The AI-Era Consulting Team:

About a year ago, we published “Why Customer Success and Consulting Are Attracting the Same People.”

At the time, we were seeing more overlap between the two talent pools. Customer Success professionals were building skills around strategic problem solving, stakeholder management, execution, transformation, and measurable business outcomes. Those same skills were becoming increasingly important in consulting.

A year later, that conversation has gotten much bigger.

AI is changing how knowledge work gets done. It is changing what clients expect from consulting firms, how work gets delivered, and ultimately, what makes someone valuable on a consulting team.

And for small and midsize consulting firms in particular, it creates an important hiring question:

Are you hiring for the résumé you have traditionally hired for, or for the capabilities your firm is going to need next?

There is no question that AI skills are becoming increasingly important.

But one of the most interesting data points comes from PwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer. Within Professional Services, 89% of AI-related job postings in 2025 were for AI users, compared with just 11% for AI developers.

PwC’s conclusion is important: most of the demand is centered around people who can apply AI within day-to-day delivery and business functions, including research, analysis, workflow support, content generation, and client service, rather than people whose primary job is to build AI technology.

That distinction matters for consulting firms.

Your next consultant probably doesn’t need to build a large language model.

They do need to understand how to use AI to work faster and smarter, question its outputs, recognize where human judgment is required, and ultimately turn information into something useful for a client.

AI fluency is becoming part of the skillset.
It is not the entire skillset.

As AI Does More of the Work, Human Judgment Becomes More Important

Research, summarization, first drafts, analysis, and content creation are already becoming easier to accelerate with AI.

Thomson Reuters found that organization-wide GenAI use across the professional services sectors it studied increased from 22% in 2025 to 40% in 2026. Among professionals already using GenAI, more than 80% use it weekly. Research, drafting, and summarization remain some of the most common use cases.

So what happens when some of the work that historically took consultants hours can happen significantly faster?

The value doesn’t disappear.
It moves.

The consultant still has to determine:

Those are much harder capabilities to automate.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 reinforces this. AI and big data are among the fastest-growing skills, but employers still rank analytical thinking as their number one core skill, cited by 69% of employers. Resilience, flexibility and agility ranked second at 67%, leadership and social influence third at 61%, and service orientation and customer service also remained among the core skills employers value.

The future of consulting talent is not technology or human skills.

It is increasingly the combination of the two.

Large consulting organizations have the ability to build highly specialized teams. Smaller and midsize firms often need something different. One person may need to understand the client’s problem, manage the relationship, lead the work, coordinate multiple stakeholders, use AI and technology effectively, present to executives, navigate change, and recognize opportunities to create additional value for the client.

That makes every hire especially important.

It also makes hiring purely by pedigree increasingly limiting. If the job has changed, looking exclusively for someone who has already held the exact title at another consulting firm can cause you to miss people who have already built the capabilities you need somewhere else.

 

This was part of our thesis a year ago, but AI makes the argument even stronger today. There are professionals working in Customer Success, Professional Services, Implementation, Solutions Consulting, Transformation, Client Strategy, Program Leadership, and other client-facing functions who have spent years doing things like:

No, that does not mean every Customer Success leader or implementation professional can become a consultant.

Transferable skills do not mean lowering the bar.

It means getting more precise about what the bar actually is.

Instead of starting with:

Start with:

“What does this person actually need to be able to do?”

Then assess for evidence that they have done it.

There is data behind this shift as well.

LinkedIn’s 2025 research found that companies using the most skills-based talent searches were 12% more likely to make what LinkedIn defined as a quality hire than companies using the fewest skills-based searches.

LinkedIn’s Skills Signal report also found that workers matched based on skills rather than titles qualified for more than three times as many roles.

That doesn’t mean ignoring experience.

It means not using a previous title, employer, or industry as a shortcut for capability.

And this is particularly relevant when AI is changing roles faster than traditional career paths can keep up.

The person who has exactly the background you would have hired three years ago may not automatically be the person best equipped for the work your clients will expect three years from now.

I would be looking for a combination of five things:

1. Strategic problem solving and judgment

 

AI can generate possibilities. Your consultant still has to know which ones matter.

 

2. AI fluency and learning agility

 

The tool someone knows today matters less than their ability to continually adapt how they work.

 

3. Client leadership

 

• Can they earn trust?
• Can they communicate with executives, handle a difficult stakeholder, challenge a client when necessary, and bring people along with them?

Client-facing experience can be developed in many environments outside of traditional consulting.

 

4. Execution and change

 

• Can they move from recommendation to implementation?

This is one reason talent from Customer Success, implementation, professional services, operations, and transformation can be particularly interesting. Many of these professionals have lived on the execution side of the equation.

They haven’t just recommended change. They’ve had to make it happen.

 

5. Commercial thinking

A year ago, we wrote about Customer Success and consulting beginning to attract some of the same people.

Today, I would take the argument further. As AI changes consulting, the boundaries around where consulting talent comes from should change too.

The best hire may still come from another consulting firm.

But they may also be sitting inside a technology company leading strategic customers. They may be implementing complex solutions. They may be running transformation programs. They may be advising executives from inside an organization rather than from outside of one.

The job of hiring isn’t to find a résumé that looks familiar. It is to understand the capabilities that will make someone successful in your firm, then know where else those capabilities exist.

For small and midsize consulting firms building their next generation of talent, that can create a significantly larger and more interesting talent pool.

If you’re hiring for consulting and want to find candidates with the right transferable skills, talk to Melo Associates.