Consulting's Pivot

Three of the world's largest consulting firms spent 2025 and 2026 rebuilding their businesses around artificial intelligence, and the results split cleanly between the ledger and the headline. Julie Sweet's Accenture booked its strongest fiscal year in recent memory and credited early AI investment directly, even as the firm moved to shed staff it judged unable to retrain for the new model ¹². Bob Sternfels' McKinsey spent early 2026 quietly restructuring its own internal balance sheet, handing $20 billion in partner wealth to an outside manager ⁷. Deloitte supplied the year's cautionary counterexample twice over, submitting AI-hallucinated reports to two different governments and paying a public price for each ³⁴⁵⁶. Consulting's pivot toward AI generated real revenue and real embarrassment in roughly equal measure, often inside the same twelve months.

Accenture Prices Its Own Pivot

Sweet's firm closed fiscal 2025, the year ended Aug. 31, with revenue, adjusted earnings and free cash flow all landing ahead of the company's own guidance, and its Sept. 25 earnings release attributed the outperformance directly to early AI positioning, headlined "Early AI investments help drive strong fiscal 2025 results" ¹. Full fiscal-year revenue reached $69.67 billion, up 7.36% from the prior year, while trailing-twelve-month revenue climbed further to $73.10 billion, a 6.7% pace that suggests momentum building rather than fading into 2026 ⁸. Net income rose 5.69% to $7.68 billion across a workforce of roughly 779,000 people, a headcount large enough that even modest percentage shifts translate into thousands of individual jobs ²⁸.

Growth carried a harder edge underneath it. Accenture announced plans in September 2025 to lay off employees the company judged unable to retrain on artificial-intelligence skills, a framing that inverted the usual logic of corporate reskilling programs: ahead of investing to upgrade every employee's capability, the firm drew a line and moved workers who fell short of it toward the exit ². Reading Accenture's own numbers against that policy produces an uncomfortable equation. A firm reporting record results while explicitly sorting its workforce by AI trainability treats the technology as both a growth engine and a screening mechanism simultaneously, a dual role few companies state as plainly as Accenture did in its own September announcement.

Deloitte's Australian Reckoning

A A$440,000 report Deloitte's Australian arm submitted to the national government in July 2025 supplied 2025's clearest cautionary tale about deploying AI inside consulting work itself, ahead of merely selling AI to clients. Inspection turned up multiple hallucinations: citations to academic sources invented outright and a quote fabricated wholesale from a federal court judgment ³. Deloitte submitted a corrected version with the errors stripped out and agreed to issue a partial refund once the fabrications surfaced publicly in October ³. An Australian senator's reaction, captured in the Australian Financial Review's follow-up coverage, distilled the episode into a single memorable line: "'Full refund': Senator slams Deloitte's 'human intelligence problem'" ⁴. The phrase reframed the entire debate neatly — a firm selling artificial intelligence as an enterprise solution had just demonstrated, in its own deliverable, exactly the verification gap that critics of the technology warn against.

Newfoundland Delivers a Second Verdict

Australia's episode proved less isolated than a single embarrassing headline. A CA$1.6 million Health Human Resources Plan Deloitte prepared for the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, commissioned in May 2025, turned up at least four false citations to research papers fabricated entirely, according to reporting by The Independent published Nov. 22 ⁵. The provincial government asked Deloitte to review its own document days later, a request CBC News covered Nov. 24 under a headline naming the citations "incorrect" rather than fabricated, a softer framing than Australia's senator chose for the earlier episode ⁶. Two governments on two continents ran into an identical failure mode through separate Deloitte engagements: AI-assisted drafting reached a client deliverable before a human verification step caught the errors baked into it.

McKinsey Reshuffles From the Top

McKinsey's own 2026 restructuring ran quieter than Deloitte's public stumbles, though its scale matched the moment. Bob Sternfels, global managing partner since 2021, oversaw a February 2026 decision to hand $20 billion in assets from the firm's internal investment arm, the vehicle managing senior partners' own wealth, over to Neuberger Berman following a strategic review ⁷. The move sits adjacent to AI rather than squarely inside it, yet the timing tracks a broader pattern across this piece: major consulting firms spent 2025 and 2026 reorganizing structures well beyond client-facing service lines, treating internal operations as fair game for the same efficiency scrutiny they sell clients. McKinsey's public materials this reporting located carried scant detail on AI-specific headcount changes or QuantumBlack's current trajectory, a disclosure gap that echoes the transparency questions raised elsewhere across enterprise AI reporting this year. Sternfels inherited a firm still carrying the memory of a 1,400-person layoff from March 2023, a reminder that McKinsey's own workforce has already absorbed one significant contraction well before AI-specific restructuring entered the conversation directly. A managing partner overseeing both a wealth-management spinoff and whatever internal AI reorganization sits ahead sends a signal distinct from Deloitte's public stumbles or Accenture's explicit sorting policy: change arrives at McKinsey through structure, ahead of headline-grabbing announcement.

