#consulting

Anyone consulting or thinking of consulting legal counsel to review the separation agreement? Anyone already have done so and could share any potential areas of concern within the terms, etc?

I've been running scenarios in my head for days. If I get laid off next week, what do I do. I have some savings, maybe two or three months worth. I could pick up some consulting work, maybe. My partner does work, but their income alone wouldn't cover everything. We could sell my car, move to a cheaper apartment, ask family for help. But none of those are good options. I'm realizing I'm not as prepared as I thought. So I'm asking genuinely, what's everyone else's plan B? Are you ready for this, or are we all just hoping we'll be spared?

KPMG is laying off over 500 staff in its UK operations. The cuts primarily affect 440 assistant manager roles in the audit business. An additional 120 positions will be eliminated from the advisory arm. KPMG attributes these reductions to low attrition rates and market conditions. The firm previously over-hired during a post-lockdown demand surge.

United Kingdom

https://www.consultancy.uk/news/43655/kpmg-to-shave-more-than-500-roles-from-uk-headcount

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/03/27/2026-06017/improving-wage-protections-for-the-temporary-and-permanent-employment-of-certain-foreign-nationals

Interesting times coming, brace for turbo outsourcing of delivery work.

The company probably paid an additional surcharge to the consulting firm to heavily alter the results and put a positive spin on management perception.

Don’t believe the results to be shared.

Hire a bunch of Mckinsey consultants to ruin the bank.
Then hire said consultant to become CEO to "revive" the bank.
Corporate America is such a peculiar place.
You can't make this stuff up if you tried.....

Video with Gunjan:
https://www.wsj.com/video/us-bancorp-ceo-on-reviving-a-banking-icon/88A15F0D-41C8-4511-A4F5-9954AE1833AA

Thoughts on our "Partners"?

I spent there less than a year - I quit because I was bored. I observed 50+ people doing almost nothing, mostly consultants or other peers. My manager (SVP level) was unable to control her area and didn't even know what she should expect from people. There was literally no strategy, no plan and terrible ignorance - from payments to tech industry.

Forvis Mazars reduced its United States workforce. This adjustment impacts about 250 employees. Audit, tax, and consulting roles saw reductions. The company explained that attrition rates were lower than anticipated. Other public accounting firms have reported similar low attrition trends.

https://www.goingconcern.com/layoff-watch-26-forvis-mazars-cuts-3-of-the-workforce-in-unusual-post-busy-season-culling/

I heard that Accenture doing a "survey" and may takeover GNT / Engineering soon. Anyone heard the same?

Just got displaced. Understand that as an individual I cannot start a new role during this timeframe, but if I have an LLC, then my single-member company gets paid and not me as an individual. Any thoughts? Any useful, constructive thoughts?

McKinsey & Co. will reduce its workforce. Cuts will affect non-client-facing divisions. Up to ten percent of staff may be impacted. This could affect several thousand employees over two years. Other major consulting firms have also announced recent layoffs.

https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/articles/mckinsey-layoffs-show-white-collar-131646321.html

Seriously???? They latch on and never ever leave. We farm out more and more work and all they care about $$$$. What a way to destroy a culture. I honestly think we'll never

Does the US Consulting Business even exist anymore? FSI, Manufacturing and Healthcare have all been gutted. Anyone left, or is this place now just an offshore staff aug sweatshop?

Wouldn't cutting MW's salary amd other ELT be a great move? Consultants like McKinsey basically run the company so why pay for expensive ELT?

I’ve been noticing some serious “entrepreneurial spirit” in the company lately and I just wanted to check in. in my team "work from home" now feels like everyone quietly running a startup out of their kitchen table while their MS Team stays open for decoration.

one colleague is “on a call” all day says he ships ten dropship orders before lunch like a 1 person warehouse. another always says he is “deep in the spreadsheets” while dogsitting his neighbors 2 golden retrievers always clocking out at 3 to touch grass.
another one takes “quick coffee breaks” to turn in three content videos and 2 brand replies before his latte is gone. another guy says he’s in consulting and he is on call most day. still not sure who pays his tab. DXC or his consulting business that somehow has more clients than his unit in DXC.

if you need me I’ll be “in a meeting” steaming vintage jackets for my fast growing online resale empire. dx c is starting to feel like a hobby at this point. peanuts money for zero effort so I’ll take that deal all day.

