In 2023, every business publication was running the same headline: AI will kill consulting. The logic was straightforward — if a model could analyse a market in seconds, build a financial projection in minutes, and draft a strategy memo before lunch, why would anyone pay $400 an hour for a McKinsey associate?
Three years later, the data tells a different story. Consulting demand is up. Engagements are larger. And the firms that adapted — along with independent consultants — are doing better than ever. Here's what actually happened.
AI Didn't Replace Judgment. It Exposed Its Scarcity.
The thing AI is genuinely good at is analysis — taking inputs and producing outputs that look reasonable. What AI is not good at is judgment: knowing which inputs to trust, which question to ask, when an answer is dangerously wrong, and what to do when the data conflicts with itself.
In my time at Neste US, I built credit risk models that AI tools could now produce in hours. But the real work was never the model — it was deciding which counterparties deserved expanded exposure, how to interpret a half-translated balance sheet from a Chilean subsidiary, when to escalate to leadership, and how to structure a recommendation so that it survived political pushback. None of that is a prompt-and-response problem.
What AI did was raise the stakes of judgment. Now that anyone can produce an analysis, the differentiator is who can produce a correct one. That's harder, not easier.
The Three Reasons Consulting Demand Is Growing
1. Companies are drowning in possibilities
AI has lowered the cost of generating options. A mid-sized firm can now produce twenty market entry strategies in the time it used to take to produce one. The bottleneck has shifted from generating options to choosing between them. That's a strategic problem, and most operators don't have the bandwidth, distance, or framework to solve it well.
This is why I've watched companies pay external consultants more — not less — to help them narrow. The value isn't in adding ideas. It's in confidently subtracting them.
2. AI implementation is itself a consulting problem
Most companies trying to deploy AI are stuck. Not because the tech doesn't work, but because they don't know which problems to point it at, how to redesign workflows, or how to measure whether it's actually creating value. The technical tooling is the easy part. The organisational integration is the hard part — and that's exactly what consultants have always been hired for.
The result: AI consulting is now one of the fastest-growing categories in the industry. Firms that combine technical fluency with operational understanding are commanding premiums.
3. Independent consultants have a structural advantage
The traditional consulting model was: pay a senior partner $1,200/hour, who deploys a team of associates at $400/hour to do the analytical work. AI compresses that pyramid. A skilled independent consultant with strong AI tooling can now do the work of a small team — at a fraction of the cost, with no overhead, and often faster.
For mid-sized companies that couldn't afford McKinsey before, this democratises access to high-quality strategic thinking. For consultants, it changes the economics of going independent. Both effects increase the total volume of consulting work happening in the economy.
What This Means for Companies
If you're running a business in 2026, here's how to think about consulting investment:
- Don't hire a consultant to tell you what AI already can. If your question is "what's the size of the X market," that's now a $20 query, not a $50,000 engagement. Don't pay for analysis you can produce yourself.
- Do hire a consultant for judgment-intensive work. Strategic positioning, M&A diligence, organisational design, post-mortem analysis on failures — anything that requires distance, experience, and the ability to disagree with you in a structured way.
- Hire smaller and tighter. The era of paying for big teams is ending. Look for individual consultants or small firms with deep expertise, AI fluency, and direct senior involvement.
- Buy the engagement, not the brand. A senior independent consultant with 15 years of operating experience will often outperform a McKinsey team of 28-year-olds at a tenth of the price. The brand premium is no longer worth what it was.
What This Means for Consultants
If you're a consultant — or considering becoming one — the picture is more positive than the doomsayers suggest, but the requirements have changed.
You need real domain expertise. Generic strategy advice has been commoditised. Specific industry knowledge, real operating experience, and the ability to make calls under uncertainty have not.
You need AI fluency. Not as a buzzword on your bio, but as a daily working tool. Consultants who can use AI to compress analytical work and spend more time on judgment are pulling away from those who can't.
You need to communicate clearly. AI has flooded the market with passable writing and decent slides. Clear thinking expressed in clear prose is now even more rare and valuable than it was.
The Honest Verdict
Consulting wasn't disrupted by AI. It was sharpened by it. The work that was easy to automate was always the lowest-margin work. What remains — judgment, integration, communication, accountability — is exactly what makes a great consultant great.
If anything, the next few years will reward strategic advisors more than ever, especially independent ones who combine deep experience with modern tooling. The consultants who'll struggle are the ones who never offered judgment in the first place — who were really just renting their analytical labour out by the hour. That work is going away. Good riddance.
Need a structured outside perspective on a business decision? I work with founders, executives, and small businesses on pricing, market entry, financial planning, and strategy — drawing on corporate experience at Neste, VAS Carbons, and consulting engagements with Sasol and Toshiba. Book a discovery call to discuss your situation.