Adopt AI or miss out on promotion: the new rule for major global consulting firms

Resistance to adopting artificial intelligence is already having concrete employment consequences at the world’s largest consulting firms. Accenture began this month to track individual weekly logins to its AI tools for senior-level employees, making that data an explicit input for promotion decisions, according to an internal email obtained by the Financial Times.

The Dublin-based firm informed associate directors and senior managers that “regular adoption” of AI would be a requirement for accessing leadership positions. “Use of our key tools will be a visible input in talent discussions,” the email stated, later confirmed by a company spokesperson to CNBC.

The problem for seniors: more resistance, more pressure.

Three executives from the Big Four firms told the Financial Times that convincing senior managers and partners to adopt AI tools has proven considerably more difficult than doing so with junior staff. The most senior employees are “less comfortable with technology and more attached to established work methods,” the sources described, leading management to implement what one of them called a “carrot and stick” approach.

The irony of the situation was not lost on anyone: while AI is eliminating entry-level jobs, it is senior staff who are most resistant to adopting it. The internal resistance was explicit: two people familiar with the change criticized the usefulness of the tools, calling some “broken garbage generators.” One of them stated that she would resign immediately if the measure directly affected her.

The policy does not apply to employees in 12 European countries or those working on U.S. federal government contracts. Accenture stated that its strategy requires “adopting the latest tools and technologies to serve clients more effectively.”

Accenture’s financial context also weighs heavily on the equation: the company’s stock has fallen 42% in the last 12 months, reducing its market capitalization from more than $260 billion to around $137 billion. CEO Julie Sweet had already foreshadowed this direction on an earnings call, saying that the firm would “separate” those who could not adapt to the AI era.

McKinsey: 25,000 AI agents already working alongside 40,000 humans.

Just a few weeks later, McKinsey’s case illustrates the other end of the transformation. Bob Sternfels, the firm's global managing partner, revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January that McKinsey currently operates with 40,000 human employees and 25,000 AI agents, for a total of 65,000 "workers." Just 18 months ago, there were only 3,000 agents.

"When people ask me how many people McKinsey employs, my answer is 60,000: 40,000 humans and 20,000 agents," Sternfels told the Harvard Business Review. The projection is even more ambitious: the firm expects to achieve numerical parity between humans and AI agents before the end of 2026, with each employee having at least one support agent.

The model described by Sternfels, which he called “25 squared,” implies that client-facing roles grow by 25%, while non-client-facing roles decrease by the same percentage, but with a 10% increase in productivity in that segment. The result: overall growth without needing to increase staff proportionally.

In this sense, AI has already saved McKinsey 1.5 million work hours in the last year, including the generation of millions of charts and basic analyses.

The implications for employment are direct: Bloomberg reported that McKinsey plans to cut 10% of non-client-facing roles in the next 18 to 24 months, primarily affecting those who performed tasks that are now automated. At the same time, the firm will hire more junior consultants with a technology background, redefining what kind of human talent is valuable in the age of agents.

A Trend Spreading Across the Industry

Move by Accenture and McKinsey is not isolated. In June 2025, Microsoft informed its employees that “using AI is no longer optional,” and managers began including AI adoption in performance reviews. CEO Satya Nadella warned executives that those who did not support the company’s AI plans should consider leaving.

The data supports the urgency of change. McKinsey’s latest State of AI report revealed that 88% of organizations already use artificial intelligence regularly in at least one business function, up from 78% the previous year. However, only a third have begun scaling their programs enterprise-wide.

While 32% of surveyed organizations anticipate a net reduction in staff in the coming year as a result of AI, 43% do not expect significant changes in the number of employees.

The paradox that emerges is the one highlighted in the viral post by therundownai that sparked this conversation: the wave of job transformation hits entry-level positions first—which AI can automate more easily—while senior profiles are the most resistant to adopting it.

Not learning to work with AI, industry executives conclude, is equivalent today to having resisted the internet in the 1990s: it's not a sustainable option.