I have been selected over McKinsey, Deloitte, Accenture, KPMG and Bain on more mandates than I can readily count. In almost every case, the selection was made by an organisation that had already worked with one or more of those firms and found the experience wanting — not in intellectual quality, but in execution accountability and commercial result.
01The centenary and the cuts
McKinsey marked its hundredth anniversary in October 2025 with the kind of confident public messaging you would expect from a firm of its standing. Behind that messaging, reporting through late 2025 and into 2026 has tracked a different story: headcount falling from a 2022 peak of roughly 45,000 to somewhere in the 36,000–40,000 range, with several thousand further roles reportedly under review over an 18–24 month horizon. McKinsey is not unusual in this. Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG, EY, Bain and BCG have all carried out comparable workforce reductions in their consulting divisions since 2023.
That is a remarkable pattern for an industry that, for most of the last three decades, only grew.
02This is not really an AI story
The convenient explanation is that AI is doing to strategy consulting what it is doing to other knowledge work — automating the research synthesis, the market sizing, the first-draft deck that used to occupy armies of junior consultants. There is some truth in that; AI genuinely has compressed work that used to require headcount. But it is an incomplete explanation, and a flattering one for the firms involved, because it locates the problem in the technology rather than in the model.
The more accurate read, and one that several industry analysts have converged on independently, is that the firms built around pure strategy advice — McKinsey, BCG, Bain — face a more structural challenge than the firms built around technology-enabled execution, such as Deloitte and Accenture. AI is accelerating a shift that was already under way: the value in transformation work is moving toward firms, and individuals, who can be held accountable for execution, not just for the diagnosis. The layoffs are a lagging indicator of that shift, not its cause.
03The structural problem with the Tier-1 model
The Tier-1 model is structurally challenged in transformation contexts for three specific reasons, none of which are about the calibre of the people involved.
- It separates the people who diagnose and design from the people who deliver. The partner who sells the engagement and shapes the recommendation is rarely the person accountable for whether it works in production eighteen months later.
- It creates incentives around scope expansion rather than outcome delivery. A staffed, billable team has a structural incentive to find more work within the existing mandate, which is a different incentive to closing the mandate as fast as the client's outcome allows.
- It removes senior involvement once the engagement is mobilised. The partner-led pitch gives way to a delivery team that is, on average, considerably more junior — a well-documented pattern across the industry, not a criticism specific to any one firm.
These are not criticisms of individuals — they are structural features of a model that was designed for a different era of consulting.Dan Collins
04What clients are actually choosing instead
The organisations moving away from Tier-1 firms on complex mandates are not, in my experience, choosing cheaper alternatives. They are choosing a different structure: a small, senior-led team where the most experienced people are present for delivery, not just for the pitch; a single named individual accountable for the commercial outcome rather than a rotating account team; and engagement terms anchored to outcomes rather than to time-and-materials scope that can expand indefinitely.
That is, in essence, the model this firm is built around — and it is worth being explicit that it does not require Tier-1-scale resourcing to deliver Tier-1-scale outcomes on a single complex mandate. It requires a different allocation of seniority across the life of the engagement, not a different level of intellectual rigour.
05Not a knock on talent
None of this is a claim that Tier-1 firms lack capable people — they recruit some of the best analytical talent in the world, and I spent years working alongside people from those firms whose judgment I respected and still do. The argument is about the model those people operate inside, and whether that model is the right one for a specific, complex, execution-dependent mandate. Increasingly, for the mandates that matter most, organisations are concluding it is not — and building or buying a different model instead.
06The mandates where the model still works well
It would be dishonest to frame this as a universal displacement, and it isn't one. For genuinely strategic questions — market entry analysis, portfolio-level capital allocation, competitive benchmarking across a large comparator set — the Tier-1 model's depth of proprietary data, pattern-matching across hundreds of comparable engagements, and analytical bench strength remain a real and defensible advantage. Organisations are not abandoning that capability. What is shifting is the boundary of where that model is asked to operate: increasingly confined to the diagnostic and strategic-options phase, with a different structure — leaner, more senior, accountable for delivery — brought in once the mandate moves from "what should we do" to "make this actually happen and stay accountable for the result."
That handoff point, in my experience, is exactly where the Tier-1 model's structural weaknesses described above become most visible, and exactly where clients are now most willing to bring in a different kind of resource.
07What boards should ask before the next mandate is scoped
For any board or CEO currently weighing how to resource a complex transformation mandate, three questions tend to clarify the choice faster than a beauty parade between firms.
- Who, specifically, will still be in the room eighteen months from now? Ask for names, not titles, and ask what percentage of their time is committed.
- How is the firm compensated relative to the outcome, not the hours? A fee structure indexed to time and materials has a structural incentive that does not always align with closing the mandate quickly.
- Who carries the commercial accountability after the engagement ends? If the answer is "the client's own team, once the firm has handed over," the firm has been paid for advice, not for a result — and the client should price the engagement accordingly.
None of these questions require dismissing Tier-1 firms from consideration. They simply make explicit a trade-off that the traditional model has, for a long time, left implicit — and that organisations are now, finally, pricing in before they sign rather than discovering after they have.