Top consultancies have frozen starting salaries for the third consecutive year as artificial intelligence starts to reshape the industry, forcing firms to reconsider their traditional “pyramid” structure.
Job offers sent by firms including McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group for 2026 show that pay for graduates is being held at the same level as this year, according to Management Consulted, which coaches students through the interview process, and people familiar with the offers.
The offers suggest a cautious approach to hiring from firms that are among the largest recruiters of graduates and MBA students.
“There are real productivity improvements from AI implementation inside firms,” said Namaan Mian, chief operating officer of Management Consulted, adding that the ability to wring more value from fewer junior employees “is putting downward pressure on salaries”.
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“AI disruption is more real in professional services and technology than in the rest of the economy,” he said.
Management Consulted found first year packages for undergraduate hires in the US, including salary and bonuses, totalled between $135,000 (€116,205) and $140,000 at McKinsey, BCG and Bain & Co in 2024 and 2025, while MBA graduates could expect $270,000-$285,000. The three firms declined to comment.
Starting salaries for consultants at the Big Four – Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC – which tend to be lower, have stagnated for even longer, showing no increase since 2022.
PwC’s UK boss Marco Amitrano said graduate hiring had been cut in 2025 and the firm said in October it would miss a target to increase its global headcount by 100,000 by 2026. It had set the goal five years ago before the rollout of generative AI.
Mohamed Kande, PwC global chair, told the Financial Times in October that AI had increased the productivity of its people, and in a BBC interview last month he said that PwC was looking to hire “a different set of people” from its traditional profile of candidates, including more engineers.
The rethink was common to many consulting firms, Mian at Management Consulted said. AI reduces the need for generalist analysts crunching data and packaging market insights and strategic advice into PowerPoint presentations.
Firms were seeking “more mid-career, specialised” staff as they spent less time on traditional strategy consulting and more helping companies implement technology and AI, he said. “It is harder to staff a 23-year-old on those kinds of projects versus someone with experience.”
Some industry executives say that the more conservative hiring practices are in anticipation of productivity gains from AI, not because those gains are necessarily yet being realised.
Two senior executives at Big Four firms estimated that, across the UK’s largest consulting and accounting firms, graduate recruitment would be down by about a half in the coming year.
“Some of that is commercial, because the market’s tougher, but some of that is anticipation of the impact of AI. Employment costs are going up, because of national insurance, the minimum wage etc, and you might be in a better place investing in AI and offshoring than in people,” one of the executives said.
The upheaval means that the traditional pyramid, in which a firm employs thousands of junior-level employees and thins out the ranks with an “up or out” promotion culture, could be set to change, according to experts.
Some are betting on an “obelisk” structure, with fewer layers and less reliance on junior staff, while others predict an “hourglass” – pinched in the middle as AI automates mid-level routine tasks.
Antonio Alvarez III, European head of consultancy Alvarez & Marsal, advocates a “box model”, matching the number of senior staff more closely to the number of juniors, because it relies more heavily on experienced professionals than on “large pools of junior analysts”.
“While we expect AI to enhance analytics and reduce the need for junior-level labour, we also anticipate that AI will increase overall demand for our services — creating natural offsets,” Alvarez added.
After several years of sluggish revenue growth, consulting firms have been keen to roll out AI internally to improve profits for partners – and also to demonstrate the potential benefits to sceptical clients.
“Clients are quite legitimately asking, what are you doing?” said Rob Hornby, co-chief executive of the consulting firm AlixPartners. “That’s become a new credentialisation, to explain how you are applying AI to your firm.”
PwC cut 150 back-office staff in the US, saying that “just as we help our clients do every day, we are becoming more digital”. McKinsey cut 200 IT jobs globally in recent days, saying “AI is enabling unprecedented levels of opportunity and impact for us and our clients”.
Accenture reduced its global headcount by more than 11,000 to 779,000 in the three months to August, and has said it will cut jobs of staff it believes cannot be retrained to use AI.
Some former Big Four partners are founding AI-native boutiques that they say will use the technology to replace much of the traditional junior cohort.
Mark Bunker, a former senior Deloitte partner and now managing partner of the start-up Queen’s Tower Advisory, said: “The direction of travel appears to be that the base will shrink as routine work is automated, but the need for experienced judgment at the top will become even more critical.”
Not all executives agree that AI will obliterate the pyramid structure. Eric Kutcher, McKinsey’s North American chair, said in September the firm would hire 12 per cent more graduates in 2026 than this year. “What we work on will still require the same level of intellect, the same pace, and you will be doing the things that you can’t do with machines.”
Hornby of AlixPartners said the traditional pyramid was likely to “contract a bit” but “there’ll be new jobs, including at junior levels, oriented around the management and curation” of AI systems.
“What the net-net situation is, I’m not sure. What the exact timing is, I’m not sure. In the Industrial Revolution and the internet revolution, there were losses before there were gains, so there was a gap in the middle. And that could happen.” - Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
