Will Consultants Be Replaced by AI? What Students Need to Know in 2026

TL;DR

• Will consultants be replaced by AI? No, but the job is being rebuilt. BLS projects 10.1% growth for management analysts from 2025 to 2035, while Big 4 advisory and IT delivery arms trim first-year hiring.

• AI already drafts slides, searches firm research and runs routine client operations at McKinsey, BCG and the Big 4.

• Client-facing strategy, implementation and change work are growing. Desk research and slide production are shrinking.

• Your move now: get one real project where you framed a problem, checked AI output and presented to a stakeholder.

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Will Consultants Be Replaced by AI?

No. Consultants aren't being replaced by AI, but the first two years of the job are being rewritten. Management analysts, the federal category that covers consultants, sit in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' highest AI exposure tier and are still projected to grow 10.1% from 2025 to 2035, almost three times the 3.5% rate for all jobs.

That's the headline. The fine print matters more if you're a student.

Having sat down with thousands of students one-on-one at Extern, we hear the same worry from people aiming at consulting: if AI can build a deck in seconds, why would a firm pay a 22-year-old to build one? It's a fair question. Consulting is also one of the fields our students most want to try next (13.5% of answers in our June 2026 post-program survey), so we wanted a straight answer backed by data, not a pep talk.

The AI Exposure Scorecard for Consulting

We score every field in this series on the same five rows. Here's consulting, using management analysts (BLS code 13-1111) as the core occupation.

Read the first row carefully. "Very high" doesn't mean "about to disappear." BLS built the category from five research measures, including Microsoft's and Anthropic's, and says in its own AI exposure methodology that exposure "does not imply job loss." It means a lot of the tasks are ones AI can touch.

And the two company measures don't even agree with each other. Microsoft's Working with AI study puts management analysts in the top 3% of occupations, while Anthropic's labor market study ranks them 94th. Different users, different scoring. So we lead with the BLS tier and treat the other two as color.

IMAGE 1 — HERO, 16:9

Alt: A young professional in a navy blazer stands alone beside a tall floor-to-ceiling window in an empty client meeting room

Prompt: A young professional in a navy blazer stands alone beside a tall floor-to-ceiling window in an empty client meeting room at early morning, the city still grey and misty outside, holding a closed laptop against their chest with their left arm while their right hand rests lightly on the back of a leather chair, a long empty conference table with neatly pushed-in chairs stretching behind them, cool blue dawn light mixed with one warm pendant lamp overhead, medium-wide shot from the doorway at eye level, entire figure clearly visible, relaxed natural posture, a half-finished paper cup of coffee left on the windowsill, sharp focus throughout. No text, no numbers, no writing, no labels, no logos and no lettering anywhere in the frame.

What Parts of Consulting Is AI Already Doing?

AI already handles a big share of the desk work that used to fill a junior consultant's week: searching internal research, drafting first-pass slides, summarizing material and running routine client processes. What it still doesn't do well is decide which question matters, or notice when its own answer is wrong. That second part is now the job.

What the Big Firms Have Rolled Out

The adoption numbers are bigger than most students expect. According to Business Insider's reporting on BCG (September 2025), nearly 90% of BCG's 33,000 employees use AI and about half use it daily. Its slide tool, Deckster, was trained on 800 to 900 firm templates, and about 40% of associates use it every week. Roughly two-thirds of BCG's most advanced AI users are associates and consultants, the entry ranks.

McKinsey's CEO Bob Sternfels described the firm as 40,000 people working alongside 20,000 AI agents, according to HRD's January 2026 report. The Big 4 went further into client delivery. Business Insider's 2025 Big Four recap lists PwC's Agent OS with 25,000 agents running across client operations, EY's 1,000 agents in 2025 with a target of 100,000 by 2028, KPMG's Workbench, and Deloitte's Zora AI "digital workers."

The BCG Experiment Every Consulting Student Should Know

The best evidence on AI and consulting work comes from a controlled study of 758 BCG consultants using GPT-4. The peer-reviewed version, published in Organization Science in March 2026, found that on tasks AI handles well, consultants with AI finished 12.2% more tasks, worked 25.1% faster and scored more than 30% higher on quality.

