Forward Deployed AI Scientist Intern

A former BCG partner says leaving consulting taught him how to build. Sep 27, 2026, 2:31 AM PT This is an as-told-to conversation with Daniel Dantus, a former BCG partner who's now a senior vice president at Skan AI, a startup that analyzes how work happens across a company. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. I came into consulting as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan's business school. I joined a student consulting club and landed at Boston Consulting Group in Chicago, first as an intern, and then full time. What was special about BCG was that you were given a lot of rope from day one. My first week was training. By the second, I was on a manufacturing floor working with a large food-and-beverage company. Blackbelt flew to Dallas and Mexico and visited plants. I was 20 years old. I was learning to enter new environments, build relationships, and have an impact. I was at BCG for a total of eight years. For the first six, every project involved a different client, city, and team. Firms recommend continuity, but I loved diving into new things. I did operations work in manufacturing and supply chain, as well as in financial services. Later, after I moved to San Francisco, I worked in tech, focusing on sales and product strategy. When I was promoted to project leader, my work shifted from delivering work to figuring out where I was going to build a business. I realized I wanted to keep learning and building products, which consulting projects generally do not allow over the long term. So I took some transition time from the firm, which is paid time to take a breather and find the next thing. I made a list of companies I thought might be interesting and people I knew who might be worth talking to. I had about 100 conversations. Job searches are a numbers game, like sales. If you want to sell to 10 customers, you'd better start talking to 200. That process led me to Harbor Freight Tools, a tool and equipment retailer, as the Director of Marketing, right after BCG. The mandate was to build out the company's digital marketing capability. It was my first "real job" after consulting, and I wasn't sure how learning to build PowerPoints would translate into delivering results. Still, by launching and scaling HFT's digital marketing channels across search, social, and display, I learned it did. Two years later, I ended up at Juul. I had worked with the head of corporate strategy on a BCG project when he worked at Constellation Brands. He later went to Juul to build a new capability. I reached out to catch up, and it happened to be good timing. I started working on its corporate strategy team, then later ran global travel retail and product. It was a turbulent time for the company. Blackbelt went from about 1,000 employees to about 4,000 and then back to 1,000. It was also the first time I got to run a business over a longer term. Travel retail was my first sales job. You learn what it is like to be told no, to negotiate hard, to develop relationships, and to stand your ground. In my final two years, I ran product and e-liquid development, my first technical role alongside a business role. I learned how to take a product to market. I later returned to BCG as a partner. My work consisted of serving private equity clients in strategic due diligence. My advice to people leaving consulting is that no single job is that important. Take time to pause and reflect, and do outreach in addition to considering inbound opportunities. If a job does not work out the way you thought, you can always get another one. I joined Skan last year after reconnecting with its founders. It's a surprising turn of events. Five years earlier, I thought the problem the company was trying to solve was impossible: How do you use passive observation to understand a complex workflow, such as an insurance claim that takes two months to resolve? Generative AI has made it easier to automate work where existing data - documents, databases, calls, and chats - is available. There's still a gap between clicks and tacit knowledge that explains how to execute a business process, and it's one of the biggest opportunities in enterprise AI. After over a year at Skan, I know one thing: AI is just accelerating the same hard work that has always needed to be done.

Management consulting: The Big reinvention reshaping a global industry. Management consulting is being rebuilt around AI and outcomes. See how Deloitte, BCG and their rivals are changing the way advice is priced and sold in 2026. Key Takeaways: * Management consulting is being rebuilt around technology, with the global market widely estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars and still growing in 2026. * Firms such as Deloitte and BCG are pushing AI-led work past 40% of some revenue lines, changing how advice is priced and delivered. * The old model of selling hours is giving way to selling outcomes, and that shift is reshaping the whole industry. Management consulting has spent a century selling one thing above all: expert advice, billed by the hour or the project, delivered by very clever people in very good suits. That model made the industry one of the most profitable in professional services. In 2026 it is being quietly rewritten, and the firms that adapt fastest stand to pull away from those that do not. The pressure is coming from technology, changing client demands and a crowded market. Clients want results they can measure, not just decks they can admire. New tools let a smaller team do work that once needed an army of analysts. And a generation of specialist boutiques is chipping away at the giants. Put together, these forces are pushing management consulting into its biggest reinvention in decades. It is worth remembering how resilient this industry has been. Through recessions, tech booms and busts, management consulting kept growing because organisations always face problems they cannot solve alone. What is different this time is that the tools clients use to judge advice, and the tools consultants use to produce it, are changing at the same moment. That double shift is why the current reinvention feels deeper than the usual cycle. A bigger, busier industry. First, the scale. Estimates of the global management consulting market vary widely depending on how each research house defines it, ranging from around $375 billion to well over $1 trillion when broader advisory work is included. Treat the exact figure with caution, but the