10 years of Consulting Excellence: A 2026 update to our original 2016 Point of View, marking 10 years of MCA Consulting Excellence 

Ten years ago, the Management Consultancies Association (MCA) launched Consulting Excellence. Shortly after, Openside partnered with the MCA to co-author the Guide to Professional Development in Consulting Firms: a diagnostic tool built around the Professional Development Pillar, arguing that firms needed to shift investment away from technical/knowledge-based training and towards behavioural and cognitive skills. 

A decade on, we’re revisiting that argument. If anything, it’s more urgent now than it was in 2016. 

Three Key Challenges Facing Consulting Firms. Then and Now.  

In 2016, we identified three challenges keeping consulting leaders up at night: Talent, Robotics, and Value. All three are still live. All three have sharpened. 

Talent 

The war for talent hasn’t ended – it’s changed shape. In 2016, firms were competing with tech companies and start-ups for graduates. In 2026, firms are competing with AI-native businesses, in-house consulting functions, and a workforce that increasingly asks what a firm will actually develop in them, not just what it will pay them. 

Career progression is still the single biggest lever for engagement and retention. If anything, the traditional pyramid of junior consultants doing the groundwork that earns them the judgment to become senior ones is under more pressure than ever, because so much of that groundwork is now automated. Firms need to be deliberate about how early-career consultants still build real expertise, not just about how they get promoted. 

AI (formerly “Robotics”) 

We wrote about robotics, AI and machine learning in 2016 as an emerging force. In 2026, it’s the operating environment. Agentic AI tools now handle data gathering, first-draft analysis, research synthesis and increasingly first-pass recommendations, the very tasks that used to be how junior consultants earned their stripes and built pattern recognition. 

That makes the argument we made a decade ago sharper, not weaker: as technical and analytical output becomes commoditised by AI, the premium on judgement, critical thinking, complex problem solving, cognitive flexibility and the ability to manage difficult client conversations goes up, not down. The skills we listed in our original Core Curriculum: complex problem solving, stakeholder analysis, influencing, critical thinking, are precisely the skills AI cannot yet replicate reliably, and they are the skills that increasingly separate a trusted advisor from a fast search engine. 

The risk for firms in 2026 isn’t that AI replaces consultants. It’s that firms use AI to cut the training ground junior consultants used to learn on, without replacing it with anything deliberate. Leaving a generation of consultants technically supported but behaviourally underdeveloped. 

Value 

The divide we described in 2016 commoditised, high-volume consulting versus high-value strategic advisory has widened. AI has accelerated the commoditisation of the former far faster than anyone predicted. Clients can now get competent technical, functional and sector analysis from multiple sources, often faster and cheaper than a traditional engagement. 

What clients cannot get from a tool is judgement under ambiguity, a point of view they trust, and a consultant who can read the room, manage a hard conversation and take accountability for a recommendation. That was true in 2016. It’s now the entire basis on which high-value firms compete. 

The Time to Act Is Still Now 

The three challenges we described in 2016 haven’t gone away – they’ve converged. Firms that treat professional development as a technical training budget line are increasingly vulnerable on all three fronts at once: they lose talent, they get out-competed by AI on commoditised work, and they lack the behavioural depth to win at the high-value end. 

Ten years into Consulting Excellence, the Professional Development Pillar and the diagnostic framework we helped build still hold up. The firms getting this right today are the ones treating behavioural and cognitive development, not just AI adoption, as their core differentiator. 

Review Your Professional Development Strategy 

As a proud Member of the MCA and co-authors of the original Guide to Professional Development in Consulting Firms, we’d be glad to talk through what’s changed, what hasn’t, and where your firm’s professional development strategy stands a decade on.