{"id":447759,"date":"2026-04-22T07:05:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-22T07:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/447759\/"},"modified":"2026-04-22T07:05:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T07:05:13","slug":"4-mbb-consultants-quit-to-be-ai-founders-and-had-to-unlearn-consulting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/447759\/","title":{"rendered":"4 MBB Consultants Quit to Be AI Founders and Had to Unlearn Consulting"},"content":{"rendered":"

The path to partnership<\/a> used to be the dream \u2014 especially at Bain, McKinsey, or BCG.<\/p>\n

But in the AI boom, some consultants have traded slide decks for startups. As AI reshapes industries and lowers the barriers to building a company, advising from the sidelines no longer feels like enough.<\/p>\n

Several of the former consultants we spoke to said they’d long had the itch to build. AI simply made the timing feel right.<\/p>\n

Others said that after years in consulting, owning a business \u2014 rather than recommending strategies to others \u2014 felt like the natural next step.<\/p>\n

The shift away from the Big Four \u2014 EY, Deloitte, PwC, and KPMG \u2014 <\/strong>has become more pronounced. James Ransome, a partner and strategy consulting lead at Patrick Morgan, a firm specializing in senior partner hiring and industry analysis, said last year that there was an “exodus” from traditional consulting powerhouses<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At the same time, traditional consulting hiring has slowed. Data from<\/a> workforce intelligence firm Revelio Labs shows entry-level inflows into consulting firms fell 54% year-over-year in June 2025. Among more senior hires \u2014 what Revelio classifies as “manager” level \u2014 monthly inflows dropped 22%, the firm told Business Insider in a September report.<\/p>\n

For those who moved, it wasn’t easy to shed their consulting background.<\/p>\n

“I went from being in a huge office with all kinds of perks to being in a coworking space with just two other people,” Nathan Wangliao, who left McKinsey in his 20s for startup life, told Business Insider. “We had to figure everything out from scratch.”<\/p>\n

In his first month, he even considered going back. “This feels too scary,” he recalled thinking.<\/p>\n

Many of these former consultants said they had to unlearn consulting habits, such as overanalyzing, chasing perfect data, and avoiding risk. As one of them put it, being in a startup means needing to “move fast with scrappy pragmatism.”<\/p>\n

We spoke with four former consultants about why they left MBB firms<\/a> to build AI startups, what consulting taught them, and what it took to break away.<\/p>\n

Read more stories about these consultants who left to become AI founders<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The path to partnership used to be the dream \u2014 especially at Bain, McKinsey, or BCG. But in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":447760,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[261],"tags":[197591,291,52960,289,290,1650,121257,66986,4742,10914,18,6262,19,4286,17,1091,7766,3127,934,82,197592,3257],"class_list":["post-447759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-year-over-year","tag-ai","tag-ai-boom","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-business-insider","tag-consultant","tag-consulting","tag-datum","tag-deloitte","tag-eire","tag-firm","tag-ie","tag-industry","tag-ireland","tag-level","tag-mckinsey","tag-other","tag-startup","tag-technology","tag-traditional-consulting-powerhouse","tag-year"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116447092651268543","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=447759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447759\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/447760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=447759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=447759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=447759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}