But then the researchers handed them a task chosen to sit just outside what AI could do. Consultants using AI were 19 percentage points less likely to get the right answer (60% and 70.6% correct in the two AI groups, versus 84.5% without AI).

That's the whole game in one experiment. AI makes you faster on the work it's good at and quietly worse on the work it isn't, so the skill firms pay for is knowing which is which.

One caveat: this ran in 2023 on GPT-4, and the tools have moved a lot since. On the APEX-Agents benchmark, the top model scored 24.0% on long consulting-style tasks in January 2026, and the top published score on a revised version was 82.4% as of October 28, 2026. The test changed between those two numbers, though. We don't know yet how much of that jump is better models and how much is a different test.

What Does the Job Data Actually Say About Consulting?

The long-run numbers look strong and the short-run entry-level numbers look mixed. BLS projects 109,200 new management analyst jobs between 2025 and 2035, with 94,100 openings a year once you count people retiring or switching fields. Meanwhile, research on young workers in AI-exposed jobs shows hiring for 22- to 25-year-olds running below trend.

The BLS Outlook for Consulting Roles (2025-35)

Here's the striking part. Every consulting-adjacent occupation we checked is in BLS's "Very high" AI exposure tier, and every one is projected to grow:

• Management analysts: +10.1%, median pay $101,860 (May 2025)

• Project management specialists: +6.7%, median $102,320

• Operations research analysts: +11.9%, median $88,940

• Market research analysts and marketing specialists: +7.0%, median $78,760

Those figures come from the BLS AI exposure and 2025-35 projections file. The management analyst Occupational Outlook Handbook page adds two details students tend to skip. Growth is expected to be strongest at smaller firms that specialize in areas such as IT or HR, not only at the famous names. And the typical way in is a bachelor's degree plus some related experience (under five years), which tells you how much a real project on your resume matters.

From Extern's Data: Postings and Who's Hiring Interns

In US job-posting counts Extern tracks daily (Adzuna, July to October 2026), live "management consultant" postings went from about 90,800 to about 105,700. That's a rise, not a collapse.

The employers posting the most consulting internships in Extern's posting tracker (August to November 2026) were RSM (72 listings), West Monroe (67), PwC (48), Accenture (32) and Oliver Wyman (14), out of 611 listings from 163 employers. None of them are Extern partners; this is simply who's hiring. Only six of those listings published pay, which is too few to quote a number.

Two warnings. Postings aren't hires, and "management consultant" is a broad title that recruiters use loosely.

So read this as a sign that demand hasn't dried up, not as proof that entry-level hiring is fine.

What the Entry-Level Research Shows

The most cited study here is Stanford's "Canaries in the Coal Mine?", revised in August 2026 with payroll data through June 2026. It finds employment of 22- to 25-year-olds in AI-exposed occupations is about 19% below where it would be if it had kept pace with less-exposed jobs. Experienced workers show no comparable gap.

The gap comes mostly from fewer hires, not layoffs. The authors are clear that the result is descriptive and they don't claim AI caused it. It's also economy-wide, not consulting-specific.

Anthropic's March 2026 labor study points the same direction, more gently. The rate at which 22- to 25-year-olds found jobs in highly exposed occupations was down about 14% compared with 2022, a result the authors call "barely statistically significant," and they saw no rise in unemployment for exposed workers.

Is that a crisis? Not yet. But it's a signal that the first rung is getting narrower.

Which Consulting Jobs Are Safest, and Which Are Most at Risk?

The safest consulting roles are the ones built around clients, implementation and change: work that happens in rooms, on sites and in relationships. The most exposed are the desk roles whose output is research, synthesis and slides, because that output is exactly what firm AI tools now produce.

The pattern is simple. Work that ends in a document shrinks. Work that ends in a decision someone acts on grows.

Business analysts sit right on that line, which is why they get their own breakdown in our guide to whether AI will replace business analysts. If you're drawn to the data side of consulting, the data analysts article in this series covers that path.

How Is AI Changing Entry-Level Consulting Work?

