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Beyond the Pyramid: How AI is Quietly Rewiring Consulting Firms

3–4 minutes

You know what nobody tells you about consulting firms? They’re falling apart. Not in some dramatic collapse, but quietly, like a pyramid slowly transforming into something else—maybe an obelisk, maybe just a confused pile of highly credentialed people.

Here’s something you probably don’t know: Gartner, the company that tells everyone else how to run their businesses, recently reported challenges in their own model. Their consulting revenue faced headwinds as clients started asking uncomfortable questions like, “Wait, do we really need a human to tell us what this AI already surfaced?” Meanwhile, Deloitte Australia went through restructuring that had less to do with market downturns and more to do with the realization that their traditional leverage model—one partner billing out ten junior consultants—doesn’t work when AI can do six of those jobs.

The pyramid model of consulting has been beautifully simple: hire smart graduates, work them hard on repetitive analysis, bill them out at premium rates, promote the survivors. It’s a model that’s funded countless PowerPoint decks and made “strategy” a verb. But AI just walked into this arrangement and said, “I’ll take it from here.”

What’s replacing it? Think less pyramid, more obelisk—tall, narrow, specialized. You don’t need layers of analysts churning through data when algorithms can do it faster and without the expensive coffee habits. What you need are the rare humans who can ask the questions the AI doesn’t know to ask, spot the patterns in the chaos, and translate all of it into something a CEO can actually use.

Deloitte’s Australia situation is particularly telling. They didn’t just trim headcount; they restructured around specialized capabilities. The future isn’t about having more consultants—it’s about having the right ones. The ones who can work alongside AI, not compete with it.

Gartner’s challenge is even more existential. When your business model is “we’ll research things and tell you what we learned,” and AI can research everything instantly, what’s your value? Turns out, it’s judgment. Context. The ability to say, “Yes, but here’s what that actually means for your industry in your specific situation.”

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: consulting firms are facing their own advice. They’ve spent decades telling clients to “embrace digital transformation” and “leverage AI.” Now they’re discovering what that actually means—not smooth slides and confident predictions, but genuine disruption of their core business model.

The obelisk model isn’t just about being lean. It’s about being pointed. Every person needs to add unique value that AI can’t replicate. That means fewer bodies, higher specialization, and a completely different career trajectory. The old path—analyst to senior analyst to manager to senior manager to partner—made sense when the work was about processing information. But when machines do the processing, what’s left is pure insight, and insight doesn’t scale the way labor does.

So what happens next? Probably a split. Some firms will cling to the pyramid, hoping clients won’t notice that the analysis is now AI-generated but still billed at human rates. Others will transform into these narrower, more specialized entities—expensive, yes, but genuinely irreplaceable.

The clients are already voting with their budgets. They’re not buying the pyramid anymore. They’re buying expertise they can’t generate themselves, even with AI. And that’s a much smaller market than “we’ll analyze your data and make it pretty.”

Here’s what no one wants to say out loud: most consulting work wasn’t really about insight. It was about comforting executives with prestigious credentials and familiar frameworks. AI can’t replicate the comfort of having a Big Four partner in the room. But it turns out, executives will trade that comfort for actual answers delivered at a fraction of the cost.

The consulting firms that survive won’t be the ones with the most people. They’ll be the ones with the most irreplaceable people. And that’s a very different firm than the one that’s dominated the last fifty years.

The pyramid is crumbling. The obelisk is rising. And if you work in consulting, you’d better figure out which stone you are.

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