Boston's Consulting Jobs Grew 9% as the Nation's Grew 24%

Boston is the city that gave the world the strategy consulting firm, and for five years its consulting workforce has been growing more slowly than the country it helped teach the trade to.

Between the first quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2024, employment in Suffolk County's management, scientific and technical consulting sector grew 9.3 percent, while the same sector nationally grew 23.5 percent. That is the headline number, and it runs against the intuition that a consulting town in a consulting boom would be the place adding the most consultants.

What the federal data shows

The figures come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, which counts jobs covered by unemployment insurance rather than sampling them. The industry code is NAICS 5416, defined in the Census Bureau's NAICS classification as management, scientific and technical consulting services. It is broader than strategy consulting alone, taking in environmental consultants, IT advisory work and scientific consulting, so read it as the advisory economy rather than as a headcount of people who own a BCG badge.

All figures below are private-ownership, first-quarter counts, so that seasonal hiring patterns do not distort a year-over-year comparison.

Q1	Suffolk County jobs	Massachusetts jobs	US jobs	Suffolk avg weekly wage	US avg weekly wage
2019	17,015	50,993	1,485,600	$3,563	$1,952
2021	17,641	54,171	1,551,987	$4,117	$2,079
2023	19,017	57,784	1,825,410	$4,324	$2,364
2024	18,600	58,264	1,835,138	$4,541	$2,442

Source: BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, NAICS 5416, private ownership, Q1 of each year. Indexed to Q1 2019 = 100. Method: employment for each period divided by that series' own Q1 2019 value.

Two details in that table matter more than the headline. The first is that Boston peaked in 2023 at 19,017 jobs and then shed 417 of them by early 2024, a 2.2 percent decline in a year when the national figure still edged up. The second is the wage column. The average Boston consulting job paid $4,541 a week in early 2024, or roughly $236,000 annualised, against $2,442 nationally. Boston's premium over the national average widened from 82 percent to 86 percent across the period.

So the local sector is not shrinking in value. It is getting more expensive per person while adding people slowly. Massachusetts as a whole grew 14.3 percent over the same window, which means the state outpaced its own capital city.

The constraint is the senior hour

Put those two columns together and you get a specific kind of squeeze. A Boston advisory firm in 2024 is paying near double the national rate for each person on staff, and it has not been adding staff at the national pace. Whatever growth it books has to come disproportionately from what each existing consultant can produce.

That is the economic condition under which firms start looking hard at which hours are actually billable. And the hour that comes up first, in nearly every account of the work, is deck production. An ex-McKinsey consultant who tested five AI presentation tools on real PowerPoint decks framed the problem the way most practitioners do: the analysis is the value, and the slide-building is the tax on delivering it.

The binding constraint in Boston consulting is no longer headcount, it is the cost of a senior hour, which is why deck production is the first task firms are willing to hand to software.

What the tooling actually has to do

The category of consulting presentation AI tools has filled in quickly, and the products differ less on whether they can generate a slide than on whether the slide survives contact with a client engagement. Four requirements come up repeatedly, and they are the ones worth testing before a firm commits.

Requirement	Why it matters in consulting	Where tools commonly fall short
Editable PowerPoint export	Deliverables get handed to the client and edited by them	PDF-only or lossy export that breaks on reopen
Charts built from source data	Numbers come from models and spreadsheets, not prose	Decorative charts that do not bind to a data source
Client template matching	Every engagement has brand guidelines	Generic themes requiring manual reformatting
Confidentiality guarantees	Client material is under NDA	Unclear or absent policy on training from uploads

The active products in the category include Gamma, Prezi AI, SlidesAI, Alai, NextDocs, 2Slides, Slideworks, STORYD and Matik. They split roughly into two camps. Tools like Matik and Alai lean on integration, pulling live figures out of a CRM or database so the deck refreshes rather than being rebuilt. Others compete on structure, generating the argument skeleton first, which is closer to how consulting decks are actually assembled.

That structural question is the one that separates a consulting tool from a general presentation tool. A consulting deck is not a sequence of attractive slides. It is an argument arranged so the conclusion arrives first and the support hangs beneath it, and the frameworks that carry it, the two-by-twos and the Porter's Five Forces layouts, are conventions a reader is trained to parse quickly. A tool that produces handsome slides in the wrong order has not saved the senior hour, it has moved it.

What to watch next

The 2024 dip is one year, and one year is not a trend. The honest reading of this data is that Boston's consulting sector stopped expanding headcount around 2023 while the rest of the country kept going, and that the local cost per employee kept climbing throughout. Whether that is a durable structural change or a post-2023 correction will not be clear until the 2025 and 2026 figures land.

What is already clear is the direction of the pressure. A sector paying an 86 percent wage premium and holding headcount flat has to find its next increment of output inside the working day it already pays for.

Common questions

Does this data mean Boston is losing consulting firms? No. Establishment counts in Suffolk County rose from 981 in 2019 to 1,125 in 2024, a 14.7 percent increase, though they also peaked in 2023 at 1,183. More firms, roughly flat employment.

Why use Suffolk County rather than the Boston metro area? Suffolk County contains downtown Boston and the Financial District, where the advisory sector concentrates. The wider metro area spans multiple counties and dilutes the city-centre signal this comparison is after.

Can AI tools produce properly structured consulting decks? They can produce the structure, and the better ones now generate the standard framework layouts directly. What they cannot do is decide whether the argument is right, which remains the part clients pay for.

Do these tools export editable PowerPoint? Some do and some do not, and it is the single most important thing to verify before adopting one. A deliverable a client cannot edit is not a deliverable in most engagements.

Cover photograph: Boston Financial District skyline, by Nelson48 at English Wikipedia, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.