What Reinvention Actually Costs

Read across all three firms, 2025 and 2026 confirm a pattern true of prior technology cycles applied at unusual speed: the companies selling transformation absorb its costs internally ahead of any client ever seeing the bill. Accenture's own workforce felt AI's arrival as a sorting mechanism, distinct from a uniform upskilling promise. Deloitte's AI-hallucination episodes cost real money, real credibility, and at least one memorable line from an Australian senator, twice over in different countries within six weeks of each other. Sternfels' quieter balance-sheet move suggests McKinsey chose internal restructuring over public AI announcements, a strategy that trades headline risk for reduced visibility into whatever workforce changes accompany it. Reskilling, the term every firm uses in its own marketing, means something closer to sorting at Accenture, closer to damage control at Deloitte, and closer to financial reorganization at McKinsey — three firms, ostensibly selling the same transformation, executing three different versions of it internally.

By the numbers

• $69.67 billion: Accenture's fiscal 2025 revenue, up 7.36% year over year ⁸.
• September 2025: the month Accenture announced plans to lay off employees judged unable to retrain on AI skills ².
• A$440,000: the value of Deloitte's Australian government report found to contain AI-generated hallucinations, reported October 2025 ³.
• Four: the count of fabricated citations found in Deloitte's CA$1.6 million Newfoundland and Labrador health plan ⁵.
• $20 billion: assets McKinsey transferred from its internal investment arm to Neuberger Berman in February 2026 ⁷.
• 779,000: Accenture's approximate global headcount as of 2025 ².
• $7.68 billion: Accenture's fiscal 2025 net income, up 5.69% year over year ⁸.
• Six weeks: the approximate span between Deloitte's Australian refund story and Newfoundland's citation discovery in 2025 ³⁵.

What to watch

Accenture's fiscal 2026 results, due after this piece's Sept. 4 cutoff, will show whether AI-linked bookings growth held through a full year of the reinvention layoffs announced in September 2025. Deloitte's response to two separate hallucination episodes bears close watching for whether the firm changes its internal verification process publicly, ahead of quietly absorbing the reputational cost and moving forward unchanged. McKinsey's next disclosure on AI-specific headcount or QuantumBlack's trajectory would close a real transparency gap this reporting found across the firm's public materials.

Sources

1. Accenture Newsroom, "Accenture Reports Fourth-Quarter and Full-Year Fiscal 2025 Results," Accenture, Sept. 25, 2025, https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/2025/accenture-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-fiscal-2025-results.
2. Wikipedia contributors, "Accenture," Wikipedia, accessed Sept. 4, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture.
3. Edmund Tadros and Paul Karp, "Deloitte to refund government, admits using AI in $440k report," Australian Financial Review, Oct. 5, 2025, https://www.afr.com/companies/professional-services/deloitte-to-refund-government-after-admitting-ai-errors-in-440k-report-20251005-p5n05p.
4. Edmund Tadros, "'Full refund': Senator slams Deloitte's 'human intelligence problem,'" Australian Financial Review, Oct. 6, 2025, https://www.afr.com/companies/professional-services/human-intelligence-problem-labor-senator-slams-deloitte-s-ai-bungle-20251006-p5n0ch.
5. Justin Brake, "Major N.L. healthcare report contains errors likely generated by A.I.," The Independent (Newfoundland), Nov. 22, 2025, https://theindependent.ca/news/lji/major-n-l-healthcare-report-contains-errors-likely-generated-by-a-i/.
6. Elizabeth Whitten, "N.L. asks Deloitte to carry out review after 'incorrect' citations found in $1.6M provincial health plan," CBC News, Nov. 24, 2025, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/nl-deloitte-citations-9.6990216.
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