What’s your real income stream, since clearly it’s not DXC??

Why are we paying MW over 30 million a year when he can't make decisions and just hires multimillion dollar consultants like McKinsey to run the company? Maybe fire MW and we'll really save money!

Have you actually worked with our contractors lately? They have massively lost capability due to offshoring. They basically just have a bunch of people doing copy and paste from old deliverables without any understanding of what the deliverable is. Very low quality coming out of these HVECs today.

Thoughts on Zensar ? Or should i just go ask AI

You are so easy to spot... 20+ years in. Has seen every reorg... Uses "back in the day" all the time.. Defend pensions. And institutional memory. Oh, yeah, let's attack consultants and outsiders... And... Always disgusted but not never ever surprised at all.

Google AI question: Has Accenture taken jobs from investment firms other that IT?

Yes, Accenture has taken over significant non-IT operational and business functions from investment firms, asset managers, and capital markets entities. Through its "Managed Services" and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) arms, Accenture often assumes responsibility for middle- and back-office operations, strategy, and talent to cut costs and modernize processes.

Examples of non-IT job functions taken over by Accenture include:

Middle & Back Office Operations: Accenture manages end-to-end trading lifecycle operations, including trade processing, reconciliation, settlement, and clearing. 👀

Asset & Wealth Management Services: They provide operational support for portfolio management, investment stewardship, and client service teams. 👀

Finance & Risk Management: Accenture runs finance, risk management, and regulatory compliance reporting, taking over these functions to manage regulation and data.

Transaction Advisory & M&A: They provide strategy consulting, post-merger integration, and operational restructuring services, effectively taking over the planning and execution roles formerly held by internal teams.

Procurement: Accenture offers procurement outsourcing, managing vendor relationships and purchasing processes for financial institutions.

Human Resources/Talent: During acquisitions, Accenture often replaces internal HR and project management (PMO) staff with their own centralized global HR group.

How they do it:

Accenture typically acquires specialized consultancies (such as Altus Consulting for investment technology or SKS Group for banking) and then uses its "shared services" model to offshore or automate roles, which frequently results in the displacement of the client’s original staff.

Are the people who have been hired before, to analyze the company for layoff advice, holding clipboards? If so, saw them at a HQ today.

Heard there is another round of consultant survey by Mars Company right now. And there are proposals of significant headcount right sizing. Any news about the target groups ?

Does anyone have any good experience with contractors at this company? I feel like in my 7 years here they have all been grossly incompetent. They interview well so I'm assuming they're cramming tech stack info before the interview (or are using AI to help answer questions).

Resumes are all over the place (and often more than one page and have seen 3+ pages more often than not), certifications for miles, but when it comes time to be a contributor to our workflow, they make some of the silliest mistakes or can't do more than a basic function. One contractor a few years back on our team was decent, but even they were not up to snuff. It's mostly been about a 90-95% negative experience in my tenure here. Otherwise I've run into some pretty bad issues like them not knowing about a tech stack item that we literally interviewed them for and asked them technical questions on.

So please, someone let me know I'm not crazy or tell me about a good one so I can imagine good quality contract work on my team.

What happened to the highly anticipated external hire from a consulting company who was appointed to head DMC strategy? She disappeared after just a few months. Was she that bad?

another "strategy team" pushing a not new approach and calling it new with long trainings where no one has done the job on the clinic level. exhausting....praying for rif or early retirement. why cant these over paid consultants figure stuff out? If it did not work the first time or second time... it wont work with less staff.

