Quo Vadis, Consulting? What 41,594 Consulting Texts Leave Unsaid

Two weeks ago I wrote a polemic about classic management consulting. Pointed, with a trigger, with an opinion. The obvious response: an isolated case, an anecdote, a bad mood.

So I counted.

Since October 17, 2026, I have collected everything 28 consultancies have published about the future since 2019: studies, outlooks, articles, white papers. McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Roland Berger, the Big Four, Accenture, Capgemini, Oliver Wyman and nineteen more. 41,594 texts in total. Everything was counted without a language model, with fixed word lists and each firm weighted equally, so that KPMG with its many short announcements doesn't set the average. Where a model helped find quotes, I then checked every quote against the original text. The details are at the end.

The question was simple: What do the firms tell their clients about the future? And what does the future of management consulting itself look like, measured by what the firms are doing right now?

Half of It Is AI Now

In 2022, one in seven of the firms' texts referred to AI. In 2026 it is almost one in two. For comparison: in 2025, one in five EU enterprises with ten or more employees used AI, in Germany a little more than one in four, according to Eurostat. So consulting writes far more about AI than its clients use it. That's its job. It is supposed to think ahead. What's interesting is what had to make room.

For four years, sustainability held steady at just over a fifth of all texts. Then it fell, precisely in the first quarter of 2025, when the EU postponed its CSRD reporting obligations. A topic the firms had sold for years as a strategic must disappeared in step with a deadline extension from Brussels. That shows who follows whom here.

The bigger the firm, the stronger the pull. At the large firms almost one in two texts has an AI reference, at the mid-sized specialist consultancies one in six. The specialists write about their specialty. The big ones write about the same thing. Put the insights pages of five big firms side by side in 2026 and you read the same idea five times in five corporate designs.

Every Wave Gets a New Name

In early 2023, “metaverse” appeared in one in twelve texts. Today it appears in one in 140. No firm has explained what became of its clients' metaverse strategies. The term simply vanished, and the next one took its place.

Now the wave is called “agentic.” 22 percent of texts, still rising. Accenture started in the fourth quarter of 2024. Capgemini, Deloitte and McKinsey followed in the first quarter of 2025, BCG in the third, Bain, Oliver Wyman and PwC in early 2026. Roland Berger arrived in the third quarter of 2026, almost two years after Accenture. Whoever brings the word first usually has the matching product on the shelf.

What's telling is where the firms don't think ahead. I set the share of texts about inflation against the inflation rate in the euro area. The two move at the same time. The correlation is 0.63. With gas, the firms write the most two quarters after the price spike. Geopolitics peaked not at the invasion of Ukraine but at the US tariffs. The firms react. They don't foresee. For a press agency that would be fine. For people who get paid for “thought leadership,” it's thin.

Whoever brings a term first usually has the matching product on the shelf.

Between 4 and 89 Percent

The nicest question you can ask consulting studies: how many companies actually get real value from AI? The answers from 2024 to 2026 range from 4 to 89 percent. That sounds like chaos, but it follows a ladder.

At the top are the companies whose revenue or costs have measurably moved: 4 to 11 percent, depending on firm and year. Below them, everyone reporting some value: 26 to almost 50 percent. At the bottom, the self-reports on whether executives “see” a benefit: 64 to 89 percent. On the same rung, by the way, the firms are close together, about a factor of 1.5. The data hardly contradict each other.

The message lies in the rung a firm quotes. In 2026, BCG quotes the top in eight out of ten articles with a global figure: almost nobody gets value, a rebuild is needed. In 2026, KPMG quotes only the broad rung: the majority sees benefits, now it's about scaling. Both are backed by their own data. And both fit strikingly well with what each firm offers in the next paragraph.

KPMG itself shows how elastic such a number is. In the Global AI Pulse for the third quarter of 2026, 89 percent of respondents see measurable value. The same report says only 12 percent calculate that value against the costs across the company. And the report for the first quarter has, on the same page, 59 percent who deploy agents and 9 percent who “currently already” use agents “in their workflows.”

