AFR Magazine’s hotly anticipated Power issue, out on September 25, includes lists of the key players across five industry sectors. Here are the year’s leading consultants.
What a difference a year makes. Last year, KPMG chief executive Andrew Yates topped The Australian Financial Review Magazine’s consulting power list. Yates had helped the firm win a series of big audits and managed cost well enough to give partners a pay bump.
And then on the evening of March 24, Labor senator Deborah O’Neill stood up in the Senate and, using parliamentary privilege, quoted a whistleblowerwho claimed KPMG audit partners had misused confidential client data and leveraged conflicted relationships to win audit work.
The fallout, and the firm’s botched handling of the matter, has been severe and is ongoing. Yates, along with most of the local leadership, has retired early, new work is proving hard to win, and dozens of partners and hundreds of staff have been cut.
This latest consulting scandal, along with the mixed effect of artificial intelligence on demand, has particularly hit the advisory arms of the big four firms (KPMG, PwC, Deloitte and EY). They are all using the technology to cut costs and create new service offerings, and advising clients on how to do the same. In turn, AI is helping smaller and newly formed firms carry out work that previously could only be done by larger firms. Some clients are using AI in place of consultants.
This year’s most-powerful list is made up of those who have helped their firms thrive in the challenging environment.
1. Peter Burns
The Accenture Australia and New Zealand head has been getting the jump on his consulting rivals by signing up large clients to multi-year outsourcing deals. Burns’ pitch is that Accenture will run back-office operations offshore – marketing, finance, human resources and IT – at a lower cost, allowing the client to cut staff. Accenture profits by using lower-cost offshore staff and improving the client’s business processes.
The firm now runs parts of the back-office operations of household names such as Origin Energy and Coles.
The Coles deal, worth an estimated $500 million over five years, involves moving up to 1000 roles offshore. Burns is negotiating a
similar deal with Qantas. These deals, along with a flourishing public sector business, helped boost the firm’s most recent local results, for 2024-25. Revenue was up to almost $3 billion and post-tax profit up by 20 per cent to $124 million. That’s a good result in a year when the big four advisory arms all struggled.
2. Said Jahani
Jahani has spent much of his time since being appointed in 2025 as CEO of Grant Thornton Australia negotiating with various private equity outfits vying to buy the local firm. The winning bidder, New Mountain Capital, is already the majority owner of the US-headquartered Grant Thornton Advisors and
will add the Australian firm to a global network spanning the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific.
The closely watched transaction – the largest ever in the Australian accounting sector – is a coup for Jahani, who has worked at the firm since 2007. Local Grant Thornton partners will receive a lucrative payday from the deal and the firm’s leaders have a war chest worth hundreds of millions of dollars to buy smaller firms and hire. Jahani has so impressed the firm’s global leaders that he was given the additional role of head of Grant Thornton in the Asia-Pacific region in late August.
3. Kevin Burrowes
Burrowes was originally planning to retire as PwC Australia CEO this year, having completed his epic turnaround job of the once-embattled firm. Then the KPMG audit leaks scandal blew up. PwC’s board looked at the KPMG allegations and quickly realised that it would lead to the government revisiting shelved laws to give ASIC more power to police the mostly unregulated big four.
They asked Burrowes to stick around for two more years and partners voted in favour of the move in August.
Burrowes, originally from the United Kingdom, was parachuted in by PwC global from a Singapore-based role to take control of the Australian firm in 2023 after a tax partner was found to have shared confidential government data to win tax work. Initially, he was greeted with fear and loathing by parts of the partnership. But his willingness to move quickly to cut personnel and push through unpopular reforms helped speed up the firm’s recovery. Revenue at the firm is increasing for the first time since the 2023 scandal hit, up more than 6 per cent in the first half of the year.
4. Joanne Gorton
Gorton, the CEO of Deloitte Australia, is another big-four leader who has returned her firm to growth amid difficult market conditions. Revenue at the firm is up slightly to $2.55 billion in 2025-26; the downturn in strategy and risk and deals advisory offset by increased revenue in tax and tech consulting. Her 2030 plan for Deloitte is to emulate Accenture by going big into offshored services and to
lower internal costs using AI.
She wants to triple the firm’s managed services arm into a $1 billion business by 2030, offsetting the threat from AI to the advisory business. The thinking is AI will automate one-third of routine consulting tasks, forcing the firm to cut fees by up to 40 per cent. She wants to redeploy, not cut, that 30 per cent of capacity, hence the aim to triple its managed services arm. Under Gorton, an auditor, the firm has also brandished its auditing chops by correctly raising the alarm about
the financial accounts of new audit client Corporate Travel Management.
5. Igor Sadimenko
Sadimenko is a driving force behind the hyper-aggressive local expansion of the US-headquartered consulting and turnaround firm Alvarez & Marsal. As head of the firm’s performance improvement service in Australia and New Zealand, he has been busily recruiting and poaching partners from the big four who can sell advisory work and then roll up their sleeves and actually do the work.
The firm has so far recruited more than 70 managing directors with this rare combo of skills, mostly from the big four accounting firms. It also expects to have more than 500 staff by the end of the year. The firm’s quick growth – it only set up locally in 2023 – means Alvarez & Marsal has become a force in the local advisory market. Revenue is expected to hit $180 million when its financial year ends in October as it picks up work once done by the big four and even the strategy firms. The firm is now quickly expanding its service offerings beyond its traditional services of consulting, tax advice and transaction advice.
