As consulting firms rapidly remake themselves to leverage AI, a small but growing number of consultants are leaving to rein it in.
Instead of joining the broader exodus to tech, these consultants are focusing on the risks that AI systems, from chatbots to agents, pose to society.
Namaan Mian, the chief operating officer of Management Consulted, a company that trains and prepares students and others for careers in consulting, said his firm has been tracking where former consultants land after leaving the industry. Roles in software development, operations at startups, IT, and, increasingly, venture capital and private equity remain primary destinations for former consultants, he said.
While moves into nonprofit and government roles, or smaller startups focused on regulating the technology, haven’t appeared in the data yet, Mian said that “anecdotally,” the field is gaining popularity.
How AI is changing consulting
Sarah Pomeranz, a former Accenture consultant, is now the founder and CEO of Consultants for Impact, a nonprofit that helps consultants transition into careers focused on pressing global problems. Pomeranz said that AI safety, governance, and policy accounted for roughly 4 in 10 of the high-impact career moves her organization has supported. That was about twice the share moving into global health and development, the next-largest category.
Pomeranz said former consultants have landed at organizations like the UK AI Safety Institute, RAND, European Union institutions, and policy teams at frontier AI labs.
“A lot of these ex-BCG and McKinsey consultants are staffing the institutions that are, in many ways, governing,” she said.
The consultants who have made the leap
Business Insider spoke to former consultants who left consulting to take up roles at AI safety nonprofits, policy organizations, government roles, and research institutes. They’ve helped governments design AI rules and managed researchers studying how advanced systems could cause catastrophic harm.
“There’s more and more of a need for generalists — just really good operators who actually know how to run an organization, make it grow, have good management practices,” said Lucas Le Merlus Schmuck, a former Bain consultant who now works on the technical AI safety team at the nonprofit Coefficient Giving.
Schmuck, who spent a year and a half at Bain before pursuing a master’s degree in public policy focused on AI governance, said moving directly from consulting into an AI safety nonprofit remains relatively rare. He said consultants generally need to first build familiarity with the field through courses and independent research.
“You usually need to acquire a little more context about the space,” he said. “You want to make sure that people are mission-aligned with what the organization wants to do.”
Peter Wallich, a former BCG consultant, now works as a senior research program manager at the Constellation Institute, where one of his tasks is to help run programs to bring more researchers into AI safety. The role involves a mix of management and coaching — a natural fit, he said, for the skills he developed in consulting.
He said BCG had been valuable early in his career, but he believed consulting firms had underestimated both AI’s transformative potential and its most severe risks.
“I wish that they took a more proactive stance on risks that they don’t have strong commercial incentives to work against,” he said. “I don’t have ill will for the firm, and I am grateful for my experience.”
The ratio of people pushing for returns from AI still vastly outnumbers those working on its potential for harm. For “every hundred people that are trying to push the frontier, trying to build AI that can outperform humans, there is one person trying to prevent catastrophes resulting from that,” Wallich said.
But those working on AI safety say they increasingly encounter former colleagues who have made the switch.
David Conrad, who worked at BCG in Australia, said he first entered consulting because he was unsure what he wanted to do and saw the firm as a professional “finishing school.” Now, he runs a nonprofit that trains people for AI policy and governance jobs across Europe.
“It definitely feels like I very regularly come across consultants in AI safety and AI policy,” he said. “It feels that there’s a disproportionate number of consultants here.”
AI safety organizations compete with well-funded labs for technical talent, so salaries can be unusually high for the nonprofit sector, Schmuck said. The trade-off is probably more significant for principals and partners.
“If you exit at a consultant or associate consultant level, sometimes it’s not even a pay cut,” Schmuck said. “Sometimes it’s the same or a pay bump.”
Pomeranz also said that AI may be making traditionally secure paths feel less certain. As firms freeze hiring, cut roles, and automate more junior work, joining a nonprofit, startup, or smaller organization may no longer seem like a leap into uncharted waters.
“It changes the calculus when the safe options are also not sure things,” she said.
Do you work in consulting and have a story to share? Email Lakshmi Varanasi at lvaranasi@businessinsider.com from a non-work email and device or contact her on Signal at lvaranasi.70.
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