McKinsey and BCG are quietly repricing the work AI can now do in an afternoon.

Margins are fine and boardroom access is intact, but roughly a quarter of McKinsey's fees are already tied to outcomes, and that is what gives it away.

McKinsey, BCG, and Bain are not in trouble the way the offshore firms are. Their margins remain high and their access to boardrooms is intact. What is eroding is quieter. For years, part of what a client bought was the difficulty of getting the answer. The frameworks, the data gathering, and the months of analysis were the product as much as the conclusion was. When a competent analytical answer is now available in an afternoon, that difficulty stops being something a client will pay a premium for.

The repricing is already showing up in the fees. By the firms' own account, roughly a quarter of McKinsey's global fees now come from outcome-based pricing, where the fee is tied to hitting a measurable result rather than to hours billed. That is a real move away from the model that built the industry. A firm does not restructure how it charges unless the old basis for charging is under genuine pressure.

The build is defensive. BCG has told investors it expects AI-related work to grow from about a fifth of revenue to roughly two fifths within a couple of years, and around 150 former consultants from the top firms have reportedly been hired to train AI systems to perform entry-level consulting tasks. Read plainly, the industry is automating the bottom of its own pyramid, the junior analyst work that the leverage model always depended on.

What survives is not the analysis. It is the access: the partner who has sat in hundreds of similar boardrooms and can manufacture the agreement to act on the answer. The new AI platforms are, in part, an attempt to rebuild that hard-to-see advantage at a new layer before clients notice the old one is gone. Whether the new container holds as well as the old one is the multi-year question none of these firms can answer yet.