Consulting Used to Be a Dream First Job. AI Changed That
How firms like McKinsey, BCG and Bain are thinking about hiring now.
Illustration: Daniel Zender for Bloomberg Businessweek
On their first day as students at Princeton University, Liv Bobby and Ezekiel Akinsanya met at an ice cream social and realized they shared an aspiration: Both hoped to get hired by a topflight management consulting firm like McKinsey & Co.
The following year they co-founded an undergraduate consulting club, and both did summer internships in the industry. But with both graduating this spring, Bobby is off to work on Wall Street in the fall, while Akinsanya is looking to return home to England and land a job with the UK government or military. “I want to be integral, and right now it’s not very clear that you will be integral as an analyst anymore,” Akinsanya says. “Those entry-level roles are maybe slowly becoming obsolete.”