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Amid the broader discourse about AI’s impact on jobs, There’s been a lot of chatter about AI obliterating what many think of as the “prestige” career track—the journey that typically goes from the Ivy League to Management Consulting to the C-Suite.
Recently, Shark Tank’s Mr. Wonderful—Kevin O’Leary—became the latest business expert to predict the downfall of management consulting. Around the same time, economist Alice Lassman declared in an op-ed for The Guardian that the prestige career machine is breaking.
Rather than mourn the loss of this time-worn career track, we should be excited about what might fill the vacuum it leaves.
Consulting firms have long offered a simple bargain: Master the playbook, execute it flawlessly, and the institutions controlling access would reward you with income and influence. It was good work if you could get it, and it produced plenty of capable people. But it trained the market to believe that access, the right degree, and the ability to repeat particular white-collar behaviors were the core ingredients of a prestigious career.
In an AI-powered world, the product is getting cheaper by the day. With execution available at the touch of a button, the white-collar prestige career bargain is collapsing. For the people who were counting on it, this may feel like the end of the world.
But for the people who were never on that path, the future is as bright as ever, because the skills that will matter most next are the ones the McKinsey machine was never very good at measuring.
Growing up in Detroit, I never had a prototypical on-ramp to a prestige career. I didn’t have the “tried and true” pedigree nor the network that tells elite institutions, “This person is one of us.” But I was able to hone a different kind of intelligence: the ability to read culture, understand what moves people, and find meaning where others only saw transactions.
Those skills opened doors for me, from running digital strategy for Beyoncé to leading strategy at Wieden+Kennedy and, eventually, teaching at the Ross School of Business at Michigan.
That kind of path doesn’t fit neatly into the economic elite’s view of what comes next. Lassman, for one, suggests the future will split between the technical and the human: Go build AI itself, or put so-called soft skills like empathy and tolerance to work in public service. But that framing has the same flaw as the old “prestige career” bargain. It still imagines only a few narrow lanes, defined by a particular kind of access, with prestige conferred by institutions rather than built by individuals.
The complicated but also exciting change AI brings to the job market is that the human capacities that matter now are broader, more active, and much harder to credential: cultural intelligence, counterintuitive judgment, persuasion, imagination, storytelling, and the ability to find meaning in ambiguity. They don’t live in one sector and don’t require a singular path or credential. They can be found and honed just about anywhere.
Conventional wisdom says that the future of the job market is one big shrug emoji, but I think we know more than we realize. My background is in pop culture and consumer behavior and in this space, brands that compete on features always lose when products commoditize. The brands that succeed are the ones that create meaning, identity, and belonging around what they sell. Again and again, the same pattern shows up: when the functional difference shrinks, the cultural difference matters more.
AI is having a similar impact on white-collar work. The next generation of prestige careers won’t belong to the people who are best at executing under someone else’s model. They will belong to those who can facilitate culture deliberately and signal meaning at scale. These skills were always harder to measure and recruit for—which is precisely why the people who had to develop them without institutional support are now best positioned to lead.
The collapse of the “prestige” career track leads many to wonder where tomorrow’s leaders will come from. The answer hasn’t changed: They’ve always been made in neighborhoods, studios, classrooms, communities, startups, movements, campaigns, and organizations that never had the luxury of mistaking credentials for potential. The gatekeepers just weren’t looking in the right places.
Marcus Collins is a Professor of Marketing at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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