The E&Y people are well trained to implant bureautic procedures and redundant controls so they can bill Citi for over-time meetings

The What IBM does today section is illuminating. . .

https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/what-does-ibm-do

In all my years in consulting i have come across multiple fake leaders (aka.. A fake leader is an individual who prioritizes personal image, power, and self-interest over the well-being of their team and organization) but nothing like IBM consulting. Per my experience apart from a handful of leaders every other leader i encountered at IBM consulting is very close to a fake leader. seems like its very much engrained into the culture what have you seen during your time ?

The execs are horsesh-t. They can make a decision but they can’t stand by it. They have no ba--s when they make a mistake and refuse to take ownership. Then they pay gazillions to consultants to make decisions for them. They aren’t worth a tenth of their salary if all they do is transfer that responsibility. The result is us worker bees working triple hours while not being recognized. The execs are wirthlesss.

The most innovative best management consulting company so cutting edge that absolutely no one has ever heard of it and those unfortunate few who have heard of it are doing everything in their power to keep it f-cking away from their business.

Have any Band 10s in IBM Federal Government Consulting been laid off?

my prediction and I am a 2nd year senior manager with iffy prediction track record.

five years from now, ACN is likely a smaller, leaner, more AI-centered firm with less revenue tied to labor-heavy delivery... more tied to high-end consulting, governance work, and complex project/enterprise orchestration... and still facing lower headcount leverage and margin pressure than in its pre-AI model.

I see Accenture at roughly 70% of current revenue (lets say in 5 years), with headcount down much more than revenue because AI compresses labor faster than it ki-ls total demand...

Now let's look Bear vs Bull cases, i am in the middle:

Bears: Think in terms of an impact across the board bears will say this:

• Mgmt Consulting - High Value Add (Research, planning, transformation - advanced thinking LLM models are really good at this - it'll slash demand by 50%)
• Vendor Selection (each advanced LLM model beats Gartner, things are analyzed and customized in less than 8 hours of work - u still need consulting, but you need 2 guys instead of 12)
• Design Systems Work (see above, the same applies)
• Dev (Agentic is going to cannibalize this up to 80%)
• Testing (Same as above, Agentic works - writes and executes scripts, u just need oversight and metrics, this will take a 70% haircut).
• Training and Change/Communication (Same as above)
• PMO (Still needed, probably 25% less or so)
• Management (Still needed, probably minimal impact)
• Overhead (Contracts, finance, HR, Still needed but will get streamlined extra 20% over time).

Bulls will counter with this, and the Wall Street seems to be more on the Bears side at least for now:

• Mgmt Consulting - High Vlue Add (AI strategy, operating model, transformation - LLMs generate options, but exec alignment grows - demand shifts up the stack)
• Vendor Selection (LLMs speed anlysis, but audit and risk increase - still need validation and accountability, fewer analysts more senior roles)
• Design Systems Work (AI builds components, but enterprise standardization at scale grows - governance and consistency expand)
• Dev (Agentic boosts output, but backlog expands - fewer devs per project, more projects overall)
• Testing (Agentic automates scripts, but continuous validation and monitoring grow - shift to quality engineering)
• Training and Change/Communication (More tools, faster change - structured adoption and change mgmt expand)
• PMO (Faster delivery, more coordination across AI, data, business - leaner but more critical)
• Mgmt (Fewer layers, higher span of control - more intense decision making)
• Overhead (More AI licensing, compliance, governance - leaner ops, higher complex.)

FIS Managers are going to provide severance to their buddies, Then those buddies will be hired directly as consultants with FIS.

If you are not in good books with your managers, they are going to transfer you to third rated staffing company COGNIZANT. After a while, FIS will ask cognizant to replace you with low cost H1B visa holder.

Watch for more RAs in Consulting very soon. . .

https://www.businessinsider.com/consulting-management-ai-agents-future-ibm-2026-3

By: Lakshmi Varanasi
Mar 23, 2026, 4:01 AM CT

• IBM's consulting arm monitors the work of AI agents using a real-time dashboard.
• IBM says AI agents have sped up security investigations, cutting task time from 45 to a few minutes.
• IBM Consulting's revenue reached $21 billion in 2025, driven by demand for AI solutions.

