,000 AI and data professionals in the last two years. EY has added 61,000 technologists since 2023. PwC introduced a career track for engineers for the first time in its 170-year history in February. Deloitte scrapped titles like “analyst” and “consultant” and gave all U.S. employees more specific job titles, as Business Insider reported in January.

BCG reported in April that AI- and tech-focused services now account for over 40% of its total global revenue, driven by 25% year-on-year growth in AI services. At McKinsey, AI initiatives now account for roughly 40% of the firm's work, Alex Singla, a senior partner who co-leads QuantumBlack, McKinsey's AI arm, told Business Insider in January.

Yet the transformation is more pronounced in pitch than in daily practice. Consulting firms are still “a long way from the frontier of what's possible” with AI, Charlie Cheesman, a former senior AI consultant at EY who helped write the firm's UK AI strategy, told Business Insider. Professional services firms were “never built to be technical organizations,” he said, so the structural change required to keep up with AI progress is enormous.

Not every firm is rushing to recast itself as a technology company. “I don't know if the identity of our firm is changing as a result of this,” Errol Gardner, global head of consulting at EY, told Business Insider. Technology drives about half of EY's business and the firm is hiring deeply technical talent. Gardner said that doesn't change EY's core proposition. “What we do is move clients from state A to state B in a safer way and as value-enabled a way as possible.” AI is a “new tool in the toolbox.”

PwC's former chief technology and innovation officer Matt Wood, who left the firm in May, struck a similar note. “It's tempting to look at AI and think the firm needs to become a technology company.” PwC's approach is to focus on how to become the best version of itself using AI.

Kate Smaje, global leader of technology and AI at McKinsey, described the real shift differently. “Enterprise problems are now more interconnected,” she told Business Insider. The move is not simply from strategy to implementation or from generalists to specialists.

Five employees from Deloitte, KPMG, and McKinsey all told Business Insider the job was more tech-heavy than three years ago. The impact of AI on consulting jobs is more complex than turning consultants into coders.

At Deloitte, a US-based technology consultant said AI has slowly shifted the work from creation to validation. Expectations have risen. “Teams are now expected to deliver more with the same or fewer people,” the consultant said. A senior consultant at Deloitte UK said clients return for ongoing support even after deploying AI tools. The “core identity of the profession remains rooted in adaptability.”

Cheesman, the former EY AI consultant, said the industry's ability to deploy AI has yet to catch up to the technology's potential. Consultancies can move clients “one or two steps forward” when AI could be taking them 5 or 10 steps forward. “There is no shortage of highly intelligent, capable people in the industry,” he said. “99% are not coders.”

The economics point one way. Over the last five years, technology-related services have grown two to six times as fast as traditional sectors, said Fiona Czerniawska, CEO of Source Global, a consulting sector intelligence firm. “Every firm that can do so [is investing] in their technology services,” she said.

Around 90% of clients believe AI will affect how firms deliver their services. The share who expect that impact to be significant has fallen – from 60% in 2024 to 40% more recently, according to Source Global's research. Clients still think of the top strategy firms as doing strategy and the Big Four as doing finance-related work, Czerniawska said. “Ultimately, it's for clients to decide the firm's identity, not vice versa.”

There is a pricing risk embedded in the rebranding. Clients associate technology with lower costs than traditional consulting, Czerniawska said. Move too far toward presenting as a tech company, and firms risk eroding the premium they charge.

“Identities have shifted unquestionably,” she said. “They've not moved to a point where somebody's saying, 'this is a technology company.'”