A lot of consulting careers are running on autopilot. Stay long enough, do decent work, get the next title. If things slow down, move firms or negotiate a better offer. That has worked for a long time. I don't think it works as well now.
Clients are under more pressure and teams are leaner. AI can now produce many of the visible outputs consultants used to spend days preparing: roadmaps, gap analyses, user journeys, workshop notes. But speed is not quality. A roadmap generated in minutes still looks like a roadmap. The problem is what it misses.
The gap analysis lists gaps but not which ones actually matter. The roadmap sequences work that cannot be sequenced that way. The user journey maps a clean path through a process that is mostly exceptions. It reads well, but it does not survive contact with the real work.
That is the shift I am seeing. AI is exposing whether consultants really understand the work. In finance transformation, the ones who stand out understand the actual finance problem, work across business and technology, challenge what the system or AI produces, and bring the conversation back to outcomes, controls and adoption.
The gap is not junior versus senior anymore. It is between people learning how the work is changing and people still running the old playbook. The consultants who stay close to how the work actually happens will become more valuable. The ones who measure progress by title alone may find the work has moved on without them.