<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/22/consulting-ai-prestige-careers>
"Consulting is a delicate contract: endure two challenging, formative years –
and in return, get a golden ticket to anywhere. Firms like McKinsey tout
themselves as the “CEO factory”, and boast they’re “not surprised” to be
consistently named the best place for future leaders.
The skills they promise to build – synthesis, sharp analysis, crisp
communication, client-readiness, hypothesis-driven thinking – have enticed
every generation’s top graduates. Get an offer from a place like this, and
everything else will fall into place: about as clear a guarantee of future
success as you could get fresh out of a bachelors. These firms spent decades
marketing themselves as production houses of excellence, and until recently,
they were.
But that value proposition no longer holds in the age of AI. Analysts are
“either using AI for their own efficiency or being told to”, Zain Mobarik, a
former consultant, put it to me. Another former consultant, speaking on the
condition of anonymity, recalled a year-one analyst on her team asking if she
could help him get the work done. The conventional approach would be to carve
time for coaching, a “give me two minutes and I’ll work it through with you,”
the way that all of us learned. He corrected her: “No, could you just send me
the prompts to put into AI?” She did. His output gleamed well beyond his year
of experience.
“The business analyst programme was the best possible training ground in
existence 10 years ago,” Romil Depala, former analyst now at a London-based PE
fund, told me. In the years before AI, the role mostly fulfilled that promise:
stuck right into challenging client work, taught to turn around clean financial
models in a couple of days and polish decks to crisply communicate our
razor-sharp analysis. Analysts would learn by owning their own corner of
knowledge, getting in the weeds deeply enough to “crack” something, then
present it in front of a client. Your progression, and your learning, was
contingent on that ownership.
Now, this execution lies mainly with an AI. With the likes of BCG’s Deckster,
Bain’s Sage or McKinsey’s Lilli – GenAI for internal knowledge management that
can answer 500,000+ prompts each month – entry-level roles (for those lucky
enough to still get them) have essentially become factchecking. There’s a
question mark over the whole apprenticeship model – it’s unclear how analysts
will build skills like we used to, while the skills we did learn (developing
your own framework, creating work plans and creative ideation) are redundant
when AI can replace them all anyway.
Firm leaders frame this as getting junior colleagues up the ladder faster.
“They’re just going to be doing things that are more valuable to our clients,”
one senior partner told
Bloomberg. But this is just spin. Firms are trimming
their workforces and freezing salaries, while the people getting promoted are
AI-fluent and high-churn – the ones that grease the wheels of this new business
model."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
