AI in Consulting: How AI-Augmented Juniors Reconfigure the Consulting Pyramid.

Details

Supervisors

Decaux, Loïc

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences de gestion, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

enManagement consulting firms are built on a pyramidal hierarchy in which junior consultants handle execution and analytical tasks, while senior consultants provide strategic judgment, client relationship management, critical review, and mentorship. GenAI might disrupt this model by augmenting junior consultants’ capabilities, quality, and productivity. However, the magnitude and mechanisms behind this disruption remain poorly understood. While existing literature focuses on AI’s potential to automate junior tasks, it leaves largely unexplored how AI-augmented juniors might, in turn, substitute for and/or complement senior consultants, and what this could mean for the consulting pyramid. To address this gap, the study uses an exploratory qualitative design that relies on semi-structured interviews of junior and senior consultants. Consultants come from the Big Four and MBB firms in Belgium. It investigates, using thematic analysis, how and for which tasks AI-augmented juniors substitute for and complement senior consultants, and how this could reconfigure the consulting pyramid. The findings suggest that currently, AI-augmented juniors displacing seniors is not happening in a significant way. Seniors’ judgment, relational capital, experience, and accountability make them hard to substitute. AI generally improves the quality of junior work, shifting senior effort from correcting formatting errors toward identifying plausible AI hallucinations, higher-order mentoring, and redefining the value proposition of their firm. The dominant dynamic seems to be top-down substitution, where seniors use AI to perform tasks they would have otherwise delegated to juniors. Together, these findings suggest a reconfiguration from a “pyramid” to an “obelisk” with overall fewer headcount and possibly a flatter hierarchy. This transformation, however, could threaten the consulting apprenticeship model, as today's juniors are tomorrow's seniors. It may also impact firms’ profitability model, going from a fee-for-service model to an outcome-based one.