And the survivor of the consulting bloodbath is… audit?

Bear with me. We’ve all seen the LinkedIn posts discussing the imminent demise of Big Consulting at the hands of AI. It’s dangerous to make that prediction based on a short-term white collar recession… but it feels like there’s something there. Smart, hard-nosed clients are willing to pay $500 / hour for someone with three decades of specialized expertise. They may not be willing to pay $200 / hour for recent graduates to crunch data or develop PowerPoint decks.

The question then is, where do the world’s future specialized experts develop their three decades of expertise?

I suggest that audit may be that place. Why does that make sense? Because while audit requires expertise, the “product” being “sold” in an audit is an independent assessment. You aren’t paying for your auditor to know your business, processes, systems, and results better than you do – they probably don’t. What matters is that they are providing an independent, objective opinion on the accuracy of those results. And conducting those independent audits provides an environment where auditors can develop the skills, knowledge, and expertise to become the world’s future specialized experts.

Funny enough, that feels a lot like a return to the world of the Big Six when I was graduating from college many years ago. People might move into consulting after some number of years of audit under their belts. Obviously the auditor of the future will need a familiarity with technology, especially AI, that we didn’t have back then. And the tasks assigned to those future auditors will be different.

But I’m betting on audit as a long-term survivor, because I can’t see the need for an independent third party that builds trust ever going away.