The consulting firms have found a new way to bill the same hour twice.

Once as strategy.

Then again as AI transformation.

Bain wants 50% of revenue from AI-driven work by 2026. BCG is aiming for 40%. McKinsey is already calling 40% of projects AI-related. Accenture is doing what Accenture does best, turning it into an industrial process with a very large invoice attached.

The obvious punchline is that consulting has discovered AI.

The better punchline is that AI has discovered consulting.

Because a lot of what used to be sold as premium advisory was actually structured synthesis, benchmarking, workflow mapping, reporting, project management, and the sacred art of putting the client’s own data back into a slide with a triangle on it.

That work is now under attack.

Not by some magical robot overlord in a Patagonia vest.

By automation, better tooling, cheaper delivery models, and clients who are slowly realising that paying seven figures for a dashboard they still cannot use is a bit rich, even by private equity standards.

The firms that win will not be the ones with the most AI press releases.

They will be the ones that change the economic model.

Less pyramid.

Less theatre.

Less graduate labour dressed up as intellectual property.

More proprietary data, repeatable workflows, embedded execution, measurable EBITDA impact, and fewer people saying “let’s align on the operating model” while contributing absolutely nothing to it.

The billable hour is not dead.

It is just looking a little overweight, underperforming, and nervous in a quarterly review.