A long-standing career bargain — endure two intense years at an elite consulting firm and emerge with a golden ticket to the C-suite — is unraveling as artificial intelligence tools reshape the work that junior analysts are hired to do, according to economists and former consultants who say the apprenticeship model that produced a generation of business leaders is being replaced by an “unfulfilling AI slog.”
The consulting industry’s traditional promise to top graduates has been that grueling entry-level work — building financial models, polishing client decks, developing crisp communication, and owning a corner of knowledge — builds irreplaceable skills. Former consultants told economist Alice Lassman, writing in The Guardian, that generative AI can now perform much of that work, and that the skills the firms marketed as their core product are becoming redundant.
Zain Mobarik, a former consultant, said analysts are “either using AI for their own efficiency or being told to.” A former consultant, speaking on condition of anonymity, recalled a year-one analyst on her team asking for help. When she offered to coach him through the problem — “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, she said, “gleamed well beyond his year of experience.”
Romil Depala, a former analyst now at a London-based private equity fund, said “the business analyst programme was the best possible training ground in existence 10 years ago.” In the years before AI, he said, the role involved challenging client work that required analysts to get in the weeds to “crack” a problem. “Now, this execution lies mainly with an AI,” Depala said. Entry-level roles, he said, “have essentially become factchecking.”
The three largest strategy consulting firms have all deployed internal generative AI tools. McKinsey & Company operates Lilli, for internal knowledge management, which the firm has said can answer more than 500,000 prompts each month. Bain & Company’s Sage and Boston Consulting Group’s Deckster perform similar functions. Depala said there is 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 … are redundant when AI can replace them all anyway.”
Firm leaders have framed the shift as a way to accelerate junior colleagues into higher-value work. “They’re just going to be doing things that are more valuable to our clients,” one senior partner told Bloomberg. Lassman called this “spin,” noting that firms are trimming workforces and freezing salaries while promoting AI-fluent, high-churn employees.
The shift is also changing whom the firms recruit. Lassman wrote that final-round interviews may now include using a firm’s internal AI to produce output. While publicly championing emotional intelligence and creativity in the mold of AI labs, she wrote, firms “are clearly looking for churners over thinkers, analysts who can run multiple agents at once to pluck IP from existing assets as fast as possible.”
The exit opportunities that once made the consulting sacrifice worthwhile are also narrowing, according to the former consultants. Mobarik described a system in which surviving the gauntlet proved “you can do things quickly and with a high level of execution,” crafting “an inner circle of high-performers” who could be plucked by equally elite firms. But with white-collar work at risk across industries, the cycle is slowing. Lassman described “a pool of 300 analysts going for the same five jobs.”
The traditional ramp from consulting to startups also makes less sense, Lassman argued, because AI has eroded the grind and competencies those exits depended on, and because spending two years incubating means missing the AI rush entirely. The skills that now matter are split, she wrote: technical ones are best learned by building AI itself, while human skills such as empathy and tolerance may give public service an edge.
“The machine that mass-produced capable generalists is being dismantled quicker than anything replacing it — and nobody, including the firms, knows what comes next,” Lassman wrote. “Where the next generation of leaders will be made is now up for grabs.”