McKinsey, in turn, has lowered its own bar. In 2022 and 2023, an “AI high performer” was anyone who attributed at least 20 percent of their operating profit to AI. In 2024 the threshold was more than 10 percent, at the end of 2025 it was 5 percent. Anyone who counts as a leader today would not even have made it into the analysis three years ago. This makes progress over the years hard to read, and none of the reports says so.

At BCG, a number simply wandered:

In November 2025, 35 percent are exploring agentic AI. In December, 35 percent use it. In September 2026, 35 percent have it in production. Each time the same survey by BCG and MIT Sloan Management Review. In practice, between “we're looking into it” and “it's running in our operations” there are months to years and usually a six-figure budget. Here, what lay in between was an editorial change.

In practice, years lie between “we're looking into it” and “running in operations.” At BCG, what lay in between was an editorial change.

Quietly Corrected

Numbers change. That's normal. What's interesting is how. For 1,141 articles with a verified figure, I set the oldest version in the web archive against today's text. Most differences are harmless: footnotes, numbering, bios. About a dozen are not.

In none of these cases does the page carry a note such as “updated” or “corrected.” To be fair: most changes came shortly after publication. They are corrections of errors, not reinterpretations after the fact. But an error by a factor of 500 that stays online for three weeks and then quietly disappears was quoted during those three weeks. Anyone who picked it up will never learn it was wrong.

Then there's the date. At Accenture, 37 of 106 articles now carry a publication date well after their first appearance in the archive. At EY 21 of 72, at Deloitte 11 of 224. At BCG, Bain and McKinsey not a single one. A text about “ambient computing” from Deloitte's Tech Trends 2015 is now dated December 10, 2025. Some of this may be genuine revision. To the reader, an eleven-year-old outlook looks just like a fresh one.

And the forecasts themselves? In 472 texts, BCG made 2,231 statements about the future, each checked word for word. Among them is exactly one forecast of its own with a number and a target year up to 2026. Lots of future, little you can check. The checkable ones that do exist miss by factors on AI. In 2019, McKinsey forecast $67 billion in revenue for AI semiconductors in 2025. What came, according to Gartner, was over $200 billion for AI processors alone. To be fair to McKinsey: in 2019, ChatGPT was not foreseeable. The lesson applies to every number with a target year on AI. They miss by factors.

The industry also misjudges its own market, by the way. The German industry association BDU expected growth of 9.8 percent for 2024. It came in at 4.3. For 2025 it expected 6.4 percent. It came in at 0.5. For 2026 it expects 4.5 percent. The expectation comes from a survey of the consultancies themselves.

The Mirror Test

Now the real question. For three years the firms have been telling their clients that AI is upending business models, organizations and job profiles. What do they write about their own?

In all texts with an AI reference, I searched for passages where the consulting industry, the consulting business or management consulting appears near an AI term. 50 hits in 10,579 texts, all read by hand. Most are author boxes, awards and promotional blocks. Six recommend that the reader bring in consultants. Three texts talk about how AI is changing their own work. None questions its own business model. The clearest is a Bain podcast from August 2026, titled “AI isn't replacing consultants.”

Outside the expert texts it sounds very different. In press interviews, on stages and in quarterly results, the firms talk openly about their own overhaul:

• McKinsey. About 40,000 people and 25,000 AI agents, CEO Bob Sternfels said in January 2026. A spokesperson confirmed the figure. A year and a half earlier it was about 3,000 agents. Client-facing roles grow by a quarter, the others shrink by a quarter. And about a quarter of global fees now depend on outcomes, according to UK head Michael Birshan.
• PwC Germany. In June 2026, partner Jan Herrmann opened a talk with the sentence: “I have destroyed our business model!” („Ich habe unser Geschäftsmodell zerstört!“) A project that used to take six to eight weeks and cost €150,000 to €200,000 would in future be possible in 24 hours. “The pyramid is now turning into more of a diamond.” („Die Pyramide wird nun eher zum Diamanten.“)
• Accenture. The workforce fell in one quarter of 2025 from 791,000 to 779,000. CEO Julie Sweet: the firm is parting ways “on a compressed timeline” with people for whom reskilling is “not a viable path.”
• BDU. The association's vice president: “Anyone who still shows up at a client without AI tools today looks like someone arriving by horse-drawn carriage.”

