If you are starting your career at PwC, it has become much easier to decide where you will do it.
The Big Four cabinet reduce the number of locations in the United States where entry-level consultants can start working as young as 13, BI’s Polly Thompson exclusively reports.
Limiting options — new hires previously could choose one of 72 U.S. offices — is about creating a greater sense of community among younger, early-career employees, Yolanda Seals-Coffield, chief people officer and head of inclusion at PwC US, told Polly.
This is an example of how PwC is evolving in the AI era. Polly previously reported on the company’s launch of an apprenticeship initiative aimed at training workers in specific skills needed for AI. It also created a new career path intended for engineers.
It’s not just about PwC. Polly did a fantastic job covering consulting firms and their try to use AI without disrupting their activity. AI agents still fail to replace human consultants, but the CEO of an AI training giant told BI. models learn quickly.
Waiting for, Use of AI by entry-level employees remains a key question.
On the one hand, technology can automate much of the mind-numbing work that juniors get bogged down with from the start. On the other hand, ignoring this initial work means losing fundamental knowledge that will be crucial for the future.
The problem of AI for juniors is not specific to consulting.
The risks posed by training young workers in AI are universal. And with so much focus on the benefits of AI, businesses can’t delay their decision any longer.
“What will differentiate outperforming companies in 2026 will not be strategy, but execution,” Paul Griggs, CEO of PwC US, told me last month during a discussion on the year’s big themes.
Leaders need to be “hyper-intentional about discipline, about roadmaps, about building measured teams based on what they execute,” Griggs added.
Two senior bankers I spoke with last month raised questions about how to use AI effectively early in your career. They discussed the benefits of accelerating a junior’s path to more impactful work, as well as the risks of creating a knowledge gap by skipping early steps.
It’s a delicate balance. Forgoing it altogether means you risk falling behind your competitors. If you lean too hard, you risk losing the attribute your customers still pay you big money for: human judgment.
“You’re missing some of that basic training that is actually a very important foundation for your more sophisticated assessment and judgment at a later stage in your career,” one of the bankers said of outsourcing early work to AI.