• Smaller, boutique consulting firms are leveraging AI to compete with established players.
• Many of these firms have a narrow focus, like helping clients with pricing or cost-cutting.
• Their methods aim to make consulting accessible to a broader range of clients.

Two sets of players have long ruled the consulting world.

There is MBB, which is McKinsey & Company, Bain & Company, and Boston Consulting Group. And then there is the Big Four: PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, and Ernst & Young.

But now, a new wave of upstarts fueled by AI is attempting to chip away at that dominance.

Many of the founders of these new firms come from the traditional consulting realm. They told Business Insider their experiences not only give them marketable skills but have also helped them identify new opportunities in the industry.

They are boutique firms. They are much smaller than the established ones, often run by teams ranging from just a few people to a few hundred. They're also more specialized, focusing on areas like pricing strategy, cost reduction, or refining slide decks.

And, importantly, they are all in on AI.

Many of them said their methods have helped them reduce old-school bureaucracy, offer more competitive rates, and make the human side of consulting work easier.

Here are eight boutique firms that are, to varying degrees, challenging the classic consulting model.

Xavier AI

Xavier AI describes itself as the world's first AI strategy consultant.

According to Joao Filipe, cofounder of Xavier and a former McKinsey consultant, the Xavier AI chatbot can provide clear, actionable business knowledge and deliverables, like a 60-page business plan, a sales presentation, or a detailed marketing strategy.

Filipe said Xavier AI has its own proprietary reasoning engine that is tailor-made for business use cases and can provide detailed sources without the hallucination you might find with other chatbots. He said Xavier can provide both strategy recommendations and actionable plans for implementation.

"99.9% of businesses could really never afford McKinsey or any of the MBBs," Filipe told BI. "We created Xavier AI so that anyone could have the power of a consulting firm at their hands when they need it."

Xavier AI just launched, but Filipe said he's been piloting it with different clients, including an international bank using it to research potential clients and better understand their needs.

Perceptis

Alibek Dostiyarov, a former McKinsey consultant, and Yersultan Sapar, a former engineer at Apple, cofounded Perceptis.

The company aims to help smaller and midsize firms compete with bigger industry players by using AI to streamline some of the more tedious processes in consulting, like proposal writing.

Perceptis is now focused on the business development side of consulting. Its AI-powered operating system can do industry research, identify opportunities that align with their client's skillset and background, and create detailed, custom proposals that the client can use to win a job.

Dostiyarov told BI earlier this year that a lot of the internal processes completed at consulting firms are heavy with manual labor and "lend themselves almost perfectly to what GenAI is capable of doing."

He also said Perceptis could make smaller firms, which don't typically have internal AI tools, more competitive in the market.

The company told BI this week that while initially serving boutique management consultancies, it's now quickly expanding to serve IT services, system integrators, software developers, financial services, design firms, and real estate agencies.

Perceptis had raised $3.6 million in funding as of January.

SIB

SIB specializes in helping clients like restaurant groups, hospitals, universities, and government agencies find savings in fixed costs — expenses that remain static regardless of how much a company produces.

SIB CEO Shannon Copeland told BI that these are often found in areas that "escape scrutiny," like fees for telecommunications, utilities, waste removal, shipping, and software licenses. According to his LinkedIn profile, Copeland is an alum of Accenture and Deloitte.

SIB has grown since its 2008 launch in Charleston, South Carolina. It's now a national firm serving hundreds of clients, ranging from Kroger and Marriott to governments like San Diego County. It recently added over a dozen Fortune 500 companies and private equity firms. Since its launch, SIB says it has identified more than $8 billion in cost savings.

Copeland said that, unlike traditional consulting firms, SIB operates under a contingency model. "If we don't find savings, we don't get paid," he said, adding that the firm doesn't charge fees upfront.

SIB uses AI agents to monitor invoices, vendor contracts, and billing patterns. The firm's consultants use the resulting insights to negotiate better contract terms or restructure their vendor relationships.

