Is AI dismantling McKinsey & Co’s oligopoly or is it strengthening it?

It was around 2014, and I'd booked a mentorship chat with an up-and-coming social media agency owner I admired.

- AANDILE MASUKU

We met at 54 Stanley’s chic industrial vibe in Johannesburg, ordered sarmies, and I pitched my aspirational idea: leverage my broadcasting career, business undergrad training, and modest entrepreneurial experience into a pivot towards top-tier independent consulting.

By the end of the meeting, I felt deflated and embarrassed. He seemed almost gleeful as he pulled no punches. But to be fair, he raised valid points I needed to hear about the nature and practice of top-tier consulting. Apparently, even running a successful social media agency—itself starting to challenge certain advisory work once reserved for management consultants—put him nowhere near the clout necessary to play at the level I envisaged.

He cited elite branding and reputational considerations, privileged network effects leveraging everything from old money relationships and generational wealth to private school connections and corporate old boys’ clubs. Then there was the technical execution gap: my research depth, executional speed, and polish would be hopelessly inadequate. Assuming, of course, I even got the opportunity to pitch to the right parties at the right level at all.

The advice? Save myself the embarrassment. Stay in my media lane. Maybe just find a real job. Not that he was offering one.

The oligopoly adapts

In October 2025, OpenAI awarded McKinsey for surpassing 100 billion tokens in platform usage. That translates to roughly 75 million pages of text processed through their internal AI chatbot “Lilli,” trained on 100 years of the firm’s work. The firm that built an empire on bespoke analysis is running insights through the same underlying technology available to anyone with internet access.