AI is resetting assumptions about how quickly professional services firms should move, and consulting clients are getting impatient.
“I am seeing clients ask for our help in delivering outcomes at a more rapid pace” compared to this time last year, Jeanelle Johnson, PwC’s managing partner for the Washington DC area, told Business Insider.
“Something that we might have said takes eight to 10 weeks; the expectation is probably half of that. The shelf life is half,” Johnson said.
Clients are not necessarily expecting an entire transformation to be completed in a fraction of the time; the expectation is more for pilots and proofs of concepts, she said.
“There’s an expectation now that tools should accelerate the work,” she added.
Johnson leads more than 2,200 consulting and accounting employees in her role as PwC’s DC managing partner. Asked whether those compressed timelines were putting pressure on her consulting teams, she said: “We’re working on it.”
The Big Four professional services firms — PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, and EY — alongside firms like McKinsey, BCG, and Accenture, are at the center of the AI shift sweeping through workplaces. They have raced to build internal chatbots, train staff, and test AI in client work.
The technology can now assist with, and increasingly perform, early-stage consulting tasks such as market research, due diligence, and brainstorming.
At McKinsey, AI has accelerated the early problem-solving cycle, turning what used to be a team’s “week one answer” — the first hypothesis after a week of research and analysis — into an “hour one answer,” Kate Smaje, McKinsey’s Global Leader for technology and AI, told Business Insider in June.
That frees up consultants to spend more time testing deeper parts of the issue tree rather than waiting days to get oriented, Smaje said.
Amid the rank and file, employees at top firms have told Business Insider they’re seeing a difference in delivery times due to AI.
A software engineer at Deloitte US told Business Insider that some coding tasks had fallen from a dayslong process to around five minutes with AI, and an EY-Parthenon consultant in the UK said that due diligence that previously took two weeks of manual work and spreadsheet handling can now be completed in a day with AI.
As well as pressure to deliver faster results, the shift is also raising questions about how the pricing model that has rested on human labor will adapt as more work gets done by AI.
The work is more complex
For Johnson, faster delivery should not be confused with less work.
AI will change how consultants spend their time, freeing capacity for more meaningful or higher-value work rather than simply reducing the number of hours needed on a project, she told Business Insider.
The work itself is also becoming more complex, she added. Clients are navigating geopolitical tensions, wars, tariffs, and macroeconomic uncertainty simultaneously — a broader set of pressures than consultants would often have helped them tackle in the past.
“The confluence of all those things at the same time is something that we used to deal with one or two things at a time,” Johnson said.
“Now we’re in a world order where we have to deal with 10 plus, plus, plus at a time.”
