For decades, being a partner's executive assistant at a top consulting firm was one of the most stable white-collar jobs around. Six-figure pay, no elite degree required, year-end bonuses, and total job security.
That deal is starting to fall apart, with McKinsey, PwC and EY all trimming the role, and AI is the reason they keep giving.
PwC's U.S. arm let go of about 600 executive assistants, recruiters and other support staff in February, with affected workers getting four to six weeks of severance. McKinsey cut roughly 200 tech and support staff late last year, which adds up to less than half a percent of its 40,000-person workforce but signals a clear direction for the firm.
KPMG is offshoring similar roles as part of a cost program, and EY is in the same camp. Across the Big Four, AI assistants have been rolled out to internal staff over the last 18 months, with back-office headcount quietly shrinking the whole time.
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Executive assistants at consulting firms book travel, run calendars and handle expenses, and the top of the pay scale can clear $100,000 with bonuses. The work is repetitive and rules-based, which is the exact profile that AI tools chew through fastest.
McKinsey's own research found AI can shave more than 30% off the time it takes to do research and synthesis on a typical project. That math works for partners, but it doesn't work for the analyst pyramid or the people supporting it.
A McKinsey spokesperson described the cuts as making support functions "more efficient and effective, including by taking advantage of AI," and global managing partner Bob Sternfels has said non-client roles will see more cuts over the next two years.
The bigger picture: more than 150,000 tech and corporate jobs have been cut globally so far in 2026, per layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi. The World Economic Forum's latest jobs forecast pegs the count of white-collar roles AI could reshape at nearly 300 million over the next five years, with roughly a third of those at risk of going away entirely.
There's also a hiring shift hiding under the layoffs, with the same firms paying up for AI engineers, applied scientists and machine learning product managers. Pay is moving toward the people who build and govern AI, not the people who do the work AI is starting to replace.
In a 2026 PwC survey of more than 56,000 workers, the people leaning into AI were the ones feeling safer in their jobs, with 70% of active AI users saying the tools made them feel more secure while the AI-avoiders reported the opposite. Whether the same partners cutting back-office staff start to thin out their junior consultant ranks is the next shoe to watch, because that's where the billable model really starts to bend.
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