{"id":411372,"date":"2026-04-22T07:32:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-22T07:32:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/411372\/"},"modified":"2026-04-22T07:32:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T07:32:10","slug":"4-mbb-consultants-quit-to-be-ai-founders-and-had-to-unlearn-consulting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/411372\/","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 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":411373,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[180643,220,28067,218,219,2356,40055,41490,2714,8924,22028,61,759,60,12382,24498,1025,1729,80,180644,742],"class_list":{"0":"post-411372","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-year-over-year","9":"tag-ai","10":"tag-ai-boom","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence","12":"tag-artificialintelligence","13":"tag-business-insider","14":"tag-consultant","15":"tag-consulting","16":"tag-datum","17":"tag-deloitte","18":"tag-firm","19":"tag-ie","20":"tag-industry","21":"tag-ireland","22":"tag-level","23":"tag-mckinsey","24":"tag-other","25":"tag-startup","26":"tag-technology","27":"tag-traditional-consulting-powerhouse","28":"tag-year"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411372\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}