- AI is transforming consultants' day-to-day jobs and letting them ditch their most boring tasks.
- At KPMG, junior consultants are being trained to manage teams of AI agents.
- They'll replace grunt work with more involvement in strategy, said KPMG's global AI workforce lead.
For KPMG's newest consultants, the days of endlessly making slide decks may soon be over.
The Big Four consulting and accounting firm is training its junior consultants to manage teams of AI agents — digital assistants capable of completing tasks without human input.
"We want juniors to become managers of agents," Niale Cleobury, KPMG's global AI workforce lead, told Business Insider in an interview.
KPMG plans to give new consulting recruits access to a catalog of AI agents capable of creating presentation slides, analyzing data, and conducting in-depth research, Cleobury said.
The goal is for these agents to perform much of the analytical and administrative work once assigned to junior consultants, allowing them to become more involved in strategic decisions.
A junior consultant will be able to turn to their team of agents to generate insights, then present them to leaders in strategy meetings to collectively pull ideas together and create a picture of where the project should go, he said.
The approach is in its early stages — "I can't say that in three months' time, when somebody starts at this firm, that it's going to be 'right, here are your nine agents, which you're going to now use every day,'" said Cleobury.
For now, KPMG is building its catalog of agents, has started testing this process in some locations, and is training new hires to develop and use agents.
"There won't be a significant change in the near term in what people are doing every day," Sam Gloede, the global trusted AI transformation leader at KPMG International, told Business Insider.
In February, the firm launched a new AI-powered platform for its advisory division called Velocity, and it is now building agentic capabilities into the platform.
"It's just this long road map of additional features that will continue to come in," said Gloede, adding that they're expecting to add voice interaction to that tool in the near term.
Returning to strategy over slide decks
Over the years, advisory work has developed into delivering large-scale transformation projects that require a great amount of planning and documentation — work that takes consultants away from "the core of what we used to be," said Cleobury.
AI will help them return to being more of a strategic advisor in the future, he said.
"That person who's got the strong hand on our client's back, showing them the direction they need to go through, steering them, helping them with their conversations, that sort of stuff. Whilst we've got the agents running a background, doing a lot of that behind-the-scenes work," said Cleobury.
Accelerating career progression
While the day-to-day aspects of the job are evolving, the career path within consulting remains the same, said Gloede. But juniors will be able to accelerate their careers much faster, she added.
"I remember I used to feel frustrated in the early years, thinking, when am I going to be a specialist in something? Well, you will probably get there a lot quicker," said Gloede.
Instead of transcribing meeting notes, juniors will spend more time analyzing insights and crafting recommendations. Getting into the decision room will give them a better chance to learn from their superiors about the strategy side of the business and to focus on building specialized expertise, Gloede said.
"That's a much more valuable use of their time," Gloede said. "It helps them develop technical capabilities faster because they can get to the depth of what they need to be focused on."
PwC, another member of the Big Four, has also said that AI will accelerate the careers of some of its junior staff. In August, the firm told Business Insider that new accounting hires at PwC will be doing the roles that managers are doing within three years, because they will be overseeing AI performing routine, repetitive audit tasks.
It's not just consulting where junior staff are likely to be managing teams of AI agents sooner rather than later. Executives from Wall Street giants have also publicly discussed the idea in recent weeks, with one JPMorgan leader saying staff will become managers much earlier in their careers thanks to "digital colleagues."
While AI is redefining entry-level jobs at the Big Four, there are also fears that it will replace them. PwC is cutting entry-level hiring by a third over the next three years, Business Insider learned.
Gloede said that she didn't expect KPMG's head count to be affected by AI. "The shape, not the size, is going to be what's changing," she said.
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