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Gen Z consultants from MBB and Big Four firms are quitting for a surprising new exit opportunity: TikTok

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Kelly He-Sun landed one of the corporate world’s most competitive jobs as a consultant at Boston Consulting Group and got promoted to a project leader by age 25.

But she didn’t see herself doing consulting forever, so in 2024, she quit after almost six years. She planned to spend time traveling and creating fashion and lifestyle content, but when she made a video about working in consulting, it took off.

“I made a video about the number of hours we typically work, and it just blew up. I didn’t expect it to draw that kind of attention,” she told Business Insider. “That’s when I started realizing, ‘Wow, people are really interested in this type of content.'”

He-Sun is among a growing group of Gen Z and millennial consultants who are trading traditional exit opportunities for content creation. Posts about consulting rack up thousands of views on TikTok and Instagram, while the #corporatelife hashtag has over 1.7 million posts on TikTok.

For some consultants from top firms, like MBB or the Big Four — which includes McKinsey, Bain, and BCG, and PwC, KPMG, Deloitte, and EY — their background can signal credibility, as well as the chance to get an insider’s perspective into an industry that’s famous for its secrecy and notoriously competitive to break into.

Three consultants-turned-content creators told Business Insider how they leveraged their high-profile jobs into lucrative exits with the help of social media, and why they have no plans to go back.

Content creation can be as lucrative as consulting

He-Sun posts all about consulting and general career tips, like about how she became one of the youngest managers at a top consulting firm and how to ask for help while still sounding competent.

While she started posting in 2024, she ramped up her strategy in 2025. So far in 2026, she’s made around $42,000. With over 50,000 followers between Instagram and TikTok, He-Sun makes most of her money through brand deals, but has also earned through affiliate marketing, user-generated content, and 1:1 coaching.

Joe Fenti, who has over 800,000 followers across accounts, left his job at a Big Four consulting firm in 2024 to become a full-time comedian and content creator. Fenti also capitalizes on his background by roasting consulting and corporate culture. One sketch, titled “Timesheets In Consulting Make No Sense,” has racked up more than 2.2 million views.

The 29-year-old started posting content while he was still working at his firm, but finally quit when the money he was making from content, primarily via brand deals, exceeded his consulting salary.

Jack Kim, a 29-year-old who quit his job at Bain last year, started posting about consulting on YouTube while he was still at the firm and realized there was a huge audience looking for insights on breaking into consulting.

He and his friend now run Casebuddy, a one-on-one mentorship business that helps take clients through the entire process of landing a consulting job, from résumé writing to acing case interviews. They charge between around $1,300 and $6,700, depending on the service, and he said most people applying for the program find it through his social media presence.

A growing opportunity in the creator economy

While mostly associated with consumer brands, influencer marketing is becoming increasingly important to B2B companies — and those companies often want to work with creators whose audience includes working professionals.

Whereas lifestyle influencers might get brand deals with retailers like Walmart or Sephora, corporate influencers can score brand deals with SaaS companies. Fenti has worked with Grammarly and Scribe, while He-Sun has partnered with Microsoft, Indeed, and several SaaS startups.

“We’re in this era of the rise of the B2B creator,” Brendan Gahan, founder of Creator Authority, told Business Insider, adding that the number of creators focused on business and corporate life was “exploding.”

The trend can be seen in the growth in LinkedIn content creators, as well as the way executives at major companies have become de facto influencers. McKinsey has promoted its own “top voices on LinkedIn,” a list that included leader Bob Sternfels. Lara Sophie Bothur previously told Business Insider how she became Deloitte Germany’s first corporate influencer.

Gahan said B2B influencer marketing was expected to be worth $7.7 billion by the end of 2025. A LinkedIn report from 2025 found that B2B marketers use influencers to raise brand awareness, build trust, and convert sales.

Gahan said influencers can help shape the reputation and opinion of a brand, and in turn influence the decision makers inside companies. For instance, if a bunch of consultants at a firm become interested in a software product they’ve seen promoted online, it’s more likely their company will be interested in buying that product.

A glimpse into the mystery of consulting

Consulting is a notoriously secretive, prestigious, and high-paying industry, so naturally, plenty of young professionals are hungry for the inside scoop on how it works and how to break in.

Kim said when he was first applying to consulting, he found there was a lot more information online about how to break into fields like finance and law, while consulting was still a mystery. “I wasn’t really able to find anyone that was specifically doing consultant content,” he said.

Fenti said he thinks the content resonates because consulting can be a “nebulous” industry full of “fluff answers” about what consultants actually do.

He also thinks his jokes about consulting and corporate culture resonate because the MBB and Big Four firms collectively employ over a million people, and it’s “nice to see the world you live reflected back to you and to see the frustrations you feel is also felt elsewhere.”

