Thought this was pretty insane!

Maybe we don’t need thousands of powerpoint pretenders in the age of ChatGPT? We should hire McKinsey to work out an AI strategy.

Sources: BLS
Tools: Excel

Posted by chartr

21 comments

  1. Now you, too, can create a 130 slide powerpoint deck that says nothing at all, just like a high-powered McKinsey analyst!

  2. Weird that the lines stayed smooth through the break in the y axis

  3. How is there a discontinuity in the y axis but the curves seem continuous across the discontinuity? Unless I’m reading the mark below 0.4% wrong.

  4. But if we get rid of consultants, who will outsource the work to offshore coder farms and claim credit for it?

  5. None of these industries were impacted by thr 2007 crash? 

  6. There are a lot of jobs that I worry about, but if the big consultancies all disappeared, I feel like that’s overall a win for humanity.

  7. If you trust the data, what else happened around the same time that might explain the change? Correlation is not causation. DOGE, perhaps?

  8. Only 1% of workers are consultants? I would have honestly guessed it was closer to 5-10%.

  10. I feel like everyone is trying to correlate everything to chatgpt launching and not the fact that 2023-2024 we were starting to feel the pain of coming out of a 4 year lock down. Like there are much bigger economical factors than “well chatgpt launch ig we dont need consultants anymore”

  11. What will we do if c-suite can no longer pay to get advice from 25 year olds who stick buzzwords in powerpoints?!?!

  12. I feel like everyone is trying to correlate everything to chatgpt launching and not the fact that 2023-2024 we were starting to feel the pain of coming out of a 4 year lock down. Like there are much bigger economical factors than “well chatgpt launch ig we dont need consultants anymore”

  13. when clients realize that consulting its mainly chatgpt they will stop paying millions to consulting firms and do it themselves

  14. I have a few thoughts / speculation in addition to the AI impact.

    -The global economic climate became really “interesting” because of Trump’s Tariffs. It had a chilling effect on all but high profile M&A.

    -ChatGPT and AI as tech have an impact. However, I think they are greatly overshadowed by the investment engine behind AI.

    -“Post-COVID” normalization continues. Revenue growth rated remain unattainable, but optimizing for profit is more viable.

  15. A particular congratulations to the all the consultants in the chat who noticed the Y-axis break point (the discontinuity) is in the wrong place. Apologies – believe it or not this was made a by a human who made a mistake and I am sorry, guess AI will take my job now.

  16. I think people in these comments are overlooking the “scientific and technology” part of that statement. Management consulting is often a load of shit and it’s where the “PowerPoint deck job” memes come from, but consulting as a whole encompasses a whole lot more than that. I’m very happy with the highly skilled consultants we had that implemented our most recent ERP for example, we did not have the in house skills at all to do it ourselves. I imagine that sort of work falls under consulting but wasn’t just a PowerPoint busy job.

    I have no idea what AI’s effect on that sort of work is though. I wonder how “automated” you could really make an implementation project like that.

  17. Correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation. This is way too simplistic to come up with any definitive conclusion.

  18. I’m aware of people paying 6-figures for Airtable consulting. Just yesterday I used Gemini to set up something fairly complex.

  19. In other news, warehouses are always looking for manual laborers, so those unwanted consultants don’t need to stay unemployed if they don’t want to.

  20. Are you sure it’s not because the federal reserve raised interest rates between April ’22 and April ’23 by 5 points from 0.08% to 5.33%?

    See: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/fedfunds

    Spending was reeled back drastically. Thousands of people were laid of that were “overhired” during COVID and so on.

  21. The number of consultants here struck me as surprisingly high. Management consulting is a small employer and nowhere near the 1M+ shown.

    I went to the NAICS website to see what’s included.

    First, PE firms are included (surprise to me) as they provide investment advice. This is important because the companies owned by PE are counted in their employment, and those are not consultants.

    Second, outsourcing staffing firms are included. While this is technically contract labor, it’s very different than having an outside team of consultants. And it’s a lot of people.

    Third, there are some public agencies here ([MDOT](https://www.naics.com/company-profile-page/?co=266)?). No idea why but they’re not consultants per se.

    Last, Big 4 accounting is included. While they are also consultants, many employees do legally required audit.

    All to say, there’s a lot more going on in the economy than ChatGPT replacing McKinsey.

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