People who work for McKinsey have a weird definition of “prestige.” If finding ruthless ways to coat layoffs and industry collapse in a veneer of “progress” is prestigious, you might be a sociopath. So forgive me for not shedding a tear that “AI” is coming for them. I mean, it’s fertile ground if the prompt is “Provide the most efficient way to cut costs at this firm, focusing on firing everyone with institutional knowledge without providing a severance package. Provide a slide deck that shows how much money will be freed up for executive compensation while touting imaginary efficiencies from AI.”

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.