AI isn’t just reshaping how corporate America works. It’s also rewriting the rules for standing out — including how companies evaluate promotion potential.
Big Four firm EY, for example, is rethinking what career pathways look like in the age of AI, as the tech influences everything from recruitment to onboarding to talent development and promotion.
“Undoubtedly, AI is changing how work is done,” Ginnie Carlier, EY Americas’ chief talent and culture officer, told Business Insider in an interview. “The traditional organizational pyramid is giving way to more flexible career portfolios, where impact matters more than title or tenure.”
“Managers’ roles are evolving quickly,” she added. “They’re increasingly responsible for cultivating a psychologically safe environment where people can experiment, fail forward and learn from AI; coaching and developing others; and leading teams comprised of both humans and agents.”
While most career models were built on a “linear progression,” Carlier said, AI is reshaping workflows and roles are becoming more fluid as “the contributions that matter most increasingly cut across skills, experiences, and outcomes rather than static job descriptions.”
To adapt, EY is factoring in additional signals to assess performance and promotion potential.
Promotions have traditionally been based on business needs and an employee’s ability to perform at the next level, a spokesperson for the firm told Business Insider. The changes EY are testing are part of its evolution into a more “skills-powered organization,” they added.
“We’re already testing more flexible, individualized career paths, including agile promotions and expanded use of skills assessments, to better align people to roles and to reflect when someone is ready to take on greater scope or impact,” Carlier said.
While skills like rote analysis, manual research, and slide production were prized in the old world, the firm’s focus now is on freeing workers to spend more time interpreting data, applying judgement to AI outputs, and telling a compelling story, she added.
AI is changing who gets through the front door
EY now requires all early-career applicants to complete a skills-based assessment. It has also shifted to a hiring model that better identifies candidates who can grow alongside the technology, Carlier said.
The EY exec also pointed to a program the firm launched in the summer of 2024 called 360 Careers, where early-career employees rotate across different parts of the business to build a broader set of skills. The program is part of EY’s broader $1 billion investment in talent and technology that also includes higher early-career pay, AI-enabled audit and tax platforms, expanded support for college students, and enhanced wellbeing benefits.
As a result of the changing landscape, Carlier said the firm is recruiting from a widening pool of talent. Two decades ago, EY was almost exclusively made up of accounting professionals, she said. Now, its workforce includes engineers, creatives, technologists, and as a result of its latest changes, candidates without degrees, neurodiverse professionals, and those with highly specialized skills, Carlier said.
In a LinkedIn post in January, Carlier said AI’s impact has been both broad, yet hard to predict.
“What we do know is that workforce transformation is changing the shape of our workforce and the skills we’ll need to succeed. In turn, we need to completely change the employee experience — everything from talent processes and procedures on how we hire and develop our people, to how we assign them to work and manage their performance and career trajectory.”
EY isn’t the only consulting firm rethinking parts of the employee lifecycle — like performance evaluation — in response to AI.
At Boston Consulting Group, using AI has become table stakes.
“There’s no box on our forms that says, ‘Are you using AI?’ It is an expectation,” Alicia Pittman, the firm’s global people team chair, previously told Business Insider.
Nearly 90% of BCG’s 33,000 employees now use AI, and about half use it daily, Pittman said.
Consultants may use AI to surface insights, but they’re still evaluated on how they interpret those insights and turn them into decisions for clients, Pittman said.
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