“Why are you solving this problem from first principles? You should’ve used ChatGPT to help you.”

A consultant at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), one of the “Big 3s” in the sector, recounted their manager’s reaction when they turned in a preliminary report on a certain topic a few months ago. “The funniest part is that I had used ChatGPT to solve the problem. I just hadn’t told my manager,” they said, not wanting to be named as they weren’t authorised to speak with the media.

Welcome to management consulting in 2025, where much of what you see on a consultant’s deck has been outsourced to generative AI tools—including, funnily enough, the deck itself. You’d think firms would be wary of this new technology that threatens to make them obsolete. After all, AI has considerably narrowedInnoleadThe End of Consulting as We Know it: Client Power and the AI Revolution the knowledge gap between firms and clients, as one McKinsey consultant admitted. Instead, firms are enthusiastically adopting AI across the board.

Those on the “frontlines” of the industry’s AI pivot are the consultants—the junior-most employees at firms like BCG tasked with research and number crunching. And it seems like they’re not happy about it. Instead of making their life easier, AI has resulted in drastically reduced timelines and ebbing appreciation for creativity.

“A lot of senior partners and partners think of AI as a magic bullet,” said a former manager at Bain, another of the Big 3 consultancies. For instance, a senior partner who assigned his juniors to work on a client assessmentclient assessmenta systematic process of gathering and analysing information about a client's business, goals, and challenges to determine the best course of action thought they could use an AI chatbot to parse data and ready the assessment in a day, said the former manager. The same thing would have earlier taken two to three weeks.

But here’s the thing: even with AI, a day is an unrealistic deadline for an assignment like this. So, who bears the brunt of these outsized expectations? The runt of the litter: the consultants. When rushed, they end up turning in subpar, AI-generated copy that sounds nice but doesn’t mean much.