The 2026 R&K Benchmark for the Consulting Industry
Table of Contents
As AI reshapes how consulting firms generate and deliver insights, a critical question has moved to the center of leadership conversations: are firms genuinely investing in the knowledge infrastructure needed to stay competitive, or quietly dismantling it? Infomineo’s inaugural 2026 R&K Benchmark for the Consulting Industry provides the first data-driven answer; analyzing how leading global consulting firms structure, size, and position their Research & Knowledge functions in a rapidly shifting landscape.
This article introduces the benchmark’s framework, the questions it was designed to answer, and a preview of what the data reveals, without disclosing the specific findings. For the full report, including detailed firm-by-firm comparisons, geographic breakdowns, and the complete visual data set, you can request access below.
Published March 2026
The 2026 R&K Benchmark
for the Consulting Industry
Infomineo’s first-of-its-kind benchmark analyzes Research & Knowledge functions across leading global consulting firms — uncovering how AI, firm structure, and geography are reshaping how knowledge work is organized and delivered.
What Is the R&K Function in Consulting and Why Does It Matter?
The Research & Knowledge (R&K) function sits at the intelligence core of any consulting firm. It encompasses the specialists, analysts, and knowledge managers who build proprietary knowledge assets, support client-facing teams with research, and maintain the institutional expertise that separates top-tier advisory from commodity consulting. R&K professionals are distinct from consultants, they rarely bill directly to engagements, but they underpin the intellectual quality and speed of everything that does.
In practice, R&K teams are responsible for a broad range of activities: managing sector intelligence, producing competitive and market analyses, supporting proposal cycles, maintaining databases and knowledge repositories, and increasingly, governing the AI-assisted workflows that are transforming how insights are assembled. As the scope of these responsibilities grows, the question of how to size, locate, and organize R&K teams has become a genuine strategic decision, not just an operational one.
The stakes are high. Firms that underinvest in R&K risk losing the depth and consistency of insight that defines their value proposition. Firms that over-engineer it risk building overhead that slows down delivery. The right balance depends on firm type, operating model, geography, and increasingly, how AI is embedded into day-to-day knowledge work. The 2026 R&K Benchmark was designed to help consulting leadership teams answer exactly this question with data.
What Questions Does the Benchmark Answer?
The benchmark was developed to support four specific leadership conversations that are recurring across consulting firms today. Each represents a genuine decision point and each benefits directly from external reference data.
How Is R&K Investment Diverging Across Consulting Firm Types?
One of the most significant findings across the benchmark is that R&K investment is not evolving uniformly. Rather than a single industry-wide trend, the data reveals a clear divergence different firm types are making fundamentally different choices about how to size and position their knowledge functions, and those choices reflect deeper strategic bets about the role of human expertise in an AI-assisted world.
The benchmark covers multiple firm types across the consulting landscape. Each segment shows distinct patterns in how R&K headcount has evolved relative to consultant growth, what support ratios look like across the peer set, and what structural factors appear to drive those differences. Understanding where your firm sits within this distribution is one of the most direct applications of the report’s data.
The Case for R&K as a Competitive Differentiator
Some firms are treating knowledge capability as a deliberate investment area growing R&K intentionally and at pace, treating it as the infrastructure that sustains advisory quality as AI commoditizes more of the research layer. For these firms, R&K is not overhead: it is the moat. The benchmark data shows which firm types are pursuing this path, and what the resulting organizational signatures look like in terms of headcount ratios, team structure, and geographic footprint.
The Case for Lean R&K by Design
Other firms operate with intentionally lean R&K functions. In some firm types, knowledge is embedded directly at the senior delivery level, and the structural logic of a lean centralized R&K team is entirely coherent. The benchmark reveals which firm characteristics correlate most strongly with this approach, and how the support ratio distribution looks across these models.
The full report includes a detailed breakdown of each firm type’s trajectory over the benchmark period, with the specific ratios, growth figures, and structural indicators available to registered readers.
How Is the Geographic Footprint of R&K Functions Changing?
Geography is one of the most strategically significant and counterintuitive, dimensions in the benchmark. The conventional assumption has been that R&K functions, like many knowledge-intensive support roles, would continue migrating toward lower-cost delivery locations over time. The benchmark data tells a more nuanced story, and understanding it matters for any firm currently evaluating its location footprint.