None of the creators currently has plans to return to the corporate world.

After the grind of consulting, He-Sun said she finds content creation work to be “really easy” in comparison, and she plans to expand her revenue streams in the coming year.

Kim said that he loves his mentorship business and has plans to continue growing it, but ultimately wants to become a much bigger content creator.

Fenti wants to do more stand-up comedy in addition to his content creation, and said he would never go back to a corporate job.

“I love being my own boss. I love creating my own schedule,” he said. “It’s such a freeing feeling.”




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AI agents failed at real-world consulting tasks — but Mercor’s CEO says they’re still on track to replace consultants

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New research suggests an AI agent can’t fully replace a human consultant — at least for now.

Mercor, the AI training giant, tested how well leading AI models, acting as agents, performed real-world consulting, banking, and legal tasks.

The models failed most of the time, but Mercor’s CEO, Brendan Foody, told Business Insider that the results tell only part of the story.

The consulting tasks in Mercor’s APEX-Agents benchmark were designed to simulate real management consulting work, based on expert surveys and input from consultants at McKinsey, BCG, Deloitte, Accenture, and EY.

Across all task categories, the AI agents successfully completed the tasks less than 25% of the time on the first try. Given eight attempts, the agents could only complete 40% of the tasks. For the management consulting tasks, OpenAI’s GPT 5.2 initially performed the best, completing nearly 23% of the tasks on its first attempt. Anthropic’s Opus 4.6, released this week, performed even better at nearly 33%.

While many of the tasks were not completed, Foody said the success rate for GPT 3 was only 3%, compared to 23% for GPT 5.2. Anthropic’s model went from 13% to 33% on consulting tasks in a matter of months. Foody said he expects the success rate of the models to be closer to 50% by the end of the year.

“These are some of the hardest tasks in the economy that people pay millions of dollars to consulting firms to do, and the models are finally being able to do them with an incredible rate of progress,” Foody said.

AI has already disrupted the consulting industry, changing the way firms hire and make money, but the likelihood of agents displacing consultants grows as the models continue to improve.

McKinsey chief Bob Sternfels recently said the prestigious management consulting firm had 60,000 employees, 25,000 of which were AI agents.

Sternfels recently said it’s the first time in McKinsey’s history that the company is able to grow without growing its head count.

Where AI agents fail in consulting tasks

The frontier models Mercor tested included those from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, among others.

One example consulting task instructed the AI agent to “analyze category consumption patterns and market penetration using the Category Penetration Score methodology for PureLife’s portfolio strategy,” asking for several specific outputs in response. The AI agents failed to produce an accurate response.

“No model is ready to replace a professional end-to-end,” the findings concluded.

Mercor found the AI agents were great at research and pretty good at data analysis, Foody said.

Where they consistently got tripped up was on longer-horizon tasks — the longer it would take a human to complete a task, or the more steps it took, was the biggest indicator that the model might have a hard time.

Unlike a human, Foody said, the models struggle to understand where in a specific file system they should look for the right information, so they often end up looking at the wrong files. They struggle with the planning side of figuring out how to work with multiple tools and cross-referencing files at the same time.

For tasks that can be done in an hour or less or that only require the use of a single tool, the models perform relatively well.

Foody said the agents are almost like interns, where they might have a 50% pass rate, and the partner is still noticing a lot of issues in the work.

Frank Jones, a former KPMG consultant who now works as an expert contractor for Mercor, said in his experience training AI, he’s found the models can get close at certain tasks, but that some human refinement is often needed.

He also said the models need very specific prompts because they don’t always understand common expectations or phrases in consulting, like “client-ready.”

“Most consultants, they know what that means. But for AI, I think there’s a lot of nuance in that,” he said.

The AI models are quickly improving

According to Foody, continuing to improve the models doesn’t require a breakthrough — it requires more and better training, which the frontier labs are already investing heavily in.

“That’s why we have so much revenue,” he said, adding, “We’re in the business of replacing human judgment.”

Mercor, whose clients have included OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, secured a funding deal in the fall that valued the company at $10 billion. Mercor employs more than 30,000 contractors around the world who help train AI models through tasks like rewriting chatbot responses. Foody previously said the company grew its revenue in 2025 by 4,658%.

Foody said he believes consulting, and especially lower-level roles, are among the jobs he’s confident will be displaced by AI. He said the next version of the AI agents benchmark will expand to evaluate the whole value chain of a professional services firm: “Instead of evaling the analyst, we’re evaling McKinsey itself.”

Right now, he says Mercor’s AI agent benchmark tells an appealing story for McKinsey, because the company could say it shows they can use AI to add value but not replace humans.

“The next version of APEX tells a very scary story for McKinsey,” he said, adding, “In the coming two years, we’re going to have chatbots that are as good as the best consulting firm.”




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