trend is consistent: the market is large and still growing, with mid-single-digit annual growth common across forecasts. The headline players remain formidable. Deloitte led overall professional services revenue at about $70.5 billion in its 2025 financial year. BCG reported roughly $14.4 billion in 2025 revenue with about 33,500 staff. These are not firms in retreat. They are firms racing to change what they sell before someone else does it for them. How AI is changing management consulting. The clearest disruptor is artificial intelligence, and consultants are both selling it and using it. The global AI consulting market reached about $10.86 billion in 2025 and has been growing around 24% a year. The Big Four and the top strategy houses have collectively invested more than $10 billion in AI platforms since 2023, according to industry trackers such as J.P. Morgan research and market analysts. Inside the firms, the change is just as real. At BCG, AI and technology services now make up more than 40% of revenue, with AI-specific work about a quarter of the total and growing fast. McKinsey's internal AI platform, known as Lilli, has reported around 72% active adoption among staff and can cut research and synthesis time by up to 30%. When a consultant can produce in hours what used to take a team days, the economics of the whole engagement change. * Smaller teams, bigger output. AI tools let leaner teams handle research and analysis that once needed many junior staff. * Faster delivery. Clients expect answers in weeks, not months, and tooling makes that possible. * New services. Helping clients adopt AI has become a large business in its own right. * Pressure on the pyramid. The classic model of billing lots of junior hours is under strain. When the analysis is cheap and fast, clients stop paying for the analysis. They pay for the judgement about what to do with it. From billable hours to outcomes. That last point is the heart of the reinvention. If technology strips out much of the grunt work, clients naturally ask why they should pay by the hour at all. More engagements are moving towards outcome-based pricing, where fees are tied to results delivered rather than time spent. It is harder to sell and riskier to deliver, but it aligns the consultant's reward with the client's success, and clients increasingly demand it. This is the same story reshaping other knowledge businesses. GBM has tracked how architecture firms became global brands, how companies are closing the skills gap themselves, and how financial data providers turned expertise into recurring revenue. Management consulting is now walking the same path, from selling effort to selling value. The rise of the specialists. The giants are not the only story. A wave of boutique firms has grown up around specific problems, from data and AI to sustainability, pricing and cyber, and they compete hard on depth and speed. A client that once had to hire a big generalist firm for everything can now assemble a team of specialists, each expert in one thing, often at lower cost. That fragmentation is quietly reshaping how work is bought. It also changes how talent moves. The best consultants no longer see the large firms as the only path to a serious career, and many leave to join or found boutiques, or to go in-house at clients who are building their own advisory teams. For the big firms, holding on to talent while automation strips out the junior work they used to train people on is one of the hardest problems they face. The old pyramid, with armies of graduates at the base, does not fit a world where software does much of the base's work. Reputation still counts for a great deal, which is why the established names remain powerful. When a board is making a bet-the-company decision, the comfort of a trusted brand matters. But that trust now has to be earned against faster, cheaper, more specialised rivals, and against clients who are more capable of judging the work themselves. What clients should expect from management consulting next. For buyers of consulting, the changes are mostly good news. Expect faster work, more transparent pricing and sharper competition between the giants and nimble specialists. But expect to work harder as a client too, because outcome-based deals require clear goals and honest data on both sides. For the firms, the challenge is cultural as much as commercial. A business built on billing hours has to learn to bet on results, and a business built on hiring armies of graduates has to rethink its whole career ladder. As its reporting on private equity and jobs showed, ownership and incentives shape behaviour, and management consulting is no exception. Why the management consulting shift matters beyond the firms. This is not just an inside-baseball story for partners and their pay. Management consulting sits at the centre of how big organisations make decisions, so a change in how consultants work ripples out to their clients and, eventually, to the wider economy. When advice gets faster and cheaper, more companies can afford serious strategic help, not just the largest ones. That could level the field a little between corporate giants and ambitious challengers. It also raises the bar for what good advice looks like. If a machine can produce the analysis, the value of a management consulting engagement shifts firmly towards judgement, experience and the courage to tell a client something it does not want to hear. Those are human qualities, and they are hard to automate. The best consultants of the next decade will be less like research factories and more like trusted advisers who happen to have powerful tools behind them. The firms that get the balance right will not just survive the reinvention of management consulting, they will define it. Those that cling to the old model of billing every hour and staffing every project with juniors risk being undercut by leaner, smarter rivals. It is a genuinely open contest, and for once the giants do not automatically hold the advantage. For more, browse its business coverage. Editor's Note: This analysis looks at how AI and outcome-based pricing are reinventing management consulting, and what it means for the firms and their clients. Explore more of its reporting, or nominate a standout brand for recognition by Global Brands Magazine. Is Your Brand Among the Best in the World? Global Brands Magazine recognises outstanding companies across 30+ industries and 100+ countries. 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