It's a question as old as the industry itself: What does a consultant actually do?
Traditionally, consultants have acted as an external support system, called in to crunch the numbers, trim head count, or identify growth opportunities.
Now, AI is reshaping what clients want from consultants and how work gets done, creating a new job profile that blurs the lines between tech and consulting.
Instead of generalist teams producing research and strategy decks, consultants are increasingly expected to provide something tangible: tools, systems, and holistic, ongoing support. The big firms aren't only advising on tech strategy, they're building and implementing it, often through multi-year transformation projects.
To win that work, consulting firms are racing to position themselves as "AI-native."
"The more they're perceived to be a technology firm, the more likely they are to win business," Fiona Czerniawska, CEO of Source Global, a consulting sector intelligence firm, told Business Insider.
But the transformation raises a key question: Are these companies fundamentally changing what they do, or merely how they describe themselves?
The race to become AI-native
Looking back at** **the top firms' actions and rhetoric over the past year makes clear just how central AI has become to the consulting business.
"There is no doubt that our firm is a tech company that delivers now on audit, tax, and advisory services," Tim Walsh, CEO of KPMG US, told Business Insider's Dan DeFrancesco at the World Economic Forum in January.
For the fourth-largest professional services firm in the US, with roots reaching back to 1897, Walsh's statement was striking. A decade ago, KPMG would have described itself as a time-and-materials business with "smart people doing smart things," Rob Fisher, vice chairman of advisory at KPMG, said about Walsh's comments. Now, the firm is embedding AI across its traditional offerings, while responding to growing client demand for subscription-style products, alongside advice and managed services, said Fisher. "We have to become more of a technology organization because clients want to consume our expertise that way," Fisher said.
KPMG isn't an outlier.
PwC has rewritten its training agenda around 30 core skills: 15 AI-centric and 15 human-centric, both of which are "extremely critical" to its success, Yolanda Seals-Coffield, chief people and inclusion officer for PwC US, told Business Insider in February.
EY is using AI as a training assistant to help its staff anticipate how their roles will evolve, and McKinsey has started using Lilli, its internal AI chatbot, in its recruitment process.
Allison Heithoff, a consultant with five years of experience, has seen the change firsthand.
Before AI, most of Heithoff's consulting job was "hands-to-keyboard work." In her first years at the midsize** **firm West Monroe, she spent her time gathering client data, configuring systems, developing features, testing them, and deploying them.
Five years later, AI can do a lot of that work.
The shift has made her role more strategy-focused and technical. Heithoff, who studied business administration, has found herself using AI to code and develop client solutions in ways she never expected.
Consultancies are hiring differently, too, looking to fill their ranks with deeply skilled technologists. Recent annual reports show that Accenture — already known for its technology capabilities — has added nearly 40,000 AI and data professionals in the last two years, and EY has added 61,000 technologists since 2023.
In February, PwC introduced a new career track for the first time in its 170-year history: the engineering track. The move is a "signpost" for where PwC expects future value to be created, Matt Wood, the firm's then-chief technology and innovation officer, told Business Insider. (Wood left the firm in May).
Even the language of consulting is changing. As Business Insider reported in January, Deloitte is outright scrapping titles like "analyst" and "consultant" and giving all US employees more specific job titles.
Tech and consulting are bleeding into each other #
Underpinning all of this is a deeper shift in what consulting firms do and the tools they use to do it. The largest consultancies have struck multibillion-dollar partnerships with the biggest names in AI, such as OpenAI, Nvidia, Anthropic, and Microsoft, to build internal tools that automate work once handled by junior staff. Now they are rolling out networks of AI agents for employees, and launching AI-enhanced platforms to give clients direct access to their expertise.
The work is also starting to look different. The strategy consulting firm BCG reported in April that AI- and tech-focused services now account for over 40% of its total global revenue, driven by a 25% year-on-year growth in AI services. At McKinsey, AI initiatives now account for roughly 40% of the firm's work, Alex Singla, a senior partner who co-leads QuantumBlack, McKinsey's AI arm, told Business Insider in January.
It's the kind of implementation work that tech companies often do with their own products. Last year, OpenAI launched its own consulting wing, offering clients tailored products and implementation support. Palantir, a tech company that sells software platforms, has teams of "forward-deployed engineers" and "customer success teams" that provide hands-on implementation and strategic advisory services to clients. (Palantir also partners with traditional consulting firms like Bain, PwC, and Accenture.)
Add in the surge of new AI-powered consulting startups — betting that AI can do strategy work just as easily as a team of consultants — and the lines between the two worlds get blurrier.
KPMG's Fisher said the firm's leadership team is out on the West Coast and Silicon Valley every six weeks to "stay connected to the action," meeting with founders, venture capital firms, and their large alliance partners. Previously, business development teams on the West Coast and client conversations would help senior leaders keep abreast of technology shifts.
The result of all this tech evolution is partnerships galore between the top firms and AI leaders. Consulting firms have become critical intermediaries in the AI boom, giving top AI companies access to a vast roster of Fortune 500 clients who still want to turn to a traditional firm for breadth of services, sector expertise, and global reach.
