Are you personally scared or excited about the whole AI wave and what it will mean for your portfolio?

Been consulting 25 years. Navigating a half dozen downturns as a practice leader. This one feels very different and the partners at my tenure largely agree the consulting profession that we enjoyed is largely over.

The big four will have their assurance foundation and cashcow largely taken out by AI. That will force them to go heavier on advisory work and penetrate further into the bottom end of what we in the MBB do. That will force the MBBS to retrench largely towards their historical strategy practice because they will no longer be able to win at the rates the big four will charge just to keep alive.

The boutiques who are growing fast, will extend further into the bottom edge of what the big four do. That will squeeze all of the big four very hard. We don’t think it will ever be the same again and eventually AI will take out most of everything the consulting firms do.

Excited, but mainly because I only have 5 or so years left until retirement and if I had to retire tomorrow I could. If I were a new college grad in any field except healthcare, I'd be terrified right now.

I am excited but scared. Because it is not taking much to implement AI unlike past technologies so there isn’t much for consulting firms to implement the tech. Clients are not expecting to spend millions to start using AI. Most of my used cases took 3-5 months to implement, results are good, now we are selling further rollout. But again, its not that $30M+ business transformation work.

Secondly, the resources with AI skills are in high demand so even if we get the work, good resources are difficult to find.

I think it will bolster portfolios in the short term particularly for the tech/digital folks, but I think the crazy buzz around this iteration of AI will taper off when leaders see it isn't a fix for everything. Especially for those implementing it willy nilly and not seeing 'results'.

For those that understand it is a tool that can boost efficiency and other specific things, I think it will lead to less consulting work in the future. For the group who doesn't understand it and didn't get the unfounded results they wanted, these will turn back to traditional consulting.

Ultimately, I am more concerned about us with consulting firms deciding that AI can take the place of our associates. The issue is that, while it can absolutely do the work they do, how are we going to build the manager level if we don't bring in associates to train on the job?

AI will lead to faster and smaller consulting/implementation projects -> lesser people on projects -> lower revenues -> lesser # of partners needed

It will be great until everyone gets hit with the compute cost. These massive data centers have to get paid for and I'm still concerned where all the money will come from when all my clients just think AI is going to create huge cost reduction

Mostly excited in the short to medium term.

Longer term is incredibly hard to predict - could be pretty terrible for consulting but if we are getting disrupted so are a lot of other areas

Excited but scared also. I work in the infrastructure domain where power and digital infrastructure will be important parts of the AI ecosystem.

We will have agentic and customized pornstars. Much more exciting than scary.

Don’t work for AI. Make AI work for you. But remember, usually it’s wrong and sort of weak. As of 2025.

I studied AI in college 20 years ago at an engineering school that is known as an AI leader. Got an MS in Operations Research from that school and up until about 5 years ago, used precisely 0 of my education in my career.

Personally I'm excited and energized about what's happening in a field I was fascinated by since I was a kid. Professionally. I am petrified and am having trouble sleeping. My problem is I know enough of how it works and what's possible to understand that what people are seeing today is barely 5%of what is not just possible but very highly likely 2-3 years away... and it's not AGi I'm talking about.

My mistake was assuming I would not see any of this in my lifetime. Even with the crude tools we have today, I've gone all in at work and at home. I have literally regained hours each day.

I'll leave you with this (and it might reveal my identity). This summer, I had on of my AI leaders grab two interns who had some AI experience at school. We tasked them to create a project deliverable agent/bot. They trained it on a specific set of deliverables we previously produced as well as versions from most of our competitors. It then would give it the same project brief as an actual case team. We gave it access to the case team's Slack, SharePoint, etc. Finally we asked it to produce an interim client deliverable. Just like the case team.

We then asked a team of senior partners to review both decks. 2 questions 1) which deliverable is better and 2) which one was produced by AI. Results weren't even close. 9 of 11 partners were convinced the AI deliverable was better the other 3 were not sure. ALL 11 partners were absolutely positive the AI deliverable was made by the human case team.

The killer? We thought it would take the interns all summer to build this. They had a crude version running in a week and the fully operational app our teams are already using, was built in 4 weeks.

The good news is by the time consulting is dead, fields like l!aw, accounting, tax, audit, equity research, etc., will already be long buried and forgotten. I give it 3-5 years.