Titans of industry like Salesforce, Microsoft, and Intel have all been slashing staff, and employees are hand-wringing about being next on the chopping block. Donald King, a 26-year-old who built AI agents for PwC, never thought he’d be the next one out the door—but he soon realized why consultants are called “hatchet-men.”
After graduating with a degree in finance from the University of Texas at Austin in 2021, King landed a job at one of the “Big Four” consulting giants: PwC. He packed his bags and moved to New York to start his role as an associate in technology consulting, working with major clients, including Oracle, during his first year. But everything changed when PwC announced a $1 billion investment in AI; King was already intrigued by the tech, so he pitched himself to join the company’s AI factory team. Working 60 to 80 hours a week, he immersed himself in the tech, even throwing knowledge-sharing AI agent block parties within the firm that drew up to 250 participants. King logged a ton of hours—sometimes at the expense of his weekends—but was confident he was excelling in his role as a product manager and data scientist.
“I was coding and managing a team onshore and offshore. It was crazy, it’s like, ‘Give this 24-year-old millions of dollars of salary spent per month to build AI agents for Fortune 500 [companies],’” King tells Fortune. “[It was] my dream job…I won first place in this OpenAI hackathon across the entire firm.”
