AI is reshaping assumptions about how quickly professional services firms should operate, and consulting clients are growing increasingly impatient for results.
“I’m 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 Themoneytimes.
“Something we might have said takes eight to 10 weeks; the expectation is probably half of that. The shelf life is half,” Johnson said.
Clients aren’t necessarily expecting entire transformations to be completed in a fraction of the time; rather, the focus is on pilots and proofs of concepts, she explained.
“There’s an expectation now that tools should accelerate the work,” she added.
Johnson oversees more than 2,200 consulting and accounting employees as PwC’s DC managing partner. When asked if these compressed timelines were putting pressure on her consulting teams, she responded: “We’re working on it.”
The Big Four professional services firms — PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, and EY — alongside consultancies like McKinsey, BCG, and Accenture, are at the forefront of the AI transformation sweeping through workplaces. They’ve been racing 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 Themoneytimes in June.
This frees up consultants to spend more time testing deeper parts of the issue tree rather than waiting days to get oriented, Smaje said.
Among rank-and-file employees at top firms, many have told Themoneytimes they’re seeing a difference in delivery times due to AI.
A software engineer at Deloitte US told Themoneytimes that some coding tasks had fallen from a days-long 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.
Along with the 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 becoming more complex
For Johnson, faster delivery shouldn’t 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 Themoneytimes.
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.”