The firms didn't sleep through it. They negotiate it elsewhere. What they preach to clients as a duty, transparency about their own overhaul, measurable goals, an honest look at the pyramid, they discuss for themselves at conferences and in press interviews. In the texts clients read to get their bearings, there is almost nothing about it.

What they preach to clients as a duty, they negotiate for themselves in press interviews. The expert texts say almost nothing about it.

Who Comes, Who Goes: Headcount and Revenue 2026

What the texts leave out, the annual reports show. The results for fiscal 2026 have been out for a few weeks.

Three things stand out. First, at Deloitte, PwC and KPMG (there fiscal 2025), it is consulting of all things that grows the slowest. Tax and legal do better. Second, at Accenture, operations grows faster than consulting. There is more money in running systems than in saying which ones to build. Third, workforces are growing again, but elsewhere. In one year, EY has almost 4,500 fewer positions in North and South America and a good 10,000 more in its global delivery centers.

At entry level it becomes obvious. Job postings from Deloitte, PwC, EY, KPMG, McKinsey, BCG and Bain fell by about a quarter in the year to May 2026, according to an analysis by Draup for Business Insider. In the same period, open positions for so-called forward deployed engineers, engineers who sit with the client and build systems, rose from zero to 1,404. In the UK, the Big Four cut entry-level positions between 2023 and 2025: KPMG by 29 percent, Deloitte by 18, EY by 11, PwC by 6. In Germany, consultancies' job postings fell by almost 10 percent in the third quarter of 2025, while postings with an AI reference grew by half, according to Index Research as reported by WirtschaftsWoche.

At the same time, the tech side grows. McKinsey's AI unit QuantumBlack has, by its own account, “well above 5,000” AI specialists. BCG X has almost 3,000 technologists. Bain says it is hiring “more, not less,” just different people.

One thing matters for context. The firms themselves mostly don't blame cuts on AI, but on low attrition, weak demand and costs. KPMG UK doesn't mention AI at all in its announcement of more than 500 eliminated roles. That may be true. It may also be convenient. Either way, the pyramid gets narrower at the bottom and wider at the top, and PwC has already supplied the word for it: diamond.

What nobody answers: if fewer analysts start today, who will be partner in 2035? In Lünendonk's survey, 58 percent of German management consultancies name the generational change among partners as the biggest hurdle. Training young talent was always the invisible part of the business model. Clients paid for it through the juniors' day rates. If that goes away, the middle will be missing in ten years.

What They Shed, What They Buy

If you want to know where a company is going, don't read its strategy papers. Read its purchase and sale agreements.

The last row is my favorite. Until the end of 2025, Accenture proudly reported every quarter how much revenue and bookings came from generative AI. Since early 2026, it no longer does, because AI is now in almost everything. IBM has also stopped publishing its figure for the GenAI business. That may be reasonable. But it also means that the metric disappears at exactly the moment you could have checked whether the AI business makes up for shrinking classic consulting. At the same time, in its 2026 annual report Accenture warns that results could suffer if clients “do not accept new pricing or commercial models.”

Sustainability shows up again too, this time as cuts. It fell from 26 to 12 percent in the firms' texts, and now the teams are shrinking. What the industry described for years as a megatrend was, for the industry, mostly a trend in its order book.

The pattern is clear: away from side businesses and slides, toward operations, software, restructuring and stakes in exactly the companies competing with them.

