Consultants, the Sky Is Falling. The Sky Is Falling But Billing Continues
December 30, 2025
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
Have you ever heard of a person with minimal social media footprints named Veronika Kapustina? I sure hadn’t. She popped up as a chief executive officer of an instant mashed potato-type of company named TON Strategy Company. I was listening to her Russian-accented presentation at a crypto conference via YouTube. My mobile buzzed and I saw a link from one of my team to this story: “Why the McKinsey Layoffs Are a Warning Signal for Consulting in the AI Age.”
Yep, the sky is falling, the sky is falling. As an 81 year old dinobaby, I recall my mother reading me a book in which a cartoon character was saying, “The sky is falling.” News flash: The sky is still there, and I would wager a devalued US$1.00 that the sky will be “there” tomorrow.
This sort of strange write up asserts:
While the digital age reduced information asymmetry, the AI age goes further. It increasingly equalizes analytical and recommendation capabilities.
The author is allegedly a former blue chip consultant. Therefore, this person knows about that which he opines. The main point is that consulting firms may not need to hire freshly credentialed MBAs. The grunt work can be performed by an AI system. True, most AI systems make up information with estimates running between 10 and 33 percent of the outputs. I suppose that’s about par for an MBA whose father is a United States senator or the CEO of a client of the blue chip firm. Maybe the progeny of the powerful are just smarter than an AI. I don’t know. I am a dinobaby, and it has been decades since I worked at a blue chip outfit.
What pulled me from my looking for information about the glib Russian, Veronika K? That’s an easy question. I think the write up misses the entire point of a blue chip consulting firm and for some quite specialized consulting firms like the nuclear outfit employing me before I jumped to the blue chip’s carpetland.
The cited write up states as actual factual:
As the center of gravity shifts toward execution depth and the ability to drive continuous change, success will depend on how effectively firms rewire their DNA—building the operating model and talent engine required to implement and scale tech-led transformation.
Yep, this sounds wise. Success depends on clients “rewiring their DNA.” Okay, but what do consulting firms have to do? Those outfits have to rewire as well and that spells T-R-O-U-B-L-E for big outfits whether they do big think stuff like business strategy or financial engineering or for outfits that do semi-strategy and plumbing.
The hybrid teams from a blue chip consultant are poised to start work immediately. Rates are the same, but fewer humans means more profits. It helps that the intern’s father is the owner of the business devasted by a natural disaster. Thanks, Qwen, good enough.
Let me provide a different view of the sky is falling notion.
- As stated, the sky is not falling. Change happens. Some outfits adapt; others don’t. Hasta, la vista Arthur Andersen.
- Blue chip consulting firms (strategy or financial engineering) are like comfort food. The vast majority of engagements are follow on or repeat business. There is are tactics that are in place to make this happen. Clients like to eat burgers and pizza. Consultants sell the knowledge processed goodies.
- New hires don’t always do “real” work. New hires provide (hopefully) connections, knowledge not readily available to the firm, and the equivalent of Russia’s meat assaults. Hey, someone has to work on that study of world economic change due in 14 days.
- Clients hire consultants for many reasons; for example, to help get a colleague fired or sent to the office in Nome, Alaska; to have the prestige halo at the country club; to add respectability to what is a criminal enterprise (hello, Arthur Andersen. Remember Enron’s special purpose vehicles? No just graduated MBA thinks those up at a fraternity party do they?)
Translating this to real world consulting impact means:
- Old line dinobaby consultants like me will grouse that AI is wrong and must be checked by someone who knows when the AI system is in hallucination mode and can fix the error before something bad like fentanyl happens
- Good enough AI will diffuse because AI is cheaper than humans who have to be managed (who wants to do that?), given health care, and provided with undeserved and unpredictable vacation requests, and a retirement account (who really wants to retire after 30 years at a blue chip consultant? I sure didn’t. Get the experience and get out of Dodge).
- Consulting is like love, truth (really popular these days), justice, and the American way. These reference points means that as more actual hands on work becomes a service, consulting, not software, consumes every revenue generating function. If some big firms disappear, that’s life.
Consulting is forever and someone will show up to buy up a number of firms in a niche and become the new big winner. The dinobaby blue chips will just coalesce into one big firm. At the outfit which employed me, we joked about how similar our counterparts were at other firms. We weren’t individuals. We were people who could snap in, learn quickly, and output words that made clients believe they had just learned something like e=mc^2. Others were happy to have that idiot in the Pittsburgh office sent to learn the many names of snow in Nome.
The sky is not falling. The sun is rising. A billable day arrives for the foreseeable future.
Stephen E Arnold, December 30, 2025
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