“Beckoned by the glamour of the start-up space, the industry’s college recruits are joining A.I. companies able to outmatch their consulting salaries.
Geoffrey Jing joined the consulting firm Bain & Company after he graduated from Carleton College, taking the well-worn path funneling top students into high-paying jobs at leading corporate consulting firms.
He figured that, like many before him, he would work at the firm for two years and then jump to something else.
He figured wrong. Three months into the job, he quit and jumped to a start-up called Sieve, which builds data sets and environments for labs developing A.I. models.
“I wanted to spend more of my early career building more closely in A.I.,” Mr. Jing, 23, said.
In the age of A.I., not even consulting, one of the most prestigious and long-coveted jobs for new graduates, is immune from the lure of the start-up scene.
As money and attention pours into the artificial intelligence industry, companies are aggressively pursuing young consultants. The young workers, whose job is to analyze and try to optimize companies — and who are accustomed to working grueling hours — are ideal for start-ups hungry to expand their businesses.
And often — thanks to a combination of glamour and big financial upside — the overtures work. Young ambitious graduates like Mr. Jing see an opportunity to join companies that are developing technologies that could transform the economy.
And then there is the money. Junior consultants at top firms generally make around $110,000 to $120,000, not including bonuses. But many A.I. start-ups are swimming in cash and offer the consultants salary increases of 30 percent or more, according to six people who recently left consulting jobs.
One former consultant said their base salary rose nearly 90 percent after they moved to work in A.I. less than a year ago. Some have been lured into A.I. by the prospect of stock options in an industry where it is not uncommon for companies’ valuations to double and triple in a matter of months.
Start-ups are “definitely going out of their way to hire these types of people,” said Sean Alkis, co-founder of Encore, a recruiting firm for tech companies.
Consulting firms say A.I. has not hurt their ability to recruit and retain employees.
A spokesman for McKinsey, one of the country’s top firms, said it receives more than a million applications each year, ultimately hiring fewer than 1 percent of applicants. The firm hasn’t seen a “meaningful increase” in early departures by junior consultants, he said.
Alicia Pittman, who oversees talent recruitment and development at Boston Consulting Group, another top firm, also said the firm continued to see “record application numbers.” She added that attrition among junior employees was in line with past years.
Other major firms, including Bain, Accenture and PwC, didn’t return requests for comment.
A.I. companies are making no secret of their desire to hire more people from those firms.
Jonathan Shenkman, vice president of business operations at Owner, an A.I. platform for restaurants, said consultants were the “primary persona” his team was interested in recruiting, more than young bankers or people from other finance-related fields.
Ken Schumacher, chief executive and founder of Ropes, an A.I.-powered platform that helps employers uncover fraud among job candidates, said he had recently spent a lot of his time trying to expand his 15-person team. He said he had started recruiting more aggressively from consulting firms because of the success of his chief operating officer, who came from McKinsey.
“Building the product is the easy part,” he said. The bigger challenge, he said, is persuading companies that the product fits their needs. “That’s where the consulting skill set maps really well to,” he added.
Many young consultants moving to tech start-ups don’t always have an engineering background. Often they are taking roles under titles like “strategy operations” or “business development,” which involves tackling any problems the new business faces, or sales.
When Stefan Miller, 25, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, he didn’t imagine he’d ever end up working at a start-up early in his career. He studied finance and, like many graduates in his class, accepted a strategy consulting job at Accenture.
But before his second year was up, he joined EliseAI, an artificial intelligence start-up helping automate workflows in housing.
“If I could give advice to new grads, it would be, ‘If you want to work for an A.I. start-up, you don’t have to take a steppingstone job,’” Mr. Miller said.
The young talent moving toward A.I. start-up jobs is well aware of calls from top executives to slow down the pace of the A.I. growth after the industry has been called out, many times by former employees, for building a powerful technology without enough caution.
Mr. Jing said he had left consulting because of how fast the tech space was evolving. But he said that fast pace also needed careful evaluation.
“I feel like I share a similar view as some people in San Francisco, where I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity in A.I. but some fears as well,” he said.
The consulting industry faced similar competition for talent around the dot-com boom around the turn of the century, when young people were drawn by the seemingly limitless possibilities of making money from the early internet. The expansion of the private equity industry over the past decade has also siphoned young talent away.
But A.I. is much more of much more of a “seismic shift” for job seekers, said David Duncan, a partner at the A.I. consulting firm Disruptive Edge.
“A.I. feels like the whole center of gravity of the economy is shifting,” said Mr. Duncan, who previously worked as a consultant for McKinsey and Innosight. “If you’re an ambitious, young person, you want to be where that shift is happening.”
People at consulting firms say they are sometimes bombarded with offers and opportunities from recruiters. Once, they might have been cautious and kept exploratory conversations private, but the leap from consulting to A.I. — sometimes before their contract is up — is slowly becoming destigmatized.
Recruiters have observed greater willingness and interest among potential hires, who sometimes have friends who made similar moves in their career.
“Needing to stay until you hit that promotion mark for the sake of updating your résumé — it’s not really as relevant as it used to be,” said McCarron Kincheloe, 25, a former Accenture consultant who took up a job at the A.I. start-up Squad Health. “What matters more is the type of experience you have or your ability to get work done.”” [1]
1. Young Consultants Are Jumping Ship for A.I. Start-Ups. Soni, Aruni. New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Sep 21, 2026.
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