The New Competition Sits With the Model Makers

In May 2026, OpenAI and Anthropic founded their own service companies. The OpenAI Deployment Company is meant to help businesses with adoption, with about $4 billion in starting capital. OpenAI holds the majority, and the backers include TPG, Goldman Sachs, SoftBank, Capgemini and McKinsey. Anthropic founded a standalone firm with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs whose engineers work with Anthropic staff to build AI solutions in mid-sized companies, such as community banks, mid-sized manufacturers and regional health systems. Both do what the consultancies want to sell right now: engineers at the client who build systems.

The consultancies react in two ways. They take stakes, like McKinsey and Capgemini at OpenAI. Or they become sales partners. Accenture has its own Anthropic business unit with about 30,000 trained people, and KPMG is giving Claude to more than 276,000 employees. The firms that tell their clients to limit their dependence on single vendors are building their own business on partnerships with one or two model makers.

And the clients? The Financial Times asked in August 2026. Bristol Myers Squibb now has AI handle its IT security monitoring, “and those contracts are going away.” SAP says its changes will cut the cost of external consultants by up to 50 percent. Bayer is using 30 AI agents for coding and testing in its SAP overhaul. UniCredit spent 24 percent less on external consultants in the first half, Société Générale 9 percent less. According to Source Global, 55 percent of clients want to use the Big Four more next year. A year earlier it was 80 percent. Only one in three clients says an IT project led by consultants was fully successful.

The stock market has already priced it in. At the end of August, Accenture's share was 27 percent below its level at the start of the year, Capgemini's 31 percent.

To keep it fair, the other side of the ledger: overall the business is growing. Source Global estimates global spending on technology consulting in 2026 at $420 billion, 8 percent more than the year before. Clients are reallocating: less labor for hire, more technology and implementation.

Germany: Standstill, As Announced

In 2025, the German market grew nominally by 0.5 percent to about €49 billion. With 2.2 percent inflation, that's a decline in real terms. Firms with more than €50 million in revenue stagnated at zero. Headcount still grew by 1.5 percent, according to the industry news service consulting.de, so faster than revenue.

Lünendonk titled its 2026 ranking “Consolidation instead of growth” („Konsolidierung statt Wachstum“). Six of the twenty largest German management consultancies lost revenue, including Porsche Consulting (−2.2 percent), Horváth (−1.0) and zeb (−4.0). Revenue per head fell, even though AI supposedly makes everything more efficient. Roland Berger, on the other hand, reported the best year in its history, with just over €1 billion. The IT consultancies grew organically by only 1.5 percent, for the first time in a long while slower than the IT market as a whole.

On pricing, AI has moved little so far. According to Lünendonk, 43 percent of management consultancies see no effect on their prices, and 16 percent bill AI services separately. BDU president Iris Grewe put it this way in March: “For many consultancies, the next few years will decide whether they become an agent of transformation or its victim.”

And what is making money in Germany right now? AI consulting, which grew by 18.8 percent in 2025 according to the BDU. Turnaround and restructuring, which led the BDU's business climate index at the start of the year. Public sector contracts and defense. The strange part: restructuring appears in 2.1 percent of the firms' texts, defense also in 2.1 percent. What they earn from, they barely write about. What they write about, they earn little from so far.

What consultancies earn from, they barely write about. What they write about, they earn little from so far.

They Sound Like Their Product

One last finding, and it's the strangest. I counted which words grew most in the texts from April to October 2026 compared with 2024 and 2025, separately by topic area.

At the very top are everyday words: “judgment,” “constraint,” “layer,” “durable,” “rarely,” “treated as.” “Judgment” rose in AI texts from 1 to 8 percent, in texts about work from 1 to 10. “Layer” in texts about banks from 1 to 16 percent. “Constraint” in geopolitics, logistics and IT each from zero to about 9. The same words rise at the same time in fields with no thematic link: supply chains, insurance, energy, inflation.

That points to a change in style, not in topics. The pattern fits texts written or revised with language models. It isn't proven. A word proves no origin. But it would be a punchline of its own: the industry that explains to its clients how AI changes their work apparently already lets its own texts sound that way. They just don't mention it.

