The Premium You Charged Was for Knowing Things

McKinsey is cutting 3,000 to 4,000 jobs. Bain is cutting. BCG is cutting. When every major firm moves in the same direction in the same quarter, it stops being a business decision and starts being a market signal.

A professor at IE Business School put it plainly in a recent Fast Company piece: "AI is replacing the technical expertise and insight that for decades justified the existence of these firms as privileged intermediaries of knowledge." Read that sentence twice. It is not wrong.

I have been in this industry long enough to know what we were selling. A large part of it was this: we know things you don't, and knowing things is expensive. The credential, the methodology, the industry benchmark that only we had access to. That was the product. And it may no longer be the product.

This is not the same argument as the pyramid collapsing, or headcount reduction (though both are happening). Those are symptoms. The root cause is that the reason enterprises paid premium fees, access to specialized knowledge that was genuinely scarce, may no longer be scarce. An AI system knows things. Instantly. Cheaply. At scale.

But this does not mean consulting is dying. It means consulting that sells knowing things is dying. Consulting that sells judgment (what to do with what you know), relationships (who calls you at midnight when it goes sideways), and accountability (the firm that stands behind the result) is not being automated away. Those are still human. We are buying intelligence with models, but we are not buying wisdom with them.

The firms cutting are not cutting senior partners. They are cutting junior research roles and back-office functions where AI has compressed the workflow. The repricing is happening at the bottom, but it will move up faster than most people expect.

My teams are in client environments doing this work right now. And what I can tell you is that the clients who are figuring this out fastest are not asking "how do we use AI" as a technology question. They are asking "what are we actually paying for when we hire outside help," and they are getting comfortable with a different answer than they had two years ago.

The honest question for anyone leading a consulting practice: what percentage of your revenue is selling knowledge, and what percentage is selling judgment? If you don't know the answer, now is a good time to find out.