AI reshapes consulting hiring

Top consulting firms are reworking entry-level hiring as artificial intelligence takes over more of the slide-building and spreadsheet work that once trained junior staff. (bloomberg.com) Bloomberg Businessweek reported on April 15 that McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group and Bain are moving away from hiring “slide-deck and spreadsheet jockeys” and toward candidates who can do more with clients than polish presentations. (bloomberg.com) The change follows three years of internal tool rollouts. McKinsey said its Lilli system can search more than 100,000 documents across 40-plus knowledge sources, while Bain said its Sage platform has been in phased deployment since early 2023. (mckinsey.com, bain.com) Those tools target work that used to fill the first years of consulting: finding prior research, drafting analyses and turning them into client-ready pages. McKinsey said Lilli cuts an initial research-and-networking task that could take two weeks. (mckinsey.com) Hiring was already shifting before this month’s report. McKinsey said in September 2025 that it planned to hire 12% more people in North America in 2026 than in 2025, while also saying younger recruits would need stronger technology and artificial-intelligence skills. (msn.com) Outside data points the same way. Revelio Labs said overall hiring demand at leading consulting firms was about 20% below its peak by early 2026, consultant hiring was down about 40% from 2023 levels, and senior consultant hiring was up 55% from 2020. (learningnews.com) The work firms want to sell is also moving closer to execution. McKinsey has told recruits they will be “at the table with senior executives” and work on implementation, while Accenture said in its 2025 annual report that generative and agentic AI revenue tripled to $2.7 billion and bookings nearly doubled to $5.9 billion. (mckinsey.com, accenture.com) That leaves a tension for graduates: consulting still recruits heavily on campuses, but the old apprenticeship model depended on lots of junior people learning by doing repetitive work. McKinsey is now even testing whether candidates can use AI in interviews, with a Lilli-based case exercise being piloted for U.S. applicants. (managementconsulted.com, managementconsulted.com) The firms are not saying junior hiring disappears. They are saying the entry-level consultant who gets hired in 2026 will be judged less on making slides fast and more on using AI, checking its output and helping clients put plans into practice. (bloomberg.com, mckinsey.com)