AI is reshaping consulting speed, and PwC’s Washington, DC leader says clients are already changing their expectations.
Jeanelle Johnson, PwC's managing partner for the Washington DC area, said clients are asking for help 'in delivering outcomes at a more rapid pace' than a year ago. Work that might have been planned for 'eight to 10 weeks' now has an expectation of 'probably half of that,' she said.
Johnson leads more than 2,200 consulting and accounting employees in her role as PwC's DC managing partner. She said clients are not necessarily asking for an entire transformation to be finished faster, but for pilots and proofs of concept to move more quickly.
'There's an expectation now that tools should accelerate the work,' she said. When asked whether those compressed timelines were putting pressure on her teams, Johnson said: 'We're working on it.'
The change is not limited to PwC. Big Four firms such as PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, and EY, along with McKinsey, BCG, and Accenture, are racing to build internal chatbots, train staff, and test AI in client work. Business tasks like market research, due diligence, and brainstorming are among the early-stage jobs AI can now assist with, and increasingly perform.
At McKinsey, Kate Smaje said AI has turned what used to be a team's 'week one answer' into an 'hour one answer.' Employees at other firms described similar time savings, including coding tasks that fell from a dayslong process to around five minutes and due diligence that dropped from two weeks of manual work to a day.
For consulting firms, that speed creates a simple but important question: what happens to the business model when more work gets done by machines? Johnson said faster delivery should not be confused with less work. In her view, AI will free capacity for more meaningful or higher-value work rather than just cutting hours on a project.
The math is simple. If clients want results faster, firms that adapt their playbook can move sooner and serve more customers with the same headcount. But the pressure is real: pricing models built on human labor will have to adjust as AI takes over more of the early work. Founders and operators in every services business should be watching this closely, because speed is becoming part of the product.
