The leader of PwC’s 2,200-person DC office says clients expect some consulting work twice as fast as a year ago

AI is resetting assumptions about how quickly professional services firms should move, and consulting clients are getting impatient.

“I am seeing clients ask for our help in delivering outcomes at a more rapid pace” compared to this time last year, Jeanelle Johnson, PwC’s managing partner for the Washington DC area, told Business Insider.

“Something that we might have said takes eight to 10 weeks; the expectation is probably half of that. The shelf life is half,” Johnson said.

Clients are not necessarily expecting an entire transformation to be completed in a fraction of the time; the expectation is more for pilots and proofs of concepts, she…