Consulting’s AI upheaval offers a preview of what can happen when organizations optimize for efficiency at the base and neglect the human skills that drive complex decisions. Sales leaders can learn from that mistake before they make it themselves.
AI’s impact on the business world has been impossible to ignore, with some industries taking the viewpoint that AI will merely serve as a teammate to human workers, while others use it to aggressively slash headcount. One of the most unique examples of this dichotomy is playing out in the consulting industry. For example, McKinsey now counts 25,000 AI agents alongside its 40,000 human employees and expects to reach parity by the end of 2026. Deloitte is scrapping its traditional consultant title hierarchy entirely, effective June 1. The consulting pyramid, built on legions of junior analysts crunching data and assembling slide decks, is crumbling because AI can do that work faster and cheaper.
If you run a sales organization, this should keep you up at night. Because the model collapsing in consulting looks a lot like the model many sales leaders are still building.
The Business Model that Stopped Working
For decades, consulting firms operated on a simple leverage model. They hired large cohorts of smart graduates to handle the research, analysis, and synthesis behind the strategy briefs for senior partners, who managed client relationships and won new business.
It’s a model that depends on volume at the base. But that base is disappearing. Late last year, MBB firms (McKinsey, BCG, and Bain)froze starting salaries for a third consecutive year. The salary freeze alone tells you something, but the structural changes tell you more. Deloitte’s title overhaul signals a move away from the traditional analyst-to-consultant-to-manager ladder because that ladder was built for a workforce model that is frankly outdated in the age of AI.
However, the most telling part of these massive structural shifts lies in the skills that these firms are scrambling to protect: The human ones. The ones that enable someone to build trust and rapport, to read a room and to ask the questions that enable an analyst to diagnose a complex, ambiguous problem before jumping to a solution.
Sound familiar?
Those are sales skills. Specifically, they’re the skills that separate a consultative seller from a rep who identifies a pain point and then dives into a scripted pitch.
Sales Organizations Making the Same Mistake
I’ve spent more than twenty-five years in B2B sales leadership, and the pattern I see right now concerns me. Too many sales organizations are investing in AI the same way consulting firms built their pyramids: optimizing for volume and efficiency at the base while assuming the human skills at the top will take care of themselves.
Think about where most AI investment in sales is going right now: automated outreach, call transcription and summarization, lead scoring, activity tracking and pipeline intelligence. All of these tools make teams faster at the mechanical parts of selling. And every one of them optimizes for the same layer of work that’s collapsing in consulting: the routine, repeatable, analysis-heavy tasks that AI does well.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that approach, but here’s the danger: Sooner or later, it comes down to a business conversation.
When Efficiency Breaks the Funnel
Let me give you an example of what I mean. One VP of Sales I worked with recently developed an in-house AI SDR to handle inbound leads. It worked wonders, answering questions, scheduling meetings, and providing a layer of insight beyond what their website contained. Within the first 90 days, the organization saw a huge uptick in sales-accepted opportunities.
Then the question became, How do we handle this influx of opportunities without losing momentum or overwhelming our AEs? AI was again the answer. Leveraging the underlying infrastructure of their SDR tool, the team quickly spun up workflows that autonomously handled account research and call prep. All an AE had to do was pull up the document and show up to the disco call. What could go wrong?
Nothing—nothing at first, that is. Sure, the research wasn’t perfect, and that lost them a few opportunities they probably would have won. But the striking consequence came later. Around six weeks after the first call-prep document magically appeared in CRM, the VP was staring down a massive pipeline, the majority of which was stuck at the proposal phase.
That’s when my team became involved. After a quick triage, the underlying issue was clear in the call transcripts: the sellers were running on autopilot, and the buyer could tell. They were efficient, robotically so in some cases, and that was the problem. The AI did what it was supposed to do, but here’s the kicker: the buyer could get that anywhere. They didn’t offer up their precious time to have a conversation around insights that a junior-level analyst could have prepared—they showed up seeking a partner to build confidence in buying decisions. What they got instead was surface-level dialogue that failed to inspire trust or connect the value of the solution to them personally. And what our VP of Sales got was a healthy pipeline, tanking win rates, and the slowest sales velocity numbers he’d seen in his three-year tenure.
What Consulting Got Wrong, B2B Sales Risks Repeating
The consulting industry’s mistake was treating junior work as a cost center rather than a training ground. When you optimize that layer purely for efficiency, you hollow out the pipeline of people who develop judgment and the strategic thinking necessary to engage high-level decision-makers.
Sales organizations are making a version of the same mistake. When a new AE’s primary job is executing automated workflows, what skills are they actually building? They’re training sellers to optimize activity metrics, while hindering their ability to walk into a complex deal with seven to ten stakeholders who disagree with each other and figure out what’s really going on.
The firms that will thrive in the AI era, in both consulting and sales, are the ones that treat human capability as the thing AI should amplify rather than replace. In the same conversation where he outlined the changing makeup of its workforce, McKinsey’s CEO Bob Sternfels said it directly. For young professionals entering the workforce, the focus should be on skills AI can’t replicate: human judgment and true creativity.
Where Sales Leaders Should Invest Instead
If consulting’s AI crisis tells us anything, it’s that the organizations most vulnerable to disruption are the ones built around tasks rather than capabilities. A sales team built around activity volume is just a consulting pyramid by another name.
The alternative is deliberate investment in the skills AI can’t replicate. That means coaching your reps on how to diagnose a buyer’s real problem before proposing anything, how to facilitate a buying decision rather than push a sales process, and how to build the kind of trust that will make an executive comfortable sharing their most pressing business problems.
It also means rethinking how you develop your people. If AI is handling the research, the prep, and the post-call summary, what’s the new training ground for a first-year seller? Where do they build the judgment that comes from doing hard, ambiguous work before they’re ready for it? Every sales leader needs to answer that question, because consulting firms didn’t answer it in time, and they’re now restructuring their entire talent models as a result.
Here’s how to start:
1. Diagnose before you prescribe
Train reps to uncover and expand the buyer’s view of problems worth solving before offering a solution. Buyers can get AI-generated insights anywhere. When salespeople exhibit the behaviors that earn a good consultant the right to advise high-level executives, you fundamentally change the seller/buyer relationship.
2. Build trust and buyer confidence
Coach reps to ask the kind of questions that make a senior buyer comfortable sharing their most pressing problems. And ensure sellers are prepared to further the conversation through a fluent understanding of financial terms and the issues that matter to C-suite buyers.
3. Sharpen selling skills using AI
Deploy AI to scale your sales coaching initiatives. Rather than leveraging AI solutions that enable sellers to coast on autopilot, use the technology to challenge them and ensure they get on-demand support and skill development. In fact, ValueSelling’s research with Aberdeen found that sales organizations using AI in their coaching activities enjoy 3.3x greater YoY growth in quota attainment.
The Competitive Edge AI Won’t Replace
The consulting industry spent two decades telling clients that digital transformation was existential and that firms who failed to adapt would be left behind. Now consulting is learning that lesson about itself. The firms that survive will be the ones that invest in judgment, relationship skills, and the ability to sit with ambiguity.
Sales organizations have a chance to learn from this before they have to live through it. The irony is that well-trained salespeople already possess the skills consulting firms are now desperate to develop. The question is whether sales leaders will recognize that advantage and invest in it, or whether they’ll keep chasing efficiency metrics while the foundation shifts underneath them.