From the early internet to cybersecurity to SaaS, consulting has adapted to technology before, layering fresh capabilities onto a familiar model. The difference now, industry insiders say, is that technology capabilities are becoming table stakes for all firms and evolving faster than ever. Over the past decade, technology integration evolved gradually, Tony Farnfield, the CEO of the mid-market consultancy BearingPoint, told Business Insider. AI has disrupted the industry much more rapidly, significantly increasing the level of tech involvement in almost every project, he said.
"Very rarely do we do a project that doesn't have some technology element to it," said Farnfield.
Many firms are now moving toward an "Accenture model" that integrates business strategy with technology and execution in a combined offering.
One of the key drivers leading that transformation is economics. Over the last five years, technology-related services have outperformed the broader market, growing two to six times as fast as traditional sectors, said Czerniawska, the CEO of Source Global. The demand has led "every firm that can do so to invest in their technology services," she said.
"While everyone is offering more technology services, some want to go even further to say, 'If that's what the future looks like, then we need to turn ourselves into a tech services player that just happens to specialize," said Czerniawska.
While the race to become AI native is undeniably on, the industry's reinvention may be more pronounced in pitch than in practice. In terms of pure tech usage, consulting firms are still "a long way from the frontier of what's possible" with AI, Charlie Cheesman, a former senior AI consultant at EY, who helped to write the firm's UK AI strategy, told Business Insider.
Professional services firms' strength lies in "initiating large-scale organizational change," he said.
They** **"were never built to be technical organizations," he said, so they are having to change massively to keep up with AI progress.
Not every firm is rushing to recast itself as a technology company.
"I don't know if the identity of our firm is changing as a result of this," Errol Gardner, global head of consulting at EY, told Business Insider. Technology now drives about half of EY's business, and the firm is hiring deeply technical talent, but that doesn't change EY's core proposition.
"What we do is move clients from state A to state B in a safer way and as value-enabled a way as possible," said Gardner, and AI is a "new tool in the toolbox" to help with that.
Deploying AI at an enterprise-wide scale requires the kind of work consulting firms have long done — navigating regulation, data governance, organizational resistance, and budgets. "They need a business strategy that is powered by AI as opposed to a separate AI strategy," said Gardner.
The identity of a consulting job — being client-facing, delivering value to clients, developing the teams, and working collaboratively — hasn't fundamentally changed, he said.
PwC's Wood struck a similar note: "It's tempting to look at AI and think the firm needs to become a technology company," he said, but PwC's approach is to focus on how to become the best version of itself using AI.
"The real shift in consulting is not from strategy to implementation, or from generalists to specialists. It is that enterprise problems are now more interconnected," Kate Smaje, global leader of technology and AI at McKinsey, told Business Insider.
The employee experience #
Five employees from top consulting firms —** **Deloitte, KPMG, and McKinsey — all said the job was undoubtedly more tech-heavy, but that AI's impact on consulting jobs is more complex than simply turning them into technologists.
Every employee at McKinsey has become more technical than they were three years ago, said Louis-Charles Généreux, an associate partner at McKinsey, who first joined the firm in 2018. Using AI to enhance work has become a crucial part of remaining competitive in the industry, he said.
At Deloitte, AI hasn't caused the work to change overnight, said a US-based technology consultant who has been at the firm for six years. Instead, it's slowly shifted the job from creation to validation and has increased expectations for workers. "Teams are now expected to deliver more with the same or fewer people," the consultant said.
A senior consultant at Deloitte UK said that even after clients implement AI tools, they still return to the firm needing ongoing support. The "core identity of the profession remains rooted in adaptability," the consultant said.
Others said that, while leadership narratives emphasize AI in everything they do, daily use still mostly leans on generative AI rather than agentic AI.
Cheesman, the former EY AI consultant, said the industry's ability to deploy AI has yet to match the technology's potential: Consultancies can move clients "one or two steps forward" when AI could be taking them 5 or 10 steps forward.
There is no shortage of highly intelligent, capable people in the industry, Cheesman said, but 99% are not coders.
For now, it's still unclear how far consulting firms will go toward remaking themselves as technology companies. They may offer more technology services than they did a decade ago, but most clients still think of the top strategy firms as doing strategy, and the Big Four predominantly as doing finance-related work, said Source Global's Czerniawska. Ultimately, she added, it's for clients to decide the firm's identity, not vice versa. Around 90% of clients believe AI will affect how firms deliver their services, yet the share who expect that impact to be significant has fallen — from 60% in 2024 to 40% more recently, according to Source Global's research.
There are also advantages to maintaining the consulting identity. Firms that lean too much towards presenting themselves as technology companies face a pricing risk, said Czerniawska. Clients associate technology with lower costs than traditional consulting, she said. Move too far in that direction, and firms risk eroding the premium they charge.
"Identities have shifted unquestionably, but they've not moved to a point where somebody's saying, 'this is a technology company,'" said Czerniawska.