McKinsey Cut 200 Jobs and Replaced Them With AI. What That Means for a 15-Person Firm.

McKinsey just cut 200 jobs and replaced them with AI.

If the biggest consulting firm in the world is doing this, what does it mean for a 15-person engineering firm? Or any AEC consultancy?

The Economist put it bluntly: consulting firms need an extensive AI overhaul. But it requires humility — something that doesn't come easily to this industry. The honest answer is that what's happening at McKinsey is happening on a curve, and every consultancy in adjacent professional services — including engineering, architecture, construction management — is on the same curve. Just earlier in it.

What's being automated first

According to HBR, the consulting work being automated first is the work that compounds across every project:

• Research and literature reviews. The first day of any project where someone reads through a stack of papers, regulations, prior reports, and codes. AI does this in minutes now, with citations.
• Financial modeling and analysis. Building forecasts, sensitivity tables, pricing models, cost-breakdown structures. The skeleton work that used to take a junior an afternoon.
• Report drafting and formatting. Turning bullets and data into prose, fitting it to a template, getting the headers and styles right. Hours of work, all of it patternable.
• Data processing and pattern recognition. Cleaning datasets, extracting trends, spotting outliers. Junior analyst work for two decades.

If this list sounds familiar, it should. That's roughly 60% of what a junior engineer, junior PM, or junior analyst does at a typical AEC consultancy. The work isn't going away — but the time required to do it is collapsing toward zero.

The shift isn't whether AI does this work. It's whether your firm is the one doing it cheaper, faster, and at higher quality than the firm next door.

The McKinsey advantage you don't have

McKinsey has a budget to rebuild itself from the top down. They can hire dedicated AI engineering teams. They can build proprietary tools. They can run firm-wide change programs. They can absorb six months of disruption to set up the next decade.

You can't.

That sounds like a disadvantage. It isn't. It's just a different game.

The three advantages McKinsey can't use

A 15-person firm has three structural advantages over a 30,000-person consultancy. McKinsey has none of them.

1. Speed

You can test a tool this week. No board approval. No legal review of every AI vendor's data clauses. No three-month pilot governance committee. No fight with IT over which model to standardize on.

You can wake up Monday, decide to try Claude on proposal drafting, and have a result by Wednesday. That cycle is unavailable inside a firm with 30,000 employees and 40 years of internal politics.

The cost of that speed is also lower for you — the tools that matter cost $20-100 per month per seat, not millions of dollars per enterprise license.

2. Proximity

You know exactly which tasks eat your team's time. Not in the abstract — in the specific, day-to-day way you only know if you're walking past your team's desks.

You know that proposals take three weeks longer than they should because every section gets rewritten from scratch. You know that progress reports are eating the project managers' Friday afternoons. You know that RFIs are being answered with five sentences when a four-line response would have been fine, because nobody has time to make it shorter.

McKinsey has to survey its own analysts to find out where the time goes. You already know.

3. Motivation

Your margins depend on it. McKinsey can absorb a few quarters of bad efficiency while it transitions. You can't.

That's not weakness — it's clarity. When the choice is "improve productivity or watch the margin compress," the experiment gets prioritized. At a firm where AI productivity is one of forty initiatives competing for executive attention, it doesn't.

The firms that will adapt fastest aren't the firms with the biggest budgets. They're the firms where the survival math is the most direct.

What it actually looks like at a small firm

I run a 15-person firm. I started small — automated my own proposal drafting first. Then email handling. Then post-meeting summaries.

Each one took a few days to figure out. Each one freed time to figure out the next one. None of them required a CTO, a transformation budget, or a McKinsey-style overhaul.

This is what compounding looks like at a small firm: each workflow you fix gives you the cycles to fix the next one. After six months, the firm runs differently. After 12, you've built something the next firm down the road would need a year and a consultant to replicate — and you got there one workflow at a time.

You don't need a CTO. You need one person who's willing to experiment and two weeks of patience.

The honest read

The McKinsey headline isn't a warning sign. It's confirmation that the curve is real and well underway at the top of the market.

Every consultancy below them is on the same curve. The question is just where each firm sits on it.

The firms that wait until the trend is visible at their competitor's office across the street will be in the same position as the McKinsey analysts who got cut — except without the McKinsey severance package.

The firms that started this week will look very different in 18 months. Same headcount. Different output. Different margin. Different position in the market.

Cost to start: roughly zero. Cost to keep waiting: paid in slow erosion of competitive position over the next 24 months.

There's no third option.