AI Layoffs and What They Mean For You

Jun 17, 2026 • 3 min read

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I’m sure you’ve seen this all over the news in the past few months… all big firms are laying off significant part of their workforce due to AI.

McKinsey is cutting 10% of its workforce.
Bain has followed.
BCG and the Big Four have all announced waves of cuts.

Yahoo Finance states:

Clients are spending less, putting projects on hold, and increasingly turning to automation and AI to do work they used to pay consultants to handle. The result is a firm – and an entire industry – dealing with more capacity than demand.”

Full story →

That tension makes it genuinely hard to read where the consulting industry is headed from here.”

AI is the reason.
We all know that.

Junior research, data analysis, slide-building – the work that filled the bottom of the consulting pyramid is being absorbed by AI tools faster than the firms can hire around it. The pyramid is collapsing.

For most readers of this newsletter, this news is not about you.
You don’t run a 45,000-person consulting firm.
You don’t have a pyramid of junior analysts doing client research.
You probably never did.

But the structural story matters for boutique founders.

For decades, what made McKinsey, Bain, and BCG dominant rested on three things.

☞	Leverage – armies of junior analysts who could do research and analysis at scale.

☞	Brand – the McKinsey, Bain, BCG name on a deck moved boards.

☞	Relationships – partners who had spent careers building trust with CEOs.

AI just took the first one (Leverage) off the board.

Junior research and analysis can now be done in hours instead of weeks. The economic structure that depended on billing 80 junior hours for every 20 partner hours stops working. The pyramid was the model.
That model has stopped working.

Brand (the second option) will hold longer.
But brand without Leverage is just a logo on a slide.

What’s left?

RELATIONSHIPS

And here’s where this news starts to matter in the boutique professional services world.

Boutique firms never had a leveraged pyramid.
You’ve always delivered senior-heavy.
You never had the leverage-advantage to defend.
The thing being broken at these firms was never your model.

What you’ve always had is relationships.

The client who calls because they trust YOU.
The intro that came through a referrer who knows YOU.
The next deal that emerges from a conversation YOU had over coffee.

This was always the boutique advantage.
In the AI era, it stops being the smaller advantage.
It becomes the larger one.

But here’s the catch.

Most boutique firms have not built infrastructure around their relationship advantage.
They live on relationships, but they don’t manage them.

And what do they run these most important relationships on?

	Instinct.
	Memory.
	Good intentions.

When the structural advantage of leverage disappears at the big firms, the firms with the deepest relational infrastructure will win.

Discipline matters more than volume.

The cost of unmanaged relationships is the Revenue Gap.
And most boutique firms have a significant one – relationships that should be producing revenue but don’t.

Why?
Because nobody’s watching them.

The consulting industry news from this month is the loudest possible signal that this matters NOW.

The pyramid is collapsing.
The advantage you’ve always had is about to become the ONLY advantage that matters.

Build the infrastructure to capture it.
DO IT NOW.

If you want to brainstorm with someone while thinking it through, that’s what I work on with boutique founders.

Talk to me about your firm →

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AI Layoffs and What They Mean For You

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