And it has a consequence beyond the punchline. If all firms write about the same topic, with the same numbers on different rungs, in the same tone, then thought leadership is no longer a differentiator. Then it's noise. And any client can now produce noise on their own, for about €20 a month.

Quo Vadis: Where Consulting Is Heading

So where to? My reading, with the caveat that forecasts on this topic age just as badly as the firms' own.

The pyramid isn't getting narrower. It's breaking off at the bottom. The work that whole classes of analysts used to be hired for, collecting data, building slides, calculating market models, AI does in hours. What remains is the diamond: few juniors, a broad middle of experts and engineers, partners at the top. That's efficient. It has a price nobody shows today. The firms no longer train their own young talent, and their clients no longer pay for it along the way.

The money moves from advice to operations and liability. Accenture earns more from operations than from consulting. McKinsey bills a quarter of its fees by outcome, and PwC wants to get there. That's the actual good news. A firm that is paid for results has to measure results. And anyone who has to measure results can no longer afford numbers that wander from “exploring” to “in production” depending on the paragraph.

The justification service loses its value. Part of consulting was always legitimation: the report supplies the reasoning for a decision that has already been made. That works as long as nobody checks. Today someone checks. Clients, journalists, audit offices and language models put the studies of three firms side by side in a minute and see who quotes which rung. If you're buying a justification, you can get it cheaper now.

The new competition comes from above. OpenAI and Anthropic are building their own service companies, Palantir showed the way, and private equity is funding specialized firms. The big consultancies become partly partners, partly resellers, partly competitors of these companies. Which role goes to whom will be decided in the next two years.

What's left is not little. Good consulting is close to operations, measures its impact and stands behind it. Research shows that exactly this kind of consulting works. It just never was what the pyramid made its money with.

So that this doesn't turn into the same inconsequential future prose I just counted, here are five forecasts with dates:

If I'm wrong, I'll write it down here. With the reason.

Five Questions for Every Consulting Study

For everyone who reads, quotes or pays for such studies. The polemic two weeks ago had a test for consultants. This one is the test for their numbers.

1. Which rung? Does it say “see benefits,” “some value” or “measurably changed revenue and costs”? Only compare numbers when the rung, the group and the year are the same.
2. Who was asked? All companies, only large ones, only those already using AI, only “pioneers”? In 2018, Deloitte surveyed only companies testing or using AI, and arrived at 82 percent with financial benefits.
3. When was the text last changed? Put the address into the web archive. It takes a minute and shows whether the number always read that way and whether the date is right.
4. Where is the forecast from three years ago? Ask for the firm's last prediction on the same topic and what became of it. If they can't show you anything, they have nothing to show.
5. What does the firm sell alongside this number? If there's an offer two paragraphs later, the number is part of the offer. That doesn't make it wrong. You should still read it like advertising.

In Closing

Over the past four years, the consultancies wrote about the future 41,594 times. About their own, almost never. Yet their own is the most interesting story in the whole corpus: an industry that has been explaining disruption to its clients for decades and is now cutting entry-level jobs itself, looking for engineers, selling side businesses, rebuilding its metrics and fighting for its place among the model makers.

Quo vadis, consulting? To where it gets measured. Whether it goes willingly or gets pushed depends on whether it starts writing about itself as openly as it demands of its clients.

An industry that prescribes transparency about change to its clients should start with its own.

Related

• Snake Oil in a Tailored Suit: Why Classic Consulting Is a Dying Model
• Explaining Is Easy, Predicting Is Hard
• 76 Percent Is Not an Answer
• Why Good Explanations Fool Us

Sources

My own analysis

• Corpus of 41,594 texts, 28 firms, as of Oct 25, 2026. Archive versions via web.archive.org, each finding documented with a timestamp.