"You could think of us as part AI, part old-school operator," Copeland said.

In addition to cost-cutting, the firm also focuses on strengthening relationships, a cornerstone of traditional consulting.

"We actually encourage vendors and clients to return to high-trust, high-accountability partnerships by using data as the starting point for better collaboration," Copeland said. "Working with robots actually makes humans listen to each other more. It's ironic, but it works."

Monevate

Monevate's motto is simple — focus on one thing and do it well.

The firm focuses on pricing strategy for software-as-a-service and high-growth tech companies. It also works with private equity firms to assess the commercial viability of potential investments.

According to his LinkedIn profile, James Wilton, an alum of McKinsey, Kearney, and ZS Associates, founded Monevate in 2021. Wilton now serves as the Firm's managing partner. The firm has 16 full-time consultants and has helped over 50 SaaS, tech, and AI companies in the past three years.

"Most of our clients are backed by venture capital or private equity, and increasingly, we're working with teams building AI products and features," Wilton told BI by email.

Wilton said clients usually turn to Monevate when they've hit a wall with their current strategy because their product has changed or the market has evolved. "We design and implement fully-baked pricing strategies, including packaging, price architecture, and price levels," he said.

Wilton said the impetus to launch the firm came from the gaps he saw in traditional consulting. "Clients often complained about recommendations that never went anywhere, high fees that only the largest companies could afford, no skin in the game, inflexible delivery models, and highly variable service quality depending on the team," he said.

Monevate keeps its focus narrow, but that's allowed even its most junior consultants to become "deep pricing experts," Wilton said.

He added that the firm's work is "narrow by consulting standards, and it means walking away from other kinds of work, but it allows us to be truly great at what we do."

Keystone

Keystone is a strategy consulting firm that advises technology companies, life science companies, governments, and law firms. Its clients include major corporations like Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Intel, Novartis, and Pfizer.

The firm was founded in 2003 by Greg Richards, a mechanical engineer by training and an alum of Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, who now serves as an advisor to Harvard Business School, and Marco Iansiti, a physicist and professor at Harvard Business School.

Iansiti told BI that Keystone tends to be more "geeky and nerdy" than traditional consulting firms. "We love to kind of get deep on the tech side of things," he said. The team includes data scientists, AI experts, and academics.

While many consulting firms are embracing generative AI, which is often used to automate day-to-day work like writing emails or reviewing documents and contracts, Iansiti said Keystone is focusing more on operational AI.

Operational AI is used to transform core business functions like managing supply chains, inventory, pricing, and forecasting. In 2023, the firm launched "CoreAI," a team dedicated to using AI to automate and improve these areas.

"We get excited about the term deep enterprise on this," Iansiti said. "Deep enterprise is really the idea of using deep learning models that are embedded around crucial operating processes in the enterprise."

The firm's "value add," he said, lies in building this kind of "pretty unique operational AI" for its clients.

Fusion Collective

Fusion Collective is an IT consulting firm that offers a range of consulting services to clients, including strategy and management advice, cloud transformation, and AI alignment.

The firm was founded by Blake Crawford, who worked on enterprise architecture at MTV Networks and Viacom, and Yvette Schmitter, an alum of Deloitte, PwC, and Amazon Web Services, where she led three cloud migrations, including the largest in the company's history.

Schmitter said that in her experience, clients are seeking AI advice from consulting firms before they're ready.

"We have organizations who are running at 99 miles an hour, hiring these firms to build these AI strategy documents, 165 pages of beautiful PowerPoints, right?" she said. But these companies still can't "operationalize" AI, she said. "Why? Because the basic infrastructure isn't there. Any type of vulnerability that they have in security, their cloud infrastructure, is just exacerbated by AI."

In the end, clients chose consultants based on trust, their networks, and existing business relationships, she said.

