Professional services firms are billing clients for hours while privately using AI to slash those same hours — and nobody is talking about it. This panel pulls back the curtain on how consulting and legal firms are actually adopting AI, why junior consultants are bypassing corporate systems to use ChatGPT on their phones, and what that means for confidentiality, talent development, and the future of the billable hour.

WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS

• Why the legal industry’s billable-hour model “rewards the slow and the stupid” and how value-based pricing is replacing it for commoditized legal products
• How consulting firms are shifting from 100-page PowerPoint deliverables to real-time digital database integrations with private equity clients
• Why confidentiality is the unspoken crisis: smaller firms are routing client data through public LLMs, and junior staff are bypassing corporate AI systems entirely
• The future consulting org chart: from pyramid to diamond shape, with fewer juniors, more seasoned industry experts, and AI handling repetitive analysis
• Why the hiring pipeline is broken — university grades no longer signal competence when theses can be AI-generated, pushing firms toward internship-based evaluation

PANELISTS

• Robin — Moderator
• Roland Scherer — Partner, Kearney
• Michael Engel — Partner, White & Case
• Beata Rosenthal — Partner, Roland Berger
• Marina March — Founder, IKAI

unDavos is a community-driven summit running during WEF week in Davos, democratizing the conversation around global challenges.

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Tags: AI professional services, consulting, legal tech, billable hours, management consulting, law firm AI, Kearney, White & Case, Roland Berger, confidentiality, AI governance, enterprise AI, talent management, future of work, value-based billing, digital transformation, unDavos, Davos 2026, WEF