McKinsey, BCG, and Deloitte's new competition is small, fast, and driven by AI

4 hours ago 2

Lakshmi Varanasi,Kelsey Vlamis,Tim Paradis

Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 10:15 AM 10 min read

Smaller, boutique consulting firms are leveraging AI to vie with established players.
Many of these firms person a constrictive focus, similar helping clients with pricing oregon cost-cutting.
Their methods purpose to marque consulting accessible to a broader scope of clients.

Two sets of players person agelong ruled the consulting world.

There is MBB, which is McKinsey & Company, Bain & Company, and Boston Consulting Group. And past determination is the Big Four: PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, and Ernst & Young.

But now, a caller question of upstarts fueled by AI is attempting to spot distant astatine that dominance.

Many of the founders of these caller firms travel from the accepted consulting realm. They told Business Insider their experiences not lone springiness them marketable skills but person besides helped them place caller opportunities successful the industry.

They are boutique firms. They are overmuch smaller than the established ones, often tally by teams ranging from conscionable a fewer radical to a fewer hundred. They're besides much specialized, focusing connected areas similar pricing strategy, outgo reduction, oregon refining descent decks.

And, importantly, they are each successful connected AI.

Many of them said their methods person helped them trim old-school bureaucracy, connection much competitory rates, and marque the quality broadside of consulting enactment easier.

Here are 8 boutique firms that are, to varying degrees, challenging the classical consulting model.

Xavier AI describes itself arsenic the world's archetypal AI strategy consultant.

According to Joao Filipe, cofounder of Xavier and a erstwhile McKinsey consultant, the Xavier AI chatbot tin supply clear, actionable concern cognition and deliverables, similar a 60-page concern plan, a income presentation, oregon a elaborate selling strategy.

Filipe said Xavier AI has its ain proprietary reasoning motor that is tailor-made for concern usage cases and tin supply elaborate sources without the hallucination you mightiness find with different chatbots. He said Xavier tin supply some strategy recommendations and actionable plans for implementation.

"99.9% of businesses could truly ne'er spend McKinsey oregon immoderate of the MBBs," Filipe told BI. "We created Xavier AI truthful that anyone could person the powerfulness of a consulting steadfast astatine their hands erstwhile they request it."

Xavier AI conscionable launched, but Filipe said he's been piloting it with antithetic clients, including an planetary slope utilizing it to probe imaginable clients and amended recognize their needs.

Alibek Dostiyarov, a erstwhile McKinsey consultant, and Yersultan Sapar, a erstwhile technologist astatine Apple, cofounded Perceptis.