The first-year consultant used to earn a place by doing research, building slides and cleaning data. AI now drafts much of that, so firms are splitting. Strategy firms say they'll keep hiring juniors and train them differently, while Big 4 advisory and IT services arms are thinning the base.

The Split Between Strategy Firms and Delivery Firms

On one side, McKinsey said in September 2025 it planned to grow its North American workforce 12% in 2026, including more entry-level hires, according to Reuters reporting summarized by People Matters. That was a plan, and we haven't seen a reported result yet. Bain's head of global talent acquisition said on the firm's August 2026 podcast that "Bain is hiring more, not less," while also recruiting engineers and data scientists to sit alongside consultants.

But PwC US plans to cut graduate hiring by a third over three years. An internal slide partly cited AI; PwC itself pointed to technology change and low attrition. Accenture booked an $865 million restructuring in 2025 and said it's exiting people for whom reskilling isn't viable, according to Business Insider's earnings coverage.

We've been writing "consulting" as if it's one industry. It isn't, really. If your target is Big 4 advisory or a large IT services firm, the entry-level squeeze is real and you should plan for it. If you're aiming at strategy firms, the bar is moving more than the headcount. (The accountants article covers the Big 4 audit and tax side.)

What Firms Expect on Day One

The new day-one bar shows up in hiring and reviews:

• McKinsey asks some final-round candidates in North America to work with its internal AI tool, Lilli, and evaluates whether they keep ownership of the final answer.

• BCG treats AI use as an expectation and grades consultants on the judgment they apply to its output.

• KPMG wants juniors to become "managers of agents."

• PwC's AI assurance leader said new hires will likely be doing today's manager-level work within three years.

• Bain screens for "technical curiosity."

So the first-year job isn't disappearing. It's starting one level higher.

The Apprenticeship Problem Nobody Has Solved

Here's the uncomfortable part. Juniors used to learn the craft by doing the grunt work, and that grunt work is the part going to AI.

The emlyon Consulting AI Barometer (July 2026, a survey of 100+ consultants) found 72% use AI every day and 43% expect firms to take an "obelisk" shape, narrower at the base. Only 18% said their teams have consistent standards for reviewing AI deliverables. The study's authors call the risk an "apprenticeship gap": losing the assignments through which expertise gets built.

It's a small survey from a business school, so don't treat it as gospel.

And yet it matches what Harvard Business Review argued in 2025 about the consulting pyramid giving way to a leaner shape.

What does that mean for you? You may have to build some of that early experience before the job starts, because the job may not hand it to you.

What Skills Make a Consultant Hard to Replace?

The consultants who are hardest to replace frame problems well, check AI output instead of trusting it, and get real people to act on a recommendation. Each skill below holds up because the research says AI is weak there, and each one comes with a way to prove it before you have the title.

1. Problem structuring. Issue trees, hypotheses, deciding what not to analyze. The BCG study showed AI hurt performance on the task it couldn't handle, which means framing is the human edge. Prove it: a written case write-up with your issue tree, or a case competition result.

2. Judging AI output. Verifying numbers, checking sources, knowing where the tool breaks. Deloitte partially refunded the Australian government in October 2025 after errors in a report made partly with AI, so this isn't theoretical. Prove it: a portfolio piece showing an AI draft, your corrections and your sources side by side.

3. Working fluently with AI tools. Prompting, agents, slide automation. McKinsey's AI interview round and Bain's "technical curiosity" screen both test this. Prove it: a project built with an AI assistant, with your prompts documented.

4. Client communication and stakeholder interviews. Interviewing staff and conferring with people on new systems are core consulting tasks in the O*NET profile, and they're the low-exposure half of the job. Prove it: a recorded presentation to a real stakeholder, plus your interview notes.

5. Data analysis. Excel modeling, SQL, some Python. Operations research and data science roles are growing despite very high exposure. Prove it: a model or dashboard in a portfolio.

6. Change management. Rolling out a process or tool and getting people to use it. Prove it: a project where you measured adoption before and after.

And notice what's missing from that list. "Makes beautiful slides" used to be a junior superpower, and it isn't one anymore.

