Consulting’s Championship Pedigree
In sports, they call it championship pedigree—the ability to show up, adapt, and deliver when the game changes. And the consulting game may just be changing.
In the last week alone:
- McKinsey cited AI leverage as it trims staff while scaling QuantumBlack
- PwC announced a reshuffle and hiring surge
- Accenture launched its AI refinery and doubled down on skilling
- BCG’s Palantir deal tied to AI-led delivery
The message is clear: something’s shifting.
Having been on both sides—first inside the machine as a consultant at PwC, and later across the table as an operator scaling venture-backed startups—I’ve seen this pedigree up close. If there’s any industry wired to navigate disruption with clarity and precision, it’s consulting.
The tools may change. But the DNA doesn’t.
The best consultants thrive in ambiguity, synthesize under pressure, and spot patterns others miss. Consulting has evolved through the PC boom, the cloud wave, the smartphone era—and now, in the AI age, I believe it’s about to level up again. Especially if the agentic trend holds.
And if I were to hazard a guess, we’re entering the age of the AI Agent Boss.
These consultants won’t just be sharp thinkers—they’ll be stacked strategists, orchestrating a custom-built agent stack to solve client challenges faster, deeper, and cheaper.
They’ll deploy enterprise-grade copilots across four familiar phases:
- Baseline (stakeholder interviews, market research, data synthesis)
- Analyze (hypothesis validation, modeling, benchmarking)
- Optimize & Monitor (recommendation engines, ops dashboards)
And these agents won’t be generic. Each will be trained on the firm’s proprietary IP and tuned to client context:
None of this is theoretical—LLMs today already power half a dozen decent agents in each category.
Imagine walking into a client—not with a blank slide and timeline—but with a finely tuned agent stack, ready to go.
And make no mistake: every forward-looking partner is paying attention—not just for client impact, but for what it unlocks:
- Margin lift (agents don’t sleep)
- Scale (run 10x more analysis)
- Market expansion (unlocking mid-market clients)
Of course, it won’t be smooth at first. These agents will be brittle, messy, and domain-specific. Productizing anything in consulting is hard. But that’s where the real upside lies: firms that encode their know-how into agents create enduring IP. A ConsultingOS, if you will.
And we’re already seeing moves across the board reflected in these recent news: These aren’t hype plays. They’re hedge bets—on new delivery models, new moats, new margins.
The firms I admire are doing four things:
Because in this new game : 👉 The deck is dead. The stack wins.
In sports, great teams aren’t just lucky—they know how to ride momentum, pivot mid-play, sense shifts, and deliver in the clutch. Consulting is no different. The game is changing.
If there’s one thing I know about this industry—it has championship pedigree. And I bet it’s about to put that to work.
I work with companies to jumpstart high-impact, inorganic growth plays—M&A scans, partner ecosystem builds, market entry initiatives, and corporate venture bets.
If you’re looking for seasoned, burst-capacity execution without the overhead of a full team, let’s connect.
About author:
Jitin Dhanani is a growth operator with 20+ years of experience scaling tech businesses via partnerships, acquisitions, and GTM. He’s held leadership roles at Vectra AI (cybersecurity unicorn), PwC Strategy&, Ixia (acquired by Keysight Technologies), and led 7e Wellness (D2C startup) and founded Dragon Capital (family office fund).
