The leader of PwC's 2,200-person DC office says clients expect some consulting work twice as fast as a year ago

Jeanelle Johnson, managing partner of PwC in the Washington DC area PwC AI is raising clients' expectations for faster delivery times on consulting projects.

Jeanelle Johnson, PwC's DC managing partner, said clients now expect some work to be delivered in half the time.

Faster delivery should not be confused with less work, said Johnson.

AI is resetting assumptions about how quickly professional services firms should move, and consulting clients are getting impatient.

"I am seeing clients ask for our help in delivering outcomes at a more rapid pace" compared to this time last year, Jeanelle Johnson, PwC's managing partner for the Washington DC area, told Business Insider.

"Something that we might have said takes eight to 10 weeks; the expectation is probably half of that.

The shelf life is half," Johnson said.

Clients are not necessarily expecting an entire transformation to be completed in a fraction of the time; the expectation is more for pilots and proofs of concepts, she said.

"There's an expectation now that tools should accelerate the work," she added.

Johnson leads more than 2,200 consulting and accounting employees in her role as PwC's DC managing partner.

Asked whether those compressed timelines were putting pressure on her consulting teams, she said: "We're working on it." The Big Four professional services firms — PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, and EY — alongside firms like McKinsey, BCG, and Accenture, are at the center of the AI shift sweeping through workplaces.

They have raced to build internal chatbots, train staff, and test AI in client work.

The technology can now assist with, and increasingly perform, early-stage consulting tasks such as market research, due diligence, and brainstorming.

At McKinsey, AI has accelerated the early problem-solving cycle, turning what used to be a team's "week one answer" — the first hypothesis after a week of research and analysis — into an "hour one answer," Kate Smaje, McKinsey's Global Leader for technology and AI, told Business Insider in June.