"I really believe that a true partner is one who's going to tell you the truth. Tell it like it is even if it hurts right?" Schmitter said. To that end, she said she asks clients who come to her about AI strategy to have a solid grasp of their infrastructure footprint, data governance policies, and security before they accelerate adoption.

The bottom line is that Fusion Collective likes to keep its advice real. "If companies have not mastered the fundamentals, you're not ready for AI, and you're not ready for an army of consultants to come in to do stuff," Schmitter said.

Slideworks

Slideworks isn't necessarily going after consulting firms' business, though it focuses on something many of the big guys are known for: making powerful slides.

Slideworks offers what it calls "high-end" PowerPoint templates and "toolkits" created by former consultants for Bain, BCG, and McKinsey.

When you work as a consultant at a top-tier firm, "you are schooled every day in best practice presentations and slide design," the company says on its website. The idea is to offer access to a library of slides and spreadsheets for areas including strategy, supply chain management, and "digital transformation."

In a February blog post, Alexandra Hazard Kampmann, a Slideworks partner, wrote that "management consultants are often made fun of as 'slide monkeys.'" Yet, she added, the slide is a "crucial reason" why McKinsey and BCG consultants have so many Fortune 500 companies as clients.

Slideworks offers a "consulting toolkit," which contains 205 slides and costs $129. It also offers a "consulting proposal," which has 242 slides plus an Excel model and costs $149.

There are also operations, mergers and acquisitions, business strategy, and product strategy templates.

Slideworks says it has more than 4,500 customers globally, including Coca-Cola, Pfizer, and the professional-services firms Deloitte and EY.

Unity Advisory

Some top UK executives from Ernst & Young and PwC are joining forces to launch a new firm called Unity Advisory in June, the Financial Times reported. The firm will be chaired by Steve Varley, who spent nearly 19 years at EY, and led by CEO Marissa Thomas, who worked at PwC for over 30 years, according to their LinkedIn profiles.

It is backed by up to $300 million from Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm, and will focus on tax and accounting services, technology consulting, and mergers and acquisitions.

"CFOs are open to a new proposition," Varley told the FT. "The Big Four are a classy bunch of service providers, but people are looking for a proposition that is super client-centric, has really low administrative cost, is AI-led rather than based on legacy infrastructure and, crucially, has no conflicts."

• Consulting firms have become a destination for some companies looking to make the most out of AI.
• AI leaders at these firms use tools like GPT Enterprise and internal chatbots like McKinsey's Lilli.
• BI asked AI leaders at several large companies to share tips for using the technology.

Working with artificial intelligence can sometimes feel more like an art than a science.

That's why many companies are turning to consulting firms for guidance on how to maximize the technology.

Top firms are not only helping companies develop AI tools, upskill their workforces, and identify potential security weaknesses, but they are also creating chatbots and agents to organize their firm's knowledge and streamline routine tasks. As a result, AI leaders at consulting firms tend to have a handle on AI strategies that can work for a broad range of tasks.

Business Insider asked AI execs at five top consulting firms — Deloitte, EY, KPMG, McKinsey, and PwC — to share their best tips for using AI in everyday work.

The AI leaders said they regularly used various AI tools, including models from OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic, as well as tools built internally, like McKinsey's Lilli, EY's EYQ, and ChatPwC, PwC's internal version of ChatGPT.

Here's how they use AI and some of their advice for getting the most out of it. Responses are edited for brevity.

How do you use AI in your work?

Dan Priest, US chief AI officer at PwC: I do a lot of research with it. For instance, I was doing some analysis on labor productivity and how AI will improve labor productivity. The typical search would produce labor statistics. Well, AI, the big powerful foundation models, it'll grab those labor facts and statistics, it'll do analysis, it'll show you trends, discontinuities, or cause analyses. It is much more robust. In terms of research and analysis, it emerges as a thought partner versus just a search engine.

You discover blind spots in your thinking. I was writing a policy and I thought it was pretty comprehensive, and I ran it through GPT Enterprise, and it found two other points in the policy that we should be adding.

