EY US$100m bonus pool for human skills
EY has announced that it will award US$100 million in bonuses for skills such as leadership, judgment, business acumen, collaboration, and adaptability. Although technology adoption gets a nod in the criteria, the framing is unmistakable: EY is putting a price on the capabilities that AI is least able to replicate.
My first reaction is cautiously positive, because a $100 million bonus pool is not simply a press release. It is a compensation decision, and compensation decisions reveal what an institution actually values, regardless of what its competency framework says. For a Big Four firm to make judgment explicitly compensable is therefore significant.
What interests me more, however, is the structure of the announcement. These are bonuses rather than changes to base pay, which means EY is not yet repricing its workforce; it is hedging it. The firm appears to understand where value is moving, but has not yet rebuilt its economics around that understanding.
The direction of travel is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Consulting has historically monetised the production of analysis - research, modelling, synthesis and the work of smart junior people - yet that is precisely the layer AI is now compressing towards near-zero marginal cost.
What remains scarce is arguably what clients were buying all along: judgment under uncertainty, the ability to navigate difficult conversations, commercial instinct, and someone willing to stand behind a recommendation when it goes wrong. The constraint is shifting from producing the work to being accountable for it.
That is why I see this as an early public admission from a major professional services firm that the pyramid is beginning to invert. The leverage that made junior-heavy consulting models so profitable is also the leverage automation attacks first. As that leverage erodes, the premium inevitably migrates towards the human capabilities that professional services firms have spent decades treating as overhead.
EY will not be the last firm to confront this.
The more interesting question is what happens next. If these capabilities remain a bonus pool while utilisation, leverage and billable hours continue to determine base pay and progression, then this is largely signalling. If, over the next two years, compensation bands, promotion criteria and career structures begin to shift towards judgment, client ownership and accountability, then the repricing will be real.
And every professional services firm still built around a leverage pyramid will have to confront what that means for its economics.