Despite widespread AI adoption, a significant 72% of employees expect to need major upskilling in AI within the next five years, yet only 36% feel sufficiently trained according to Boston Consulting Group research. The survey of more than 11,000 employees across 14 countries reveals a critical gap between AI implementation and workforce preparedness. Most workers in accounting and finance already use AI tools regularly, with 74% of finance frontline employees using the technology at least several times a week and 42% reporting time savings of a full workday or more per week. However, two out of three frontline employees receive little or no guidance on how to use the time freed up by AI, creating a disconnect between tool availability and effective utilization.
Despite the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence in consulting and advisory services, India's top firms have refused to reduce their billing rates. Companies that expected consulting and advisory firms to bring down their rates with growing AI use came in for a rude shock as firms refused to budge on billing clients. The consulting and advisory firms' defence centres on the fact that any cost benefit brought about by the reduction in the number of analysts and consultants and the time taken for a project is offset by additional investments to upskill and train teams and roping in more senior partners to manage risks associated with AI. As Boston Consulting Group reports, AI helps engineers do their jobs more effectively rather than replacing them, making these roles less likely to experience direct displacement and shifting engineers' work toward system-level thinking, orchestration, and product and design tasks, rather than repetitive coding tasks.
Consulting and advisory firms have invested heavily in AI over recent years, increasingly replacing junior employees with automated bots for research and production tasks. Hourly rates range from ₹40,000-50,000 for a junior analyst to several lakhs for senior partners. Projects that were typically handled by on-site junior analysts with senior leaders checking in periodically now require more hands-on involvement from senior experts due to rising risks of AI, including data privacy breaches and hallucinations where bots generate fabricated data. A BCG survey found 88% believe they will need "major upskilling" in the next five years, with the firm noting that absorbing such a workforce shift will require deliberate investment in reskilling, mobility, and capability building. Vivek Prasad, chief commercial officer at PwC India, acknowledged that meaningful adoption of AI requires significant investments in platforms, specialist talent, governance frameworks and continuous workforce training.
Discussions are now centred on value-based models in consulting parlance, where fees are determined by outcome estimation instead of benchmark amounts. Purushothaman KG, national AI leader at KPMG in India, noted that value-based models are shaping up across different domains as firms seek to derive differentiated outcomes from AI propositions. Uniqus Consultech co-founder Sandip Khetan explained that as firms optimize on labour and resource costs, clients must factor in technology costs woven into the process, with consulting firms also putting in more guardrails and recovering costs of developing AI assets. For CEOs, the imperative today is to focus on achieving the right balance of automation, upskilling, and deliberate talent planning to deliver enterprise ROI at scale and help their employees develop the skills they need to thrive in the AI era.
The emergence of AI has expanded the addressable market for consulting firms, with more companies needing external support to build AI capabilities. Siddharth Jain from Kearney India noted that while the shape of teams has changed—fewer analysts per project, more mid-level consultants—overall project volumes have increased. Many advisory firms, especially Big Four firms, are increasing presence in tier II and III markets, with growing demand for workforce development driving partners to establish offices in Jaipur, Coimbatore, Mysuru, Bhubaneswar, Jamshedpur, Kochi and Chandigarh. The European Commission estimates that between 150,000 and 500,000 EU workers will need to be retrained or reskilled each year up to 2050, highlighting the global scale of workforce transformation requirements. A recent poll by gasworld found that 57% of respondents cited tech upskilling as their priority, far ahead of retention and turnover (22%), recruiting drivers and technicians (11%), and safety culture and compliance (10%).
