Dr. Tauni Lanier
Founding Partner
Read Dr. Tauni Lanier’s full article on Substack.
As AI eats into the graduate intake at the world’s biggest advisory firms – KPMG’s own numbers are down by a third, McKinsey and BCG have frozen starting pay for three years running – the industry is reading it as efficiency. Dr. Tauni Lanier reads it differently: as a business model running out of road.
In this piece, Tauni traces the shift from Stanford researcher Melissa Valentine’s concept of “flash teams” expert groups assembled fast, dissolved once the work is done aligning to the model Evermore is built on: not a marketplace assembled from scratch each time, but a standing community of senior practitioners who already know each other’s work, AI-scaled rather than AI-replaced. It’s a case for judgement over utilisation, and for why the firms with the most to lose here aren’t the boutiques they’re the ones with a permanent bench to keep busy.