At IBM's consulting arm, the future isn't a slide deck or a strategy memo — it's a live dashboard where humans monitor the work of AI agents in real time.

Earlier this month, Mohamad Ali, senior vice president of IBM Consulting, walked Business Insider through the dashboard that the company both uses internally and recently released to clients.

"Every hour I can see what's going on with all the humans associated with digital workers," and vice versa, he said. "That is the new consulting model going forward."

The dashboard is known internally as "Consulting Advantage." The company unveiled it in 2024 to help its own consultants build and manage teams of AI agents. This January, it unveiled "Enterprise Advantage," a similar version of the platform for clients that allows them to build and manage AI agents at scale.

In recent years, the firm has made itself the testing ground for building and deploying digital workers as it prepares clients for a future defined by AI. Ali said the firm has digital staff working side by side with humans on more than 150 client engagements.

Take the example of a typical security operations center, he said. When an alert comes in, a human investigator would normally spend about 45 minutes combing through logs to figure out what went wrong and what to do next. At IBM, he said, that process is increasingly handled by AI.

Digital workers first "generate an investigation plan." Then they execute it in real time. Multiple agents tackle different parts of the problem simultaneously, passing tasks back and forth, he said. Then they run a risk analysis and produce a report. The process now takes just a couple of minutes. The findings are then passed back to a human — with key actions highlighted — and the human verifies it.

In January alone, IBM used this approach to complete 52,000 investigations, Ali said.

IBM has evolved dramatically from its early days as a maker of mainframe computers into a key player in the AI bo-m. The company said its generative AI department was valued at $12.5 billion during its fourth-quarter earnings call.

Its consulting department, especially, has seen an uptick due to demand for generative AI and services that help clients implement it. Consulting revenue for 2025 came in at over $21 billion, up from about $20.7 billion in 2024.

IBM Consulting has been around for decades. The company acquired PwC's consulting arm in 2002. PwC would later rebuild its consulting business after a five-year noncompete clause expired.

IBM Consulting now employs about 150,000 employees and says its work overlaps with the Big Four and more technology-focused firms like Accenture.

"We don't do, like, what markets you should be in," Ali said. "We do strategy around 'how do you take your corporate strategy and implement it?'"

And right now, he said, there's a big question in corporate strategy: How do you prepare for a world where humans work alongside AI agents?

Boston Consulting Group coming back for assessments at Technology gp. Be ready!

There are 475 people as now, with GBUs, Consulting, etc. The plan is too stay with ca 200. That's massive reduction, much more than 30k spread.

All European companies hire McKinsey to understand how they can run their business better. But McKinsey is not working for the benefit of these companies or Europe. McKinsey is working for the benefit of billionaires in the US.

Recently McKinsey asked Volkswagen to close 8 of their 10 German factories and lay off almost everyone.
https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/volkswagen-mckinsey-soll-angeblich-schliessung-fast-aller-deutschen-werke-empfehlen-a-89c85f97-0964-40b0-ad5f-7163ea7c1925

McKinsey is also the reason why the executive board want to fire SAP employees. This entire narrative that SAP should fire almost everyone and replace them with AI comes from US billionaires through McKinsey.

My hot take is that SAP should fire McKinsey. It will save millions that we give them each year. And SAP should focus on innovation instead of using stupid US marketing and laying off employees and making customers angry. Christian Klein is only doing all this because he plans to join the McKinsey Germany board after he leaves SAP. And that's wrong.

This is my third bank. All are bad, but this one is the worst. I come across stuff that seems like a remnant from the previous century. With all that fancy management and hefty consultant fees, you'd think they would have streamlined some processes by now. AI would short-circuit trying to deal with this place.

Why is ESC engaging MARS consultant review this time round? Heard they are reviewing for the BSC teams? potential rationalization again??