The Consulting Model Is Broken. Here Is What Should Replace It.
- John R. Childress
- Jul 2
- 6 min read
Accenture, PwC, and McKinsey are shedding tens of thousands of jobs as AI erodes the billable-hour model that built their empires. The disruption is real and accelerating. But within it lies an opportunity these firms are uniquely positioned to seize — if they are willing to reimagine new value streams.
The numbers tell a stark story. Accenture eliminated 22,000 positions in 2023 alone, including 11,000 in a single quarter. McKinsey, whose headcount ballooned to more than 45,000 at its post-pandemic peak, has been quietly contracting ever since, with further cuts of up to 10 percent of non-client-facing staff signaled for 2026. PwC abandoned its ambitious target of 100,000 net new hires, cut its global workforce by 5,600 in the year to June 2025, and saw revenue growth slow for the third consecutive year, reaching just 2.9 percent on revenues of $56.9 billion. Across the three firms, graduate recruitment is being cut, start dates deferred, and entire specialist divisions, in data engineering, design, research, and analysis, are being restructured out of existence.
The explanation most commonly offered is AI. It is also correct, as far as it goes. The work that once required armies of junior consultants to gather data, build market analyses, synthesize competitor intelligence, and produce the slide decks that justified eye-watering fees can now be accomplished in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost. Clients know this. They are increasingly unwilling to pay premium rates for work that a well-prompted AI model can produce overnight. The traditional consulting pyramid, a handful of senior partners generating insight, supported by tier upon tier of analysts and associates providing the labor, is structurally obsolete.
Here is what the restructuring announcements do not address: the genuine, urgent, and largely unmet need that these firms are uniquely equipped to serve. And it has nothing to do with research, analysis, or strategy decks.
The Capability Crisis No One Is Naming
In four decades of advising boards and executive teams across Fortune 500 and FTSE 250 companies, I have observed a persistent and widening gap between organizations' strategic ambitions and the leadership and business capabilities of the people within them. Most companies do an extremely poor job of developing their employees professionally. They invest in technical training and compliance programs. They run occasional management development workshops. They send high-potentials to MBA programs and hope the investment pays off. What they almost never do is build, in any systematic and sustained way, the strategic thinking, leadership judgment, and business literacy that transforms competent specialists into genuinely effective leaders.
This is not a marginal problem. It is the central constraint on organizational performance in the modern economy. AI is accelerating it. As routine analytical and process tasks are automated, the premium shifts decisively toward the human capabilities that AI cannot replicate: sound judgment, strategic reasoning, the ability to lead through uncertainty, to build cultures that attract and retain talent, and to make decisions under genuine complexity. These are not skills that emerge naturally from a career in one discipline. They must be developed deliberately, rigorously, and continuously.
As AI automates the analytical, the premium shifts to what AI cannot replicate: judgment, strategic reasoning, and the ability to lead through uncertainty.
What Consulting Firms Actually Know How to Do
Here is the underappreciated truth about Accenture, PwC, McKinsey, and their peers: beneath the slide decks and the billing structures, these organizations have spent decades developing something genuinely valuable. They know how businesses work. They understand strategy formulation, organizational design, financial analysis, change management, and leadership development at a level of sophistication that very few institutions can match. They have trained generations of talented people in the disciplines of structured thinking, rigorous problem-solving, and effective communication under pressure. That institutional knowledge does not disappear when the billable-hour model becomes uncompetitive. It becomes, if anything, more valuable.
A consulting firm that helps clients build AI-augmented strategic thinking is not competing with AI. It is making AI work.
The opportunity is to turn that expertise outward in a fundamentally different way. Not as a service that produces deliverables, but as a partnership that develops people. Corporate learning partner is not a glamorous title, but it describes something that the business world desperately needs and is currently failing to find. Imagine Accenture or McKinsey deploying their best sector expertise not to produce a strategy document, but to run a sustained, immersive capability-building program for a client's top 200 leaders. Imagine PwC applying its financial and risk expertise not to an audit, but to building genuine financial and strategic literacy across a client's entire management population.
This is not a retreat from strategic ambition. It is a recognition that strategy without capability is a document, not a direction. In my recent book, Culture 4.0, I argue that the organizations best positioned to thrive amid sustained disruption are not those with the cleverest strategies, but those with the deepest wells of human capability: leaders at every level who understand the business, think strategically, and can adapt continuously. Building that capability is the highest-value service any external partner could offer. It is also currently a largely vacant market.
AI as the Curriculum, Not the Threat
There is a particular irony in the fact that the technology disrupting the consulting model is simultaneously creating the most urgent new development need in the corporate world. Every organization is now trying to figure out how to integrate AI into its operations. Most are doing so through a combination of technology procurement and hope. What they are not doing, in any systematic way, is developing the human judgment required to use AI well: the ability to frame the right questions, to evaluate AI outputs critically, to understand where automation enhances decisions and where it obscures them, and to lead organizations through the cultural and structural changes that serious AI adoption requires.
AI creates a capability-building challenge, not a technology challenge.
And it sits squarely in the space where a reimagined consulting model could create genuine, differentiated value. A consulting firm that positions itself as a partner helping client organizations build AI-augmented strategic thinking across their leadership populations is not competing with AI. It is making AI work. That is a service for which clients will pay, and pay well, because the alternative, deploying AI on top of organizations whose people lack the judgment to direct it effectively, is a risk that boards and chief executives are beginning to understand.
A New Business Model Hiding in Plain Sight
The shift I am describing requires consulting firms to make a genuinely uncomfortable cultural transition of their own. The traditional model rewards the production of intellectual deliverables: the report, the recommendation, the roadmap. It measures success by the quality of the output and the seniority of the partner who signs it off. A corporate learning partner model rewards something different: the measurable improvement in client capability over time. It requires patience, sustained engagement, and a willingness to be assessed not on the elegance of a presentation but on whether the people in the room are genuinely more capable twelve months later.
That is a harder discipline. It is also a stickier, more defensible, and ultimately more valuable business model than selling strategy documents in a market where AI is becoming a faster, cheaper competitor. Long-term capability partnerships, structured around the genuine measurement of development outcomes, create exactly the kind of deep client relationships that the traditional project-based model could never create. They also create something consulting firms currently lack: a reason for clients to keep them around when the immediate project is done.
Accenture, PwC, and McKinsey are not facing extinction. They are facing a forced reinvention that most incumbents resist until the alternative becomes unavoidable. The firms that move first, that have the courage to cannibalize their existing model before the market does it for them, will find that the demand for what they could offer, rigorous, expert, sustained human capability development at scale, is not shrinking. It has barely been tapped.
The irony would be considerable: the firms best known for telling other organizations how to transform themselves, finally doing it.
About the Author
John R. Childress is a senior executive advisor and co-founder of the Senn-Delaney Leadership Consulting Group, one of the world's pioneering corporate culture and leadership development practices, and currently a senior advisor to boards and C-suite executives on corporate culture, strategy execution, and leadership. With four decades of experience across Fortune 500 and FTSE 250 organizations, he is the co-founder of Pyxis Culture Technologies and the author of Culture 4.0: The Future of Corporate Culture (LID Publishing, 2026). Learn more at www.johnrchildress.com. You can reach John for a confidential discussion at john@johnrchildress.com