Three senior partners at Boston Consulting Group were promoted to oversee its move into AI.Boston Consulting GroupBCG has appointed three new leaders to guide its AI initiatives in North America.BCG's new leaders have made a name for themselves within the firm as good people managers.The changes come as consulting firms adapt leadership to embrace AI and technological expertise.Boston Consulting Group is putting three longtime leaders in charge of some of its most important AI and technology work in North America — and the promotions are telling.All three bring deep technical or transformation experience, but their capabilities and new mandates are also heavily focused on people, whether that's helping employees experiment with AI, build new skills, or turn new tools into lasting changes for clients.Amanda Luther will lead the firm's regional AI and functional activation efforts, Silvio Palumbo will take over BCG X in North America, and Natasha Taylor will help lead its technology and digital work.The appointments come as consulting firms rethink the profile of the people they hire and promote. McKinsey recently elevated 21 consultants to a new distinguished-partner role meant to reward deep expertise in areas like AI and technology, Bloomberg reported. At EY, its Americas talent chief Ginnie Carlier told Business Insider that the firm — once made up almost entirely of accountants — now recruits engineers, technologists, creatives, candidates without degrees, and neurodiverse professionals.AI has rapidly changed the consulting industry and is forcing firms to rethink some of their most basic measures of success. Firms are trying to determine whether their AI agents are delivering value, while also tracking how employees use the technology and, in some cases, incorporating AI adoption into performance evaluations. The shift is reaching the business model, too: Clients are increasingly asking firms to put more "skin in the game," pushing consultants toward fees tied to outcomes rather than simply time spent on a project.As firms embrace AI and become more technical, they are finding they need leaders with strong people management skills who can help employees become more comfortable experimenting with new tools, help teams adapt their workflows, and manage the organizational changes that come with AI. While technical depth is important, so is the ability to bring people along.For BCG's newest leaders, that combination is central to the job.Business Insider spoke with Luther, Palumbo, and Taylor about how AI is changing what firms look for in consultants, what leadership looks like when the technology keeps moving, and what they plan to prioritize next.These conversations have been edited and condensed for clarity.Natasha TaylorNatasha Taylor will help lead BCG's tech and digital work across North America.Boston Consulting GroupNatasha Taylor will help lead BCG's tech and digital work across North America. She specializes in healthcare and has deep experience in digital and generative AI transformations, and she also leads BCG's Denver office.How has AI influenced the way you work with your teams?I approach work with clients and my teams by asking how we can consistently deliver the best problem-solving and execution. Generative AI, more than AI broadly, has had the biggest impact on how I work with my teams and how we can be more effective in partnering with clients.It has made my teams spend more time on the things that really matter: thinking through the toughest problems clients face, getting to the detail and nuance more quickly, and spending less time on administrative tasks.Generative AI has really influenced the way we spend our time, collaborate, ingest information, and come up with hypotheses quickly. And, for lack of a better phrase, pulling from healthcare, it has enabled us to work at the top of our license more consistently.Where do you anticipate getting the most pushback for your ideas, your approach to leadership, or your broader goals in the coming year?I don't know if pushback is the right word for it. Different organizations are certainly at different levels of maturity and ability to invest in the end-to-end work required to reap the benefits of AI, which takes an enormous amount of people engagement and change management.What I've seen is that making real investments in AI requires a lot of commitment. You have to engage across the entire organization and make sure there's alignment across technology teams on which vendors to invest in, what the foundational architecture looks like, and where the right areas of value creation are. You also have to engage the business and examine workflows in a way that helps people embrace the technology rather than be afraid of it.So it's not as much pushback as it is that there's a lot of work required to get ROI from investments in AI. Organizations have different levels of ability to make that executive leadership commitment among many competing prior
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