PwC DC flags faster client demand as AI compresses consulting timelines

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Highlights

Clients at PwC's Washington, D.C. office now expect outcomes in about half the time compared to last year, citing AI-driven efficiency.
AI has allowed tasks like market research, coding, and due diligence—previously taking days or weeks—at McKinsey, Deloitte, and EY-Parthenon to be completed in minutes or hours.
The accelerated pace from AI is prompting consulting firms to reconsider pricing models as automation outpaces billable human labor despite increasing task complexity.

PwC sees AI-driven shift in delivery expectations

As reported by Business Insider, Jeanelle Johnson, PwC's managing partner for the Washington, D.C. area, says clients are asking the firm to deliver outcomes more quickly than they did at the same time last year. She says assignments once scoped at eight to 10 weeks now often carry an expectation of about half that timeline, as clients assume technology should help accelerate the work.

Johnson says the pressure is centered less on completing full business transformations in a fraction of the time and more on moving faster through pilots and proof-of-concept projects. She leads more than 2,200 consulting and accounting employees in PwC's D.C. office, and says the firm is working through what those compressed timelines mean for its teams.

The shift reflects a broader race among large professional services groups, including PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, EY, McKinsey, BCG, and Accenture, to build internal AI tools, train staff, and test the technology in client work. AI is increasingly assisting with early-stage consulting tasks such as market research, due diligence, and brainstorming, changing how quickly firms can produce initial analysis.

Pricing and workload questions emerge across the sector

Examples from across the industry suggest the pace of delivery is already changing. At McKinsey, global technology and AI leader Kate Smaje says AI has turned what used to be a team's "week one answer" into an "hour one answer," allowing consultants to spend more time testing deeper parts of a problem rather than waiting days to get oriented.

Employees at other firms describe similar gains. A software engineer at Deloitte U.S. says some coding tasks have fallen from a process lasting days to around five minutes with AI, while an EY-Parthenon consultant in the UK says due diligence that once required two weeks of manual work and spreadsheet handling can now be completed in a day.

For firms and clients, that speed-up is also raising questions about how consulting pricing models adapt as more work is completed by AI rather than billed human labor. Johnson says faster delivery does not mean less work, arguing that AI is likely to free consultants to focus on higher-value tasks even as client problems become more complex amid geopolitical tensions, wars, tariffs, and macroeconomic uncertainty.

Our earlier article covered the intensifying debate over the pace of frontier AI and whether industry safety controls can keep up. It noted talks among leading AI labs about coordinating on shared safety standards, alongside public calls by some executives to slow development even as commercial AI products continue expanding.

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