Todd Lohr, head of ecosystems at KPMG: Part of my job as a leader is being able to synthesize information. AI is very helpful in that it has allowed me to understand trends and the marketplace and has enabled me to have a broader view as a leader and synthesize and ingest a lot more information.

It has also been helpful for communications in terms of preparing for meetings, follow-up from meetings, as well as correspondence.

Rodney Zemmel, global leader for McKinsey Digital and firmwide AI transformation: I've found it to be excellent at "level one" creativity and coming up with things you generally will not have thought of. It's an excellent aid to brainstorming for our teams. I haven't yet seen it as having true unbounded creativity, i.e., a new way of looking at the world. That won't be far behind, though.

What are your go-to AI prompts or advice you have for writing good prompts?

Dan Priest, PwC: I'll give some context about what I'm trying to do, a short, punchy question, and then ask follow-ups that make them increasingly specific, and then you can adjust based on what you're seeing.

During the week, I travel a lot, and if I get 100 or 200 emails in a day, it's just really hard to keep up with every single one of them. I go into Microsoft Teams, activate Copilot, and ask it to review all messages in Teams and email and find the actions for me. I'll just spend 15, 20 minutes at the end of the day, do the prompt "Identify emails that are addressed to me directly or that have an action for me," and it produces the list. It's not perfect, but it's good at it.

I like to cook, and I don't like to waste food in the refrigerator. So I will prompt, "Create a recipe with these ingredients," and I'll just list the things that I want to get rid of in the refrigerator.

Rodney Zemmel, McKinsey: Too many people are still using it to look something up. The trick is to have a dialogue with it and to get comfortable building agents that can execute simple tasks. Let AI handle the 80% of tasks we're mediocre at, so we can excel at the exciting 20%, as one of my colleagues likes to say.

Matt Barrington, Americas chief technology officer at EY: Context management is paramount. I keep separate AI "workspaces" for different focus areas — such as technical Q&A or drafting client communications.

I also give the AI clear instructions about the style and depth of response I want, like "Provide a concise, bullet-point summary," or "Act as a finance expert," or "cite credible sources or references and provide links."

What challenges are there with using AI?

Dan Priest, PwC: It is changing muscle memory.

I've spent a lot of years developing a certain writing style, a certain research technique, and I had to change that. And I am better for having changed it, but it doesn't happen overnight.

It was just like anything that you learn, you have to be disciplined about learning it, and then it sticks.

Todd Lohr, KPMG: The biggest challenge is connecting all my individual data sources that are disparate. If I want to build my own personal AI, the challenge is having access to the right information and knowledge.

I have been deliberate about addressing this challenge when I took over in my current role. I put everything in one folder and personally curated the content that I agreed with and liked.

Matt Barrington, EY: The main challenge is keeping pace with the innovation. There's a constant flow of new models, tools, and capabilities, and it can be tough to pinpoint which option is best for a given task. I follow newsletters, participate in AI-focused events, and learn from AI practitioners — but in my view, hands-on experimentation is the most effective way to stay informed and find what genuinely works.

Also, it is important to remember that while these models are confident and impressive, they can be wrong. Always validate the information and output before you utilize it.

What do your clients want to know about incorporating AI into their business?

Dan Priest, PwC: The questions have sort of shifted. A year ago, they were asking, "What's the killer use case?" "What's the most industrialized use case?" "What's the use case that's going to produce the most savings or the greatest deficiencies?" Now, the questions we're getting are less about those technical use cases and they're much more about "How do you evolve the business strategy to take advantage of AI capabilities?"

Rodney Zemmel, McKinsey: They want to understand how AI agents can integrate with their workforce, acting like talented interns who need proper training to be effective. We've also seen the conversation move from just productivity to growth and productivity, and to finding ways to do things better and faster than humans to doing things that no human could possibly do.

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