For a wider view across fields, our guides to jobs AI won't replace and the best paying AI-proof majors show where consulting sits next to other paths.

How Can You Get AI-Ready Consulting Experience as a Student?

Get one real project where you framed a problem, used AI to speed up the work, checked what it produced and presented the result to someone who had to act on it. Pair that with an early start on recruiting, because consulting timelines run far ahead of graduation.

Start With the Recruiting Calendar

Consulting recruits early. Our consulting internships guide for summer 2027 tracks the firm-by-firm timeline: the main MBB rounds for summer 2027 closed in spring 2026, and Big 4 and boutique firms ran later. If you're a sophomore or first-year, the summer 2028 consulting guide is the one to bookmark, since MBB applications for that cycle are projected to open between June and August 2027.

For firm detail, our McKinsey internship guide and PwC internship guide cover programs and how to apply. Given the hiring split above, it's smart to apply across both strategy and advisory firms instead of betting on one tier.

Get One Real Project on Your Resume

Firms now expect you to arrive able to check AI work and talk to clients. The cleanest proof is a project for a real organization. At Extern, we've seen that students who can walk an interviewer through one real problem, start to finish, interview very differently from students who can only describe coursework.

That's what an Externship is built for. Most run 8 weeks (the range is 4 to 11), at 5 to 10 hours a week, on company-endorsed projects with guided support. The Lean Startup Co. Corporate Strategy Externship gives you strategy work for a real company, and the Institute of Mental Health Healthcare Operations & Consulting Externship is close to what operations consultants actually do.

It won't replace a consulting internship.

But it gives you something specific to say in a case interview when they ask what you've worked on.

Build Your AI-Judgment Portfolio Piece

Take one project and document three things: the AI first draft, what you changed and why, and the sources you used to check it. Keep it to two pages. It's the single best answer to the question firms are now quietly asking every junior candidate: can you tell when the machine is wrong?

When you're ready for real project work, you can browse current Externships by field.

Extern is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by any company, firm or organization named here. This article is based on publicly available information as of November 2026. Job data and company plans change, so check the original sources linked above.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will McKinsey be replaced by AI?

No. McKinsey is using AI heavily, with its CEO describing 40,000 people working alongside 20,000 AI agents, but it's reshaping roles rather than closing up shop. In September 2025 it said it planned to grow its North American workforce 12% in 2026, including more entry-level hires. The desk research juniors used to do is the part changing fastest.

Is consulting dying because of AI?

No, consulting isn't dying, but its shape is changing. BLS still projects management analyst jobs to grow 10.1% through 2035. What's fading is the old model where large teams of juniors produce research and slides. Expect leaner teams, more implementation work and higher expectations for new hires from day one.

Is consulting a good career option in 2026?

Yes, for students who like ambiguous problems and working with people. Median pay for management analysts was $101,860 in May 2025, and openings run about 94,100 a year. The catch is that entry-level competition is tougher, so you'll need proof you can do real project work, not just good grades.

Are Big 4 firms still hiring entry-level consultants?

Yes, but fewer in some places. PwC US plans to cut graduate hiring by about a third over three years. Even so, PwC still posted 48 consulting internships in our tracker this fall, so apply broadly, start early in the recruiting cycle and show AI fluency in your application.

Do consultants need to learn AI and coding?

You need AI fluency more than deep coding. Firms like McKinsey now test how candidates work with AI tools, and Bain screens for technical curiosity. Basic Excel modeling and some SQL or Python help a lot, but the bigger skill is checking AI output and explaining what it got wrong.

How do consultants use AI day to day?

Mostly for first drafts and search. Consultants use firm tools to find past research, summarize documents, draft slides and brainstorm. That same BCG reporting found daily use is now normal at the firm. The final storyline, the client conversation and the call on what's actually true still sit with the consultant.

Will AI replace business analysts?

Not wholesale, though routine business analyst tasks are shifting to AI. Drafting user stories, meeting notes and standard reports is getting automated, while stakeholder interviews and judgment stay human. BLS has no business analyst code, so we break down the closest categories in our separate guide on whether AI will replace business analysts.