05/12/2026
Wall Street is betting $1.5 billion that the old consulting model is dead.
In early May 2026, Anthropic, a leading AI developer (creator of the Claude model), announced a joint venture with key Wall Street players. The new company, already being dubbed the "McKinsey of AI," has received $1.5 billion in funding. Its goal will be to help businesses implement advanced AI solutions in practice.
For decades, when big businesses faced a serious challenge, they called consultants like McKinsey, BCG, or Bain. These firms built their empires in an era when information was scarce.
The business model worked like clockwork. Consulting, let's call it a collective McKinsey, diagnosed a business problem (collected data, conducted interviews, built models), formulated a strategy (recommendations on beautiful slides), and then departed, leaving the client alone with a 200-page report and its own staff, who still had to implement it all. And, of course, billed $500 to $700 per hour for each consultant involved.
The main problem lies in the reporting section. McKinsey has always been an expert in advice, not in its implementation. And as long as the costs of searching, processing, and interpreting information remained high, this worked. But then came artificial intelligence.
Analytical work, which underpinned the entire traditional consulting pyramid, is no longer scarce. What previously required a team of four analysts and two weeks of work can now be accomplished in two days by one person with AI tools.
And now you're reading the main part of this post. Any modern consulting firm takes AI tools and bolts them on top of the old business model. This improves the efficiency of existing employees, but doesn't change the very logic of work, even as everything around them is rapidly transforming.
That's why you'll increasingly encounter the term "AI-Native company." This is both saying that a certain person is a native speaker, and also saying that a company was designed and built from the ground up using a model where AI is not a tool, but a supporting structure of the business.
The very concept is changing. We're not buying a subscription from one of the leading companies, but rather developing a completely new organization around a new architecture. To do this, do we need a consultant or an AI engineer? You might say that McKinsey could hire such engineers to continue providing its consulting services. It can't. Because all the engineers are already hired by AI companies, and they'll be selling results, not hours. AI-native companies sell deliverables—ready-made legal analysis, automated financial reporting, rebuilt operational processes.
Therefore, the "McKinsey of Artificial Intelligence" company mentioned at the beginning of this post is an attempt to create the first truly AI-native consulting structure that will:
▶️ integrate Anthropic engineers and AI agents directly into client companies—not send PowerPoint presentations, but physically rebuild business processes
▶️ create scenario plans that can then be replicated and scaled
▶️ offer services that are several times cheaper than McKinsey (by some estimates, 40-60% cheaper)
The company was created by a partnership between the AI company Anthropic and three Wall Street investment giants willing to provide their clientele—Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and Hellman & Friedman. They understand that analytics has become more accessible in the market, but no one has yet taken on the implementation.
Winners will be those who can do it, not those who can advise.
