TL;DR

KPMG’s global head of consulting, Svilena Tzekova, told CNBC in a report published on Thursday 12 November that a slice of the firm’s advisory income has disappeared because clients can now reach the same advice quickly themselves. She and other London-based leaders described pressure on two pillars of the industry: charging by the hour and hiring graduates in bulk. None claimed to have solved how to price the work instead.

Advice is no longer scarce

Tzekova, who is based in London, said the knowledge that used to justify consulting fees is far easier to get. “We were making quite a lot of money by providing advice. I think that part of our business is literally nonexistent anymore,” she said.

Buyers talk about paying for results, she added, but procurement teams still compare bids on headcount and hourly rates. AI also brings fresh costs, such as computing power and charges from model providers based on the volume of text processed. She called a commercially sensible outcome-based model “very difficult” to reach.

Emiko Caerlewy-Smith, who runs investor relations at Elixirr, argued the challenger firm has an edge because it has never billed by time and materials. Preparing its own data for AI use took Elixirr half a year, she said, and she questioned how long that would take at a firm with tens of thousands of staff.

The graduate pipeline

The entry-level tasks that trained generations of consultants, such as research, analysis and building slide decks, can now be largely automated. EY’s Paul Goodhew, who leads assurance innovation and digital globally from London, said AI can already prepare the first round of ticking figures back to their evidence, a job juniors once did manually. The firm is adding roles such as people who prepare data for audit teams and product managers for its platforms.

Claire Trachet, who founded the London advisory firm Trachet, worried that juniors who skip the groundwork will not build professional judgement. Tzekova’s answer was not to stop hiring graduates but to give them responsibility much earlier.

Why it matters

We covered Elixirr in August when its AI advisory work accelerated, and its pitch now rests on never having billed by the hour. In our view the most telling detail is Tzekova’s point about procurement. Clients may ask for results, but while their buying teams still score bids on day rates, the Big Four have little reason to drop the pyramid quickly.

Looking Forward

Watch UK graduate intake numbers at the large firms in the next recruitment round, and whether any of them publish an outcome-based pricing offer for AI-led work.