Professional services is at a crossroads.
McKinsey just announced they now count 25,000 AI agents as part of their workforce alongside 40,000 human employees. Bob Sternfels, their global managing partner, expects parity by the end of 2026. That’s one AI agent for every human consultant.
This isn’t a pilot program. It’s a fundamental restructuring of how one of the world’s largest consulting firm operates.
If you’re leading a professional services firm, whether you’re a 15 person SI or 1,500 person consultancy, you need to understand what this means for you.
The Crisis Isn’t About AI. It’s About Intelligence.
The debate about AI’s impact on consulting tends to swing between extremes. On the one hand, some argue AI will render consultants obsolete. On the other, some claim it will only make them more indispensable. But the reality is this: consulting isn’t disappearing, but it is being fundamentally reshaped.
For decades, our industry has operated on what we at Moonnox call the “brilliant individual” model. Hire smart people. Put them on projects. Bill their hours. When they leave, scramble to find someone else that can fill the gap.
This model worked when expertise was scarce and clients had no alternatives. But AI has changed the math.
The research and analysis that once required a team of junior consultants can now be done in hours. Data synthesis that took weeks happens in minutes. The grunt work that justified the pyramid structure of consulting firms, partners at the top, associates at the bottom, is being reshaped.
McKinsey reports saving 1.5 million hours in search and synthesis work last year alone. Their AI agents have generated 2.5 million charts in six months. The role of junior consultants is shifting from pure manual execution to supervising AI outputs and operating at a higher level of human judgement than before (the type of skills that used to only come with time on engagements and mentorship with brilliant individuals).
If you’re still running on the brilliant individual model, you’re not just behind, you’re exposed. The expertise that got you here won’t get you where you need to go. And the margins you’ve relied on are compressing fast. (Dig into the margin pressure in Is Time and Materials Dead?)
The Opportunity Hidden Inside the Crisis
While this moment is a threat to the old model, it’s also an opportunity to build something fundamentally more valuable.
Thomson Reuters’ 2025 Future of Professionals report found that organizations with clear AI strategies are twice as likely to see revenue growth from AI adoption. And 3.5 times more likely to experience critical benefits. The divide between firms that have figured this out and firms that haven’t is widening fast.
The Harvard Business Review put it directly: AI is reshaping how firms organize, deliver value, and engage with clients. The traditional pyramid model of consulting is giving way to leaner structures where senior experts and AI systems work together to deliver insights faster and more effectively.
The firms pulling ahead aren’t just adopting AI tools. They’re building systems that capture and compound their institutional knowledge, turning individual expertise into organizational balance sheet value. At Moonnox, we call this “Collective Intelligence” (or CI, for short).
Think about it this way…when your best consultant leaves, where does their knowledge go? The frameworks they’ve built. The client relationships they’ve navigated. The nuanced judgment calls that made them effective. In most firms, all that knowledge walks out the door. Or it gets buried in emails, Slack threads, random call recordings, and Sharepoint folders.
Now imagine a firm where every engagement makes the organization smarter. Where every client interaction feeds the collective intelligence. Where every solution becomes part of a growing, compounding asset. This is what the leaders in this space are building right now. (We break down what the shift looks like in Making the Move From Individual to Compounding Intelligence.)
The Real Question
We talk with professional services leaders every week who are wrestling with the same question: How do we unlock operational precision with AI without turning our industry into a price race to the bottom?
Here’s what we’ve learned: The answer isn’t better AI tools. The answer is building systems where your collective intelligence compounds with every engagement, making your firm exponentially more valuable.
The firms that figure this out will use AI orchestration to build the kind of enterprise value that was never possible in a pure linear growth model.
The firms that don’t? They’ll be drowning in AI tools that get them nowhere. They'll compete on price. And they'll wonder what happened.
The choice is yours.
