The only reason this existed in the first place is because measuring performance is extremely difficult, and becomes more difficult the more complex a person's job is.
AI won't fix that. So even if you eliminate 50% of your employees, you won't be eliminating the bottom 50%. At worst, and probably what happens on average, your choices are about as good as random choice. So you end up with the same proportion of shitty workers as you had before. At worst worst, you actively select the poorest workers because you have some shitty metrics, which happens more often than we'd all like to think.
So, what you're describing is a mythical situation for me. But - US corporations are fabulously rich, or perhaps I should say highly-valued, and there are lots of investors to throw money at things I guess, so maybe that actually happens.
Note that AI wipes out the jobs, but not the tasks themselves. So if that's true, as a consumer, expect more sleepwalked, half-assed products, just created by AI.
I just wish that instead of getting more efficient at generating bullshit, we could just eliminate the bullshit.
That covers majority of sales, advertising and marketing work. Unfortunately, replacing people with AI there will only make things worse for everyone.
Its the people that are constantly working, and too busy to be seen, producing output and keeping the lights on who don't have time for the "games" who AI is going for. Their jobs are easier to define since they are productive and do "something" - so its easy to market AI products for these use cases. After all these people are usually not the people in charge of the purse strings in most organisations for better or worse.
Management will be thrilled.
Most criticisms I see of management consulting seem to come from the perspective, which I get the sense you subscribe to, that management strategy is broadly fake so there's no underlying thing for the consultants to do better or worse on. I don't think that's right, but I'm never sure how to bridge the gap. It'd be like someone telling me that software architecture is fake and only code is real.
That said, how would we measure if our KPMG engagement worked or not? There's no control group company, so any comparison will have to be statistical or vibes-based. If there is a large enough sample size this can work: I'm sure there is somebody out there that can prove management consulting works for dentist practices in mid-size US cities or whatever, though any well-connected group that discovers this information can probably make more money by just doing a rollup of them. This actually seems to be happening in many industries of this kind. Why consult on how to be a more profitable auto repair business when you can do a leveraged buyout of 30 of them, make them all more profitabl, and pocket that insight yourself? I can understand if you're an poorly-connected individual and short on capital, but the big consulting firms are made up entirely of well-connected people who rub elbows with rich people all day.
Fundamentally, there will never be enough data to prove that IBM engaging McKinsey on AI in 2025 will have made any difference in IBM's bottom line. There's only one IBM and only one 2025!