The skill BCG's North America boss thinks matters more in the AI era

At Boston Consulting Group, consultants of the future might look a lot like those of the past: generalists with business acumen.

The difference, said BCG veteran Mel Wolfgang, is that the firm increasingly sees its consultants developing some of the technical capabilities once concentrated among specialists in areas such as IT architecture and software development.

Wolfgang got a better sense of that shift when he took over as North America chair in May.

He asked how many of BCG’s traditional consulting staff had skill sets similar to those of its technical employees.

What Wolfgang found surprised him. “I’ve actually kind of got double the workforce that I thought I had, and I started to really categorize what people know,” he said.

Nearly as many people with traditional consulting backgrounds — including, as Wolfgang put it, “the English lit major with an MBA” — had developed skills that approximated those of BCG’s technical hires.

BCG gauged those skills through tests and employees’ demonstrated technical work on the job.

The findings come, Wolfgang said, as the firm is accelerating its hiring of both technical talent and business generalists, who have long populated the consulting industry.

He said he wants people who combine technical proficiency with the critical-thinking skills BCG has traditionally prized. “I’m trying to find the Venn diagram overlap of that as much as I possibly can,” Wolfgang said.

Many new hires, he said, are arriving with a broader range of technical skills.

In interviews, BCG will ask whether candidates have experience using AI tools such as Claude and Codex.

Wolfgang said that while those abilities are increasingly helpful, “You still have to frame the problem.

You still have to work the analytics.” Plus, he said, consultants need to determine whether an answer makes sense. “The role of judgment has increased enormously, and that’s an apprenticed skill,” Wolfgang said.

Officers and project managers spend time with junior staffers to help them arrive at the best answers, he said.

While AI can help generate insights, Wolfgang said, “you might have to do it multiple times because what it spits out originally may require a lot of refinement and judgment.” Wolfgang said that about 30% to 40% of the firm’s work is focused on AI, including helping clients reshape their business models around the technology.

The remaining share of BCG’s business, he said, falls under traditional consulting — things like strategy, mergers, and post-merger integrations.

Yet those efforts also generally touch on aspects of AI. “Pretty close to 100% of our work today talks about AI in some way,” he said.

To keep up with clients’ AI needs, Wolfgang said the firm has expanded employee training beyond what it provides to new hires or those entering a new client industry.

BCG instructs staff — from consultants to support and operations teams — on topics such as the basics of building AI agents and determining where and how best to use them.

For employees who want to go deeper, the company offers instruction in more technical areas, such as data engineering.

The AI fluency training, which the company has structured into a four-step ladder, involves technical tasks, such as programming an AI tool that employs multiple agents. “They also spend a lot of time forcing you to think through the judgment,” he said of the lessons.

The training requires that BCGers pass a series of assessments.

Those tests adjust to help staffers who might be struggling, Wolfgang said. “If you’re not doing well, it adapts the questions until eventually you learn it,” he said.

About half of the company’s workers in North America have completed the first level of AI training, Wolfgang said.

About one-third have finished the second, and about 20% the third.

The goal, he said, is to have all staff finish the first level by the end of the year and all four levels in the next couple of years.

Wolfgang, who said he recently completed his second training tier, would like staffers to pause between steps to apply what they’ve learned.

It’s akin, Wolfgang said, to passing the written test for a driver’s license. “Now you’ve got to go pass your driver’s test, and that happens on the casework,” he said.

Ultimately, the AI instruction, on its own, is only part of the equation, Wolfgang said. “The critical thinking that a consultant has always delivered is still in the bull’s-eye of what we need to train people to do,” he said.