The Pyramid Is Coming Down. Now What?

McKinsey cut 3,000 to 4,000 people this year. About 10% of the firm. The stated reason is AI-driven productivity. But that framing gives AI too much credit and the business model too little scrutiny.

The pyramid was never a delivery model. It was a pricing model.

Here's how it worked. A junior analyst does the analysis. A manager packages it. A partner presents it. You pay for all three, even when the analysis now takes two hours instead of two weeks. The leverage wasn't in the people. It was in the pricing architecture. And AI just made the math visible.

I've spent years watching how large firms price work. The pyramid is elegant when the work genuinely requires all the layers. But a lot of consulting engagements don't. What they require is the partner's judgment and the analyst's output. The manager in the middle is how you justify the invoice. When AI compresses the analysis layer, you can't keep charging for the full stack. The clients know it, and now the firms do too.

This isn't AI replacing consultants. That's the wrong read. This is AI exposing that a lot of consulting headcount was priced into the model, not actually necessary to the work. The firms cutting now aren't the ones that lost. They're the ones that moved first before a client said it out loud in a negotiation.

The opportunity in this moment belongs to mid-market firms that never had the pyramid to begin with. Leaner teams, outcomes-focused delivery, less overhead baked into the engagement structure. The story is better now, and so is the delivery.

The pyramid is coming down at every level of the market. The question isn't whether it happens to you. It's what you're building while it does.