What the MCA’s 2026 data tells us about the biggest risk in consulting right now

For 30 years, the consulting business model didn’t really change. Firms sold judgement, packaged as strategy. Junior consultants built that judgement by doing the unglamorous work first – the research, the modelling, the first-draft analysis – under a partner who caught their mistakes before a client ever saw them.

That’s the model AI is now taking apart. And the MCA’s 2026 Annual Industry Report shows exactly how far the process has already gone.

The data is unambiguous

77% of consulting firms have now integrated AI into their systems or workflows. The tasks going first are the ones that used to sit with junior teams: research, analysis, modelling. It’s not a future risk. It’s this year’s reality.

At the same time, hiring patterns are shifting fast. Experienced professionals accounted for 37% of all new hires across the industry in 2025, up from 26% the year before. At large firms, it’s 53% – more than half of everyone hired last year had already done the job somewhere else. Firms aren’t just adopting AI. They’re quietly redesigning who they need, and when in a career they need them.

None of this is firms turning their backs on junior talent – graduate recruitment still grew 10%, apprentice hiring grew 31%. The MCA is clear that firms remain committed to hiring young people. But the nature of what those juniors spend their first two years doing is changing, fast, and most firms haven’t rebuilt the training model to match.

The industry’s own leaders are naming the risk

We didn’t need to make this argument ourselves – the people running these firms are already making it. The Managing Partner of Technology at Deloitte, put it plainly in the report:

“The firms that will stand out will not be those that simply bring forward impressive technology or the promise of transformation, but those that combine technology with deep advisory capability, sector expertise, knowledge and experience.”

The Managing Partner at Baringa, frames it as a live risk, not a hypothetical one: adapting AI into how consulting teams actually work is “a profound risk if we do not adapt and provide answers,” and “a material risk if we do not adapt our own business to harness it to be better.”

And a management consultant at North Highland, describes what this looks like from inside a firm right now: junior consultants are being asked to contribute more of their own perspective, earlier, because automation has taken over the tasks that used to buy them time to learn. Her conclusion: “Young consultants today need to bring a stronger niche, understand clients at a deeper level, and go beyond frameworks, jargon and acronyms.”

The part almost everyone is getting wrong

Every firm is investing in AI-augmented tools. Within a few years, nearly all of them will have broadly comparable technology. That was never going to be the differentiator – because a tool that everyone owns can’t be anyone’s advantage.

The real differentiator is the one thing that can’t be bought off the shelf: people who can tell when the AI is wrong. That takes more than intelligence. It takes judgement, built through real experience – and increasingly, emotional intelligence and the discipline to catch a mistake before it becomes a client’s problem.

Here’s the risk almost nobody is naming out loud. If firms keep automating the tasks that used to build junior judgement – without deliberately rebuilding how that judgement gets developed instead – they’re not just changing a training model. They may be raising the last generation of consultants who learned the old way, with no clear plan for how the next generation learns at all.

What this means for firms right now

The MCA’s data points to three shifts happening at once across the industry:

  • Consulting is becoming AI-native. Tools handle the research and modelling; humans focus on framing the right problem and exercising judgement.
  • Advice is becoming an asset, not just a service – software, data and playbooks packaged alongside human expertise.
  • More revenue is meant to tie to outcomes, not hours – though the MCA’s own data shows this is still more talk than practice, with traditional fee models remaining dominant.

Firms that treat these as separate technology or commercial decisions will miss the actual shift. The common thread across all three is people – specifically, whether a firm has deliberately built the judgement, critical thinking and emotional intelligence to make any of it work.

Where Openside fits

We’ve spent 35 years developing exactly these capabilities in consulting professionals – critical thinking, judgement under pressure, the emotional intelligence to manage clients through ambiguity – long before “AI hallucination” was a phrase anyone needed to know.

Our view is straightforward: these capabilities aren’t part of the consulting toolbox anymore. They are the toolbox. Without them, no firm – however good its AI stack – can actually use the tools it’s investing in.

The question worth asking isn’t whether your firm has the right AI tools. Most firms will, eventually. It’s whether you have people who know when to trust them, and when not to.

If your firm is rethinking how junior talent gets trained in an AI-native world, we’d like to hear how you’re approaching it. Get in touch at www.openside.group.

Sources: MCA Annual Industry Report 2026. Quotes reproduced from named contributors as published in the report.