The firms' studies (value from AI, agents)

• BCG: “Where's the Value in AI?” Oct 2024. bcg.com · “Why AI pilots rarely deliver value,” Aug 11, 2026. bcg.com · “The authorization gap,” Sep 17, 2026. bcg.com
• KPMG: Global AI Pulse Q1 2026. kpmg.com · Q2 2026. kpmg.com
• Capgemini: “Making AI real,” Sep 22, 2026. capgemini.com · Bain: “How do companies create value with AI,” Jun 15, 2026. bain.com
• McKinsey: “The economic potential of generative AI,” archive version of Jun 14, 2023. web.archive.org · Version of Mar 11, 2026. web.archive.org
• McKinsey 2019 on AI semiconductors. mckinsey.com · Gartner, semiconductor revenue 2025, Jan 12, 2026. gartner.com
• Bain podcast “AI isn't replacing consultants,” Aug 3, 2026. bain.com

Financial results 2026

• Accenture, FY 2026 results, Oct 1, 2026. sec.gov · Annual report (10-K) FY 2026. sec.gov
• Deloitte, FY 2026 (per CPA Practice Advisor, secondary source). cpapracticeadvisor.com
• PwC, FY 2026, Oct 19, 2026. pwc.com
• EY, FY 2026, Oct 8, 2026. ey.com
• BCG, revenue 2025, Apr 23, 2026. bcg.com
• Capgemini, half-year 2026. capgemini.com · Capgemini buys WNS. capgemini.com
• Accenture, last separate AI figures in Q1 FY 2026, earnings call Dec 18, 2025 (Motley Fool transcript). fool.com
• IBM drops its GenAI metric (Trefis, secondary source). trefis.com

Headcount and entry level

• McKinsey, 25,000 agents (Storyboard18 citing Business Insider). storyboard18.com · Outcome-based fees, Business Insider (via Yahoo). yahoo.com · Job cut plans, Bloomberg, Dec 15, 2025. bloomberglaw.com
• Accenture, restructuring 2025 (Gulf News). gulfnews.com
• Business Insider on Draup data, forward deployed engineers and QuantumBlack, Sep 17, 2026 (via dnyuz). dnyuz.com
• Big Four UK, entry-level positions (citing the Telegraph). scottishfinancialnews.com · accountancytoday.co.uk
• KPMG UK, more than 500 roles. consultancy.uk
• WirtschaftsWoche: „KI im Consulting“ (“AI in consulting”), Herrmann and Braunmüller, Jun 3, 2026. wiwo.de

Divestments, acquisitions, new competition

• McKinsey sells MIO Partners (Bloomberg). bgov.com
• PwC, exit of the French-speaking African countries. pwc.com
• Accenture, acquisitions FY 2027 (Channel Dive). channeldive.com
• OpenAI: "OpenAI launches the Deployment Company", May 11, 2026. openai.com · Funding and investors (S&P Capital IQ via MarketScreener). marketscreener.com
• Anthropic: enterprise AI services company with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs, May 4, 2026. anthropic.com · blackstone.com
• Anthropic and Accenture. anthropic.com · Anthropic and KPMG. anthropic.com
• Financial Times: “Consultants head for a showdown with their own clients,” Aug 31, 2026 (via Irish Times). irishtimes.com

Germany

• BDU: Facts & Figures 2026, Mar 27, 2026. bdu.de · consulting.de on headcount development. consulting.de
• Lünendonk ranking 2026, management consulting. PDF · Study 2026, preview. PDF · IT services market 2026. luenendonk.de
• Roland Berger, record revenue 2025, May 28, 2026. mynewsdesk.com · AI start-up with Jonas Andrulis, Feb 12, 2026. mynewsdesk.com
• Porsche sells MHP to TCS, Aug 24, 2026 (Deutsche Börse, EQS announcement). deutsche-boerse.com
• Handelsblatt: Deloitte cuts jobs in sustainability auditing, Oct 5, 2026, based on company sources. Original behind paywall, excerpt: autobound.ai
• Eurostat, use of AI in enterprises 2025. ec.europa.eu

Images. Photos generated with Bria (FIBO model), charts my own.