BCG is betting that the best AI leaders know how to lead people, too

• BCG has appointed three new leaders to guide its AI initiatives in North America.
• BCG’s new leaders have made a name for themselves within the firm as good people managers.
• The changes come as consulting firms adapt leadership to embrace AI and technological expertise.

Boston Consulting Group is putting three longtime leaders in charge of some of its most important AI and technology work in North America — and the promotions are telling.

All three bring deep technical or transformation experience, but their capabilities and new mandates are also heavily focused on people, whether that’s helping employees experiment with AI, build new skills, or turn new tools into lasting changes for clients.

Amanda Luther will lead the firm’s regional AI and functional activation efforts, Silvio Palumbo will take over BCG X in North America, and Natasha Taylor will help lead its technology and digital work.

The appointments come as consulting firms rethink the profile of the people they hire and promote. McKinsey recently elevated 21 consultants to a new distinguished-partner role meant to reward deep expertise in areas like AI and technology, Bloomberg reported. At EY, its Americas talent chief Ginnie Carlier told Business Insider that the firm — once made up almost entirely of accountants — now recruits engineers, technologists, creatives, candidates without degrees, and neurodiverse professionals.

AI has rapidly changed the consulting industry and is forcing firms to rethink some of their most basic measures of success. Firms are trying to determine whether their AI agents are delivering value, while also tracking how employees use the technology and, in some cases, incorporating AI adoption into performance evaluations. The shift is reaching the business model, too: Clients are increasingly asking firms to put more “skin in the game,” pushing consultants toward fees tied to outcomes rather than simply time spent on a project.

As firms embrace AI and become more technical, they are finding they need leaders with strong people management skills who can help employees become more comfortable experimenting with new tools, help teams adapt their workflows, and manage the organizational changes that come with AI. While technical depth is important, so is the ability to bring people along.

For BCG’s newest leaders, that combination is central to the job.

Business Insider spoke with Luther, Palumbo, and Taylor about how AI is changing what firms look for in consultants, what leadership looks like when the technology keeps moving, and what they plan to prioritize next.

These conversations have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Natasha Taylor

Natasha Taylor will help lead BCG’s tech and digital work across North America. She specializes in healthcare and has deep experience in digital and generative AI transformations, and she also leads BCG’s Denver office.

How has AI influenced the way you work with your teams?

I approach work with clients and my teams by asking how we can consistently deliver the best problem-solving and execution. Generative AI, more than AI broadly, has had the biggest impact on how I work with my teams and how we can be more effective in partnering with clients.

It has made my teams spend more time on the things that really matter: thinking through the toughest problems clients face, getting to the detail and nuance more quickly, and spending less time on administrative tasks.

Generative AI has really influenced the way we spend our time, collaborate, ingest information, and come up with hypotheses quickly. And, for lack of a better phrase, pulling from healthcare, it has enabled us to work at the top of our license more consistently.

Where do you anticipate getting the most pushback for your ideas, your approach to leadership, or your broader goals in the coming year?

I don’t know if pushback is the right word for it. Different organizations are certainly at different levels of maturity and ability to invest in the end-to-end work required to reap the benefits of AI, which takes an enormous amount of people engagement and change management.

What I’ve seen is that making real investments in AI requires a lot of commitment. You have to engage across the entire organization and make sure there’s alignment across technology teams on which vendors to invest in, what the foundational architecture looks like, and where the right areas of value creation are. You also have to engage the business and examine workflows in a way that helps people embrace the technology rather than be afraid of it.

So it’s not as much pushback as it is that there’s a lot of work required to get ROI from investments in AI. Organizations have different levels of ability to make that executive leadership commitment among many competing priorities.

Amanda Luther

Amanda Luther will lead BCG’s AI efforts across North America as its new regional AI and functional activation lead, helping teams bring more AI work to clients. She already leads the firm’s global AI and digital transformation practice and also runs its Austin office.

As you step into this new role, what are your main priorities for the coming year?

First is getting my arms around the role and all the organic activity that is happening with AI at BCG — it is a lot! Second is setting the right environment for our teams to experiment and innovate with our AI offerings as they test out ways to adopt it into our day-to-day work. In practice, that means protecting dedicated time for upskilling, giving teams the tools to experiment, and shouting from the rooftops on what is working. Finally, and most importantly, is ensuring we continue to raise our own bar and deliver the high-quality, high-impact work our clients expect.

How is AI changing what effective leadership looks like?

It’s almost twofold. The first is that leaders are increasingly taking on the AI agenda themselves — 72% of CEOs now call themselves the primary decision-maker on AI, double from where that number was in 2025. This isn’t a delegable task anymore.

The second is that the management job itself is changing as AI impacts the operating rhythm of an organization. AI is no longer a tool CEOs can push down into the organization. It is increasingly changing how they personally decide, prioritize, and communicate. In the best case, AI amplifies a CEO’s two scarcest resources — time and judgment — but only if the CEO puts in the work to understand how AI can truly support what they do every day.

As my colleagues put it in a recent publication, AI tailored to a CEO’s decision-making context could dramatically accelerate that process, and improve the quality of the inputs informing their decisions, by reconciling conflicting information, surfacing tradeoffs, testing assumptions, and flagging risks before the meeting begins.

The goal of using AI for decision-making is to equip CEOs with better information faster, so they enter the room not ready to be briefed, but ready to decide.

Silvio Palumbo

Silvio Palumbo will lead BCG X across North America, focusing on its AI strategy and people. He’s a longtime AI and machine-learning leader who has helped build and scale some of BCG’s personalization tools.

AI is changing so quickly. Do you think leadership should also turn over and change at the pace of technology?

There are two angles. We have our own governance around leadership rotation, and those rotation mechanisms have always been respected.

The other is the promotion cycle. We want to make sure that people who were engineers and doers five years ago can move into leadership roles. Both mechanisms help make sure we have that refresh.

BCG is a place where the promotion chases you, not the other way around. I think that’s very special. It keeps things fresh and helps make sure the right talent is exposed to the right leadership roles.

How do you define a typical consultant, and how is that definition changing with AI?

If you look at BCG X, we are a core part of BCG, and the definition of a consultant is now broader. A consulting team brings two elements: industry and strategic depth from knowing the industry and the specific client, and the technical execution capability we bring at X.

So it’s somewhat reductive to ask, “What is a consultant?” I think we now have consulting teams that bring that cross-disciplinary set of capabilities.

The team in X is 100% execution-focused. We bring a high degree of accountability, and our relationships with senior leaders are about strategic changes — improving pricing, improving operations, and reducing cycle time. We bring a team that doesn’t just advise, but is hands-on and drives the change.

I think that’s a different flavor of consulting than what people may have thought of 10 years ago, and it comes with a much higher degree of measurability and accountability.