It's magical.
McKinsey, the world's top consulting firm, actually received a medal recently awarded by OpenAI to its major token-consuming clients.
McKinsey was quite proud of it and posted the medal on LinkedIn immediately.
Wait, something seems wrong... As soon as I think about it, I can feel that there is something wrong with "this honor" -
McKinsey, the company you spent millions of dollars on PPT, is actually a major client of ChatGPT?!
This probably also means that the strategic consulting PPTs that many institutions spent millions of dollars to purchase were actually produced by ChatGPT.
In fact, McKinsey is no longer the McKinsey you thought it was.
Top consulting firms are embracing AI with a frightening ruthlessness.
Consulting giants fully deploy AI
McKinsey, which frequently urges clients to accelerate the deployment of AI in its research reports, has already taken the lead in entering this area.
As early as 2015, it acquired QuantumBlack , a British data analysis company serving F1 racing teams.
Initially, QuantumBlack existed as an "experimental data science team," primarily responsible for tasks such as algorithm development, machine learning models, and data visualization.
In 2018, McKinsey officially incorporated QuantumBlack into the group's brand system and positioned it as its AI-native consulting department.
Since then, with the rise of a new wave of generative AI, QuantumBlack's priority has been further enhanced, and it is regarded as the key engine for this traditional consulting giant to enter the AI era.
In 2023, QuantumBlack launched McKinsey’s first in-house AI, Lilli .
(ps: The name comes from Lillian Dombrowski, the first female employee of McKinsey)
To train Lilli, McKinsey fed it more than 100,000 internal documents and interviews it had accumulated over decades.
With Lilli, consultants can automatically generate PPTs based on prompts and polish the text through a feature called "Tone" to ensure that the content conforms to McKinsey's language style.
In addition, analysts can directly ask Lilli questions, write project proposals or organize research reports, significantly shortening the time from research to output.
In just two years, Lilli's usage within McKinsey has exploded.
According to Delphine Zurkiya, a senior partner at McKinsey, more than 70% of the company's more than 40,000 employees now use Lilli in their daily work, and the number of questions the platform responds to each month has exceeded 500,000 .
Not only McKinsey, but almost all top consulting firms are now trying to reshape their operating models with AI.
In this transformation race, McKinsey's old rival, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), has been even more aggressive.
As of April this year, BCG has developed eight or nine internal AI tools .
For example, there's Deckster, an intelligent editor for creating PPTs, and GENE, a voice assistant for brainstorming, podcasting, and live presentations.
In addition, to encourage employees to incorporate these AI tools into their workflows, BCG has even included AI usage rates in employee performance evaluation indicators .
Alicia Pittman, Chair of BCG's Global Talent Team, said AI is rapidly becoming a new core competency for consultants:
If you don’t possess these qualities, you won’t perform well—you’ll be left behind by your peers in terms of problem solving and insight.
Currently, nearly 90% of BCG's approximately 33,000 employees are using AI tools , and about half of them rely heavily on AI for their work every day .
AI is becoming deeply embedded in consulting giants.
Disrupted Consultants
However, as AI spread rapidly within McKinsey, a layer of severe personnel turmoil was shrouded in thick smoke.
In less than two years since ChatGPT was launched, McKinsey has laid off more than 5,000 employees, with a layoff rate of about 10% - one of the largest layoffs in the history of this century-old consulting firm.
There are many different opinions on the reasons for the layoffs:
Some believe this is a manpower adjustment after McKinsey overexpanded during the pandemic;
Others point out that the main reasons are the slowdown in global consulting market growth and tightening client budgets.
But what worries the industry most is still the impact from the technological wave.
After comprehensively promoting AI reforms, McKinsey's work efficiency has been unprecedentedly improved.
AI has enabled our team to reach new levels of productivity.
One senior partner even admitted that AI is already capable enough to take over the work of some junior consultants .
It is reported that McKinsey's internal AI platform now undertakes about 30% of information collection and organization tasks .
How can we ask employees to deploy AI while taking away their jobs?
In sharp contrast to McKinsey’s bloody layoffs, a group of AI-enabled “catfish” companies are rapidly pouring in outside the traditional consulting industry.
For decades, the consulting and technology industries have been interdependent—the technology industry is responsible for innovation, and the consulting industry is responsible for implementation.
But now, this division of labor is being broken by AI.
On the one hand, AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic have begun to provide models and solutions directly to enterprises, and clients no longer need to go through traditional consulting firms.
On the other hand, these foundational model vendors have spawned a new industry called consultancy tech. These emerging companies use AI to automate consulting processes and provide traditional consultants with powerful auxiliary tools to help them complete reports, analyses, and proposals more efficiently.
However, the ambitions of these "catfish" are obviously more than that.
As AI tools continue to evolve, their ultimate goal is to replace consultants with algorithms and directly provide customers with intelligent consulting service systems .
