The Consulting Pyramid Is Dead — And the Autopsy Report Is Damning

The consulting pyramid is dead.

And the autopsy report is damning.

McKinsey just cut 200 tech staff. Bob Sternfels has signalled more non-client role reductions over the next two years. Deloitte scrapped traditional job titles entirely — effective June 2026.

But here’s the part nobody is saying out loud:

The pyramid model — hire 50 analysts, bill them at £250/hr to make slides, promote 3 to partner — was an arbitrage on structured information work.

That arbitrage just collapsed.

Three data points tell the whole story:

1. Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (2026 Global AI Report): 53% of financial institutions are already running AI agents in production. Not piloting. Production.

2. McKinsey’s own research: 30% of companies are planning AI-driven layoffs — but only 39% can attribute any EBIT impact to AI yet. They’re cutting based on expectation, not evidence.

3. Entry-level job postings mentioning “AI fluency” as a requirement: 1 in 4 today vs. 1 in 20 just two years ago.

Read that again.

The firms that built their business model on graduate labour arbitrage are now watching that labour become algorithmically replaceable. The 26-year-old making a waterfall chart at 2am? An agent does that in 40 seconds now.

We saw this firsthand at Manthan Intelligence.

Last month we completed a deep competitive intelligence tearsheet on Barclays’ entire AI strategy — agentic workflows, enterprise AI platform architecture, financial crime detection systems, quant AI deployment — synthesised from hiring signals, public filings, and technical role descriptions.

Time to produce: under 3 hours.

A traditional consulting team would have scoped that as a 4-week engagement. Minimum £80,000.

We did it with agentic engineering and domain expertise. No pyramid. No leverage model. No army of analysts.

This isn’t a prediction. This is happening now.

The death diagnosis for the consulting pyramid:

• Cause of death: Agentic AI eliminated the information synthesis arbitrage
• Time of death: Q1 2026
• Survivors: Domain experts who build, not advisors who PowerPoint

The firms that survive will look nothing like McKinsey circa 2020. They’ll be small, technical, opinionated, and they’ll ship working intelligence — not decks.

We’re building one of those firms at Manthan Intelligence. Four months in. Every week the thesis gets stronger.

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Read more at getmanthan.com

Mayank Mathur | Founder, Manthan Intelligence | GP, Tavaga Fund