The reports of McKinsey’s death are greatly exaggerated, despite what The Economist might say. McKinsey isn’t dead. What’s dying is the professional mythos – the belief that your time is inherently valuable. Just as importantly, the glamour once attached to professional life, the sense that years of hard work and study meant you had “made it”, is dying too.
When I was 22, I landed one of those coveted analyst roles at McKinsey London straight out of university. Despite working over 80 hours a week, I felt glamorous about it: business class flights around the world, sampling 5-star hotels in global cities, Michelin star team dinners, getting picked up in a Mercedes S-class at 10pm to be dropped off outside a Mayfair club on Friday nights (anyone remember Mahiki?). But the most important element wasn’t the fancy perks; it was feeling that my time mattered.
Even as a 22-year-old graduate, the Firm provided a phalanx of administrative, research and operational support so I could focus on client matters without worrying about anything else (though client matters mostly meant Powerpoint, Excel and Problem Solving Sessions). That support made being a McKinsey consultant feel sexy and glamorous.
Over this summer, I met with dozens of leaders across professional services: senior partners at law firms, consultancies, accounting firms and credit funds. As an AI entrepreneur and investor, I’ve always been fascinated by how technology transforms the white-collar workplace. What I learned confirmed something I’ve been thinking about for years: the degradation of “professional time” and encroachment of non-billable administrative work has been a structural problem even before AI or Covid. This shift comes from four interconnected forces that have fundamentally changed how professional services operate.
The death of personal support
First, structural cost reduction has eliminated the human infrastructure that made professionals feel valued. Just last week, Grant Thornton made headlines by offshoring its secretaries to India. But offshoring fundamentally destroys what made secretaries valuable: real-time, in-person contextual support. An offshore assistant won’t understand London transit issues, client preferences or office politics. If we’re going offshore, why not just use software?
The numbers tell the story. In the US, secretarial roles halved from 5m in 1990 to 2.5m by 2020, now hovering around 2m today, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The personal touch that made professionals feel supported has largely vanished.
The SaaS trap
Second, technological shifts have created what I call the “SaaS trap”. Business software
companies promise complete automation for travel booking, time-keeping and expense management. But instead of having a secretary who knows your preferences and optimises your itinerary for both cost and productivity, you now book everything yourself on various apps. This has even happened in the consumer world: in the past you might go to your local travel agent; today you go to the Ryanair website. We were promised frictionless efficiency. Instead, we’ve all become our own secretaries, booking flights and uploading receipts between client calls.
Every partner and associate I spoke with this summer shared the same anecdotal experience: non-billable administrative work has increased by roughly 25 per cent. There’s now an expectation to do it yourself. Compare this to my own experience back in 2008: even a 22-year-old consultant booking his own flight was inconceivable. Did those SaaS companies account for the loss of billable hours when they promised savings from cutting administrative support?
Economics over fellowship
Third, compensation structures have shifted from long-term fellowship to short-term profit maximization. Traditional law firm “lockstep” compensation was based on seniority and firm profitability, incentivising long-term thinking and collective success. The shift to “eat what you kill” models made firms more short-term focused by definition. Cutting administrative support boosts immediate profit per partner, even if it degrades the overall employee and partner experience. This pattern repeated across consulting and accounting.
Every millennial just below partner level I spoke with said the same thing: “The partnership economics model is broken.” Whether driven by culture wars, increasing American individualism, or other factors, this optimisation of “profit over fellowship” has drastically shifted how firms calculate support costs.
Covid’s acceleration
Finally, Covid solidified these changes. The thinking became: if we survived without in-person support during lockdowns, maybe we can just run everything on apps or outsource permanently?
The result
Today, even partners at prestigious firms experience far more drudgery and far less glamour than their predecessors. The fabric that made professional services feel special has largely unravelled.
But I think there’s hope on the horizon. AI might be the key to bringing back professional sexiness: not by returning to the old model, but by creating something entirely new. The question is whether we can build AI systems that restore the feeling of valued time without requiring armies of human support staff.
This all comes back to a point I’ve been emphasising in my recent columns: context. Currently, there are fantastic AI tools that crawl the web for research (ChatGPT Deep Research or Perplexity), build presentations (Gamma, Gemini Slides) and execute domain-specific workflows (Harvey, Legora, Cursor). However, despite all these tools, both AI-enabled and old-school SaaS, the human is still the “super-app” gluing them together, providing the context: client preferences, travel details, relationship dynamics, organisational politics.
If we can solve the context layer for AI, then AI can provide a true super-app that gives time back to professionals to focus on what they really care about – serving clients, building relationships, generating expertise – while AI handles everything else seamlessly.
This is how we can bring that “special feeling” back to professionals (in addition to more billable hours, of course): by building AI tools with deep personal context that allow each professional to scale themselves in ways that feel genuinely unique and express their expert craft and personality.
Dr Lewis Z Liu is a founder, investor and AI scientist