Open source unicorn Hasura is on this path.
Its enterprise-level platform PromptQL can help customers combine their internal data with existing large models to create exclusive AI analysts.
Once successfully deployed, these AI analysts can replace the original data scientists and continue to learn and evolve as the environment changes.
In addition, PromptQL also provides a support team of professional engineers to provide enterprises with operational and strategic consulting services from AI analysts at $900 per hour .
The slightest fluctuation in the capital market may be more telling.
Many of these companies have received funding in the past few months.
For example, Parable , an AI platform that helps companies track employee time usage, announced in September that it had completed a $16.6 million financing round; Dialogue AI , an automated market research platform, announced this month that it had completed a $6 million financing round; and Xavier AI, the world's first AI strategic consulting company, is also in the process of raising its seed round.
Of course, these startups are still in their infancy, and it is too early for them to compete head-on with industry giants like McKinsey.
But it is worth noting that they have begun to erode the market share of second-tier consulting firms .
These AI startups are becoming a new option for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) – clients that are too small to afford McKinsey now have an alternative.
Tanmai Gopal, co-founder and CEO of PromptQL, also admitted that AI advisors still lag behind traditional advisors, but their advantages lie in immediacy and cost efficiency:
It may not be as good as a McKinsey consultant, but it is immediate.
But in the final analysis, whether it is a spontaneous AI reform from top to bottom or an AI revolution initiated from bottom to top, the consulting industry, the "Ship of Theseus", has begun a thorough transformation.
Those wooden decks that were once made up of consultants are being replaced piece by piece by AI, forged into steel with a cold metallic luster.
When tacit knowledge becomes the last line of defense
Interestingly, despite such large-scale staff reductions, major consulting giants have remained relatively optimistic in the face of external concerns that AI will cause large-scale unemployment.
McKinsey said that AI will indeed take over some basic work, but this does not mean that companies will reduce recruitment:
Do we still need consultants to create PowerPoint presentations? No, technology can already do that. This doesn't mean we'll reduce the number of consultants, but rather that we'll empower them to focus on more valuable work for clients.
However, in another sense, this sentence may also mean that those lower-value entry-level jobs are indeed no longer needed.
According to data from workforce intelligence firm Revelio Labs, hiring in the consulting industry has continued to deteriorate since peaking in 2022.
Entry-level positions have been hardest hit: in June this year, the number of recruitment for entry-level consultants plummeted 54% year-on-year.
Fundamentally, AI has breached the defenses of primary consulting services.
And beneath the line of defense, because current training data can hardly cover human experience, the implicit knowledge and intuition possessed by those senior consultants are becoming increasingly valuable.
Experts point out that today's consulting firms prefer to directly hire experienced and mature talents rather than training an entry-level consultant from scratch .
These companies are prioritizing experience and expertise more than ever before. You might still see an office hiring nine or 10 people a year, but now, half of those 10 are no longer fresh out of college.
Some time ago, the famous economist Brynjolfsson once again sounded the alarm for young job seekers in his new paper "Canary in the Mine" .
Research shows that AI is particularly good at replicating the "book knowledge" that entry-level jobs rely on, which has caused the employment rate of the 22 to 25-year-old group to drop sharply by 13% , making them the group most affected by AI.
Relatively speaking, positions centered on experience and insight have shown greater resilience, and the employment rate of senior employees has remained stable or even increased slightly.
Therefore, industry insiders generally believe that with the current capabilities of AI, it is still impossible to shake the moat of "tacit knowledge" - the existence of consultants is still valuable.
Open AI, like other similar systems, is only connected to 2% to 5% of the world's implicit knowledge. Asking questions and consulting humans should still be the primary source of information.
However, if you can’t even get into a consulting firm, where can you accumulate this tacit knowledge?
In the past, the consulting industry, while highly intensive, had a relatively clear upward path.
In every project, consultants can see positive feedback on their professional capabilities and value. As their resumes continue to improve, they may even have the opportunity to win the jewel in the consulting crown - partner.
But now, as consulting firms cut staff, strengthen AI deployment, and tighten performance standards, this growth ladder paved for young consultants seems to be being dismantled step by step .
Reference Links:
[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-consulting-startups-2025-10
[2]https://www.businessinsider.com/bcg-head-of-people-ai-core-competencies-performance-evaluations-2025-9
[3]https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mckinsey_were-honored-to-be-among-the-top-global-activity-7384392652550586368-o3Bx/
[4]https://www.ft.com/content/68011c4a-8add-4ac5-b30b-b4127aee40ba?utm_source=chatgpt.com
[5]https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/publications/canaries-in-the-coal-mine/
This article comes from the WeChat public account "Quantum Bit" , author: Focus on cutting-edge technology, 36Kr is authorized to publish.
