Cut down entry-level hiring because of AI? Far from it, says Oliver Wyman CEO

[SINGAPORE] Not too long ago, Oliver Wyman president and chief executive Nick Studer used to worry about the job prospects for his elder son, a 21-year-old extrovert doing a degree in psychology, who, while a good problem-solver, was not at all interested in building spreadsheets.

These days, however, as artificial intelligence sweeps through the employment landscape, the Cambridge-educated management consultant is more wary about the future for his younger boy, who is doing maths, further maths, physics and computer science at the A levels.

STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects were once thought to offer the brightest job prospects, and the parental dilemma for Mr Studer, who himself graduated with first-class honours in manufacturing engineering, underscores the vast shifts in the employability landscape. Many companies in professional services, technology, finance and the media are slowing entry-level intakes, arguing that AI can increasingly fill those roles.

Management consulting firm Oliver Wyman declines to join that herd. Indeed, it may increase its junior intake.

“There is a lot of AI-washing going on, while at the same time companies are saying they are not yet happy about the returns they are getting on their AI investment,” says Mr Studer, referring to companies that are shedding jobs they think can be done by AI. 

“Our view is that in an AI world we are not going to hire any fewer people. We may even hire more junior people. It is a critical call.”

Mr Studer, 52, was speaking to this writer in his last interview as chief executive of Oliver Wyman, where he has been working for 28 years. From April 1, he takes on bigger responsibilities as president and CEO of sister company Marsh Risk, a leading insurance broker and risk advisory.

While the elite layer of management consulting is considered to be the trio of McKinsey, BCG – short for Boston Consulting Group – and Bain, firms like Oliver Wyman, Kearney and Roland Berger are known for niche practices that top talent finds attractive. In Oliver Wyman’s case, that specialisation is financial services.

Teams are organised by both industry and capability, which means every partner is a team member on two sides. In Mr Studer’s case, that happens to be financial services and performance transformation. Another partner could be an aviation specialist and also be part of the risk team. The firm is organised around four core capabilities, which it refers to as “transformative moments”.

These are top- or bottom-line-driven, full-performance transformations, when firms seek to focus on finding new profit centres or save on costs in the wake of corporate mergers or buyouts, for customer innovation and growth, and finance risk and restructuring.

“Suddenly, the pricing people were sitting next to the cost people, and the people who did all the work on new product pricing are sitting next to the designers, and it has been terrific,” he says.

At the junior end, Oliver Wyman’s decision not to ease back on hiring is based on common sense, he says.

“Obviously, I love our junior people. But what I care about more is that five years after they start their careers, how many do I have with five years of business problem-solving experience? Besides, our junior people are doing very different jobs now from a pre-AI world.”

Consultants are famously labelled as anxious overachievers. While many Oliver Wyman consultants do come with MBA degrees, the firm recruits widely and looks for talent who bring analytical, research and client-handling skills, and people who handle meetings well.

They must also have an ability to protect their space – the instinct to know when challenged by a client whether to push back, or retreat. Partners who don’t know how to protect their space will not protect the team space, and those are the teams that pull 80-hour work weeks.

“We want fit, well-performing corporate athletes, not exhausted, analytical shells.”

Mr Studer recalls that even early in his career at Wyman when he was involved in an intense “barn-burner” of a project, he would work 18 hours a day through the week but knock off at 6pm on Fridays to see his fiancee over the weekend. 

Now, more and more senior people are confident about doing likewise.

“You need to be a bit self-confident to do it on your own terms, because you cannot be a good adviser if you are constantly taking orders,” says Mr Studer, a former rugby player who loves a good roast and has a passion for pickling vegetables out in his home shed in the bucolic Surrey Hills outside London.

Founded in 1984 when Alex Oliver and Bill Wyman left Booz Allen Hamilton to set up their own firm, New York-headquartered Oliver Wyman has significantly focused on the US market, which accounts for about half of the US$3.6 billion (S$4.6 billion) revenue it clocked in 2025. 

That’s a leap from the US$2 billion it earned when Mr Studer was given charge of the firm in July 2021. Back when he started in 1997, it had billings of just about US$60 million.

The firm grew revenue by 7 per cent in 2025, amid a challenging environment with some competitors reportedly seeing growth flatline, though Mr Studer acknowledges that Oliver Wyman should have done better in Asia, which accounts for about 10 per cent of its revenue.

This column has spoken in the past to the heads of the Big Three management consulting firms, and I was curious to know what a firm like Oliver Wyman does to differentiate itself. 

Mr Studer says Wyman staff – who are bona fide specialists – do not arrive at a client site claiming to have the answers, even if they have performed similar assignments elsewhere.

“We appreciate that every institution is different,” he says. “So, we arrive saying we have the tools to get you the answer. We are very collegial to work with, and in the past four years that has been one of the centrepieces of our strategy.”

“This is why we have grown faster than some of our peers. The AI era has ended the age of arrogance of the management consultant,” he says, with AI applications able to dredge up a wealth of information within seconds of a prompt.

The modern Oliver Wyman was formed in 2007 from the merger of three global consultancies: Mercer Delta, Mercer Management Consulting and Mercer Oliver Wyman, all subsidiaries of Marsh, formerly Marsh & McLennan Companies. 

Given that the integration with Marsh Management Consulting truly took place only in 2012 – making Oliver Wyman about three generations younger than Mr Bob Sternfels’ McKinsey, which started 100 years ago – the firm’s performance has been satisfactory, Mr Studer feels. 

Looking back at his tenure, he says that while he’d generally prefer two-thirds of partners to have been promoted from within the company, the number lately has been about half, as Oliver Wyman grew in areas such as AI and payments, and greenfield spaces such as restructuring and geostrategy.

The firm’s pitch that it has an exciting story convinced talent at bigger but less entrepreneurial firms to move over – “a very good home for mid-tier partners at those firms who, when they look up, all they see is feet”.

Oliver Wyman has a headcount of 8,000, of whom about one in 10 are partners. Over the past 14 months, it has lost five partners to leading strategy consulting rivals but drawn more than 30 away from them. The firm has also seemed to have avoided the negative publicity of large layoffs in a challenging operating environment, aside from a few who were let go in its US home base.

Mr Studer was a founding director of TheCityUK, a finance industry body tasked with improving Britain’s status as a financial centre. I asked him what he thought of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s decision to end the non-domicile tax regime, which removed the privilege enjoyed by UK residents domiciled abroad to avoid paying UK tax on foreign income, as long as it was not brought into the country. The development seems to have been received poorly by many global investors.

Mr Studer says the “non-dom” fallout is palpable. Close to his home in the countryside, a local business he knows well lost 12 of its top 100 customers as people left the UK.

“I was gobsmacked. This wasn’t even Kensington but out in the Surrey Hills. If it is hitting retail in Surrey it is definitely hitting other things.”

Looking back on his years at Oliver Wyman, Mr Studer is gratified that he had the opportunity to work alongside others to “build something out of virtually nothing”. His challenge at 155-year-old Marsh Risk is to avoid going in there and turning it into another major consultancy because these are entirely different businesses.

“We have been calling Marsh Risk the risk adviser of the future, although I would argue that when it comes to risk the future is now!” THE STRAITS TIMES