Several distinct geographic dynamics are captured in the data: the rise of near-shoring as an alternative delivery model, and how regional concentration of R&K teams correlates with client market proximity. These patterns vary meaningfully across firm types and are directly relevant to how firms think about time-zone alignment and language coverage.
Proximity and Location: How Firms Are Thinking About R&K Geography
The benchmark reveals a clear divergence playing out across the peer set. Some firms are doubling down on proximity to their core consulting markets, prioritizing tighter integration between R&K teams and client-facing consultants. Others are maintaining or expanding offshore and near-shore delivery platforms, betting on productivity gains from AI to sustain high-quality outputs. The full report maps where each firm sits on this spectrum, and what the resulting footprint patterns look like across regions.
How Does the Consulting Pyramid Shape R&K Investment?
Beyond headcount and geography, the benchmark explores a less obvious driver of R&K investment: the seniority composition of consulting teams. How a firm’s workforce is distributed across junior, mid-level, and senior roles turns out to be a meaningful predictor of how it approaches centralized research support and understanding this relationship helps explain patterns that might otherwise look inconsistent across firm types.
In firms where senior partners and principals represent a high share of total headcount, the knowledge function tends to be more distributed, embedded in senior judgment rather than concentrated in a dedicated R&K team. In firms with more pyramid-shaped workforces, the opposite is often true: a larger base of junior and mid-level consultants creates stronger demand for centralized research support infrastructure. The benchmark maps this relationship across the full peer set, and the data reveals patterns that are both consistent and instructive.
For consulting leadership teams thinking about R&K design, the data points to a clear pattern: your organizational pyramid is one of the most important inputs into R&K decisions. The full report provides the distribution data and scatter analysis needed to apply this lens to your own firm’s structure.
What Does This Mean for Consulting Firms Navigating the AI Era?
The benchmark lands at a particularly consequential moment for consulting firms. AI is already an active force reshaping what R&K teams do, how they are structured, and how they create value. But firms are not all responding to that pressure in the same way and the choices being made today are likely to compound over time into meaningful differences in knowledge quality, delivery speed, and competitive positioning.
Some firms are contracting their R&K functions, betting that AI absorbs routine research tasks and that a leaner team can maintain quality through better tooling. Others are investing more deliberately in R&K, betting that the value of human judgment in governing AI outputs, providing contextual depth, and managing knowledge risk grows rather than shrinks as AI becomes more embedded in workflows. The benchmark data helps clarify which direction the industry’s leading firms are actually moving, and what the early structural signals of each approach look like.
Infomineo’s own model reflects the second thesis. Founded by former McKinsey and BCG consultants, the firm pioneered Brainshoring a model that pairs domain-specialist teams with governed AI workflows through its orchestrator B.R.A.I.N. to support the world’s leading consulting firms with high-quality, scalable R&K delivery. As in-house R&K functions face growing pressure, the demand for a trusted external partner that keeps human expertise at the center of every output becomes, if anything, more strategically relevant.
Three Questions Every Consulting Leader Should Be Asking
How does our R&K support ratio compare to our peer set? The benchmark provides the data needed to answer this question with precision and to understand what your current ratio reflects about your firm’s approach to knowledge infrastructure. Is our R&K footprint still aligned with where our clients and consultants are? Geographic priorities are shifting across the industry, and the benchmark provides a concrete basis for evaluating whether your current location choices remain well-suited to your operating model. Have we articulated a clear human-AI R&K model? The firms that will lead on knowledge quality over the next five years are the ones making informed decisions today about how to shape their R&K function in the age of AI — and building a reflected, resourced operating model around those decisions.
Request access to the full report.
The full 2026 R&K Benchmark includes firm-by-firm breakdowns, pyramid structure analysis, country-level headcount data, and the complete R&K ratio rankings available upon request.
Request the Full ReportFrequently Asked Questions
What is the R&K support ratio and why does it matter?
The R&K support ratio measures the number of Research & Knowledge professionals per 100 client-facing consultants. It is a practical proxy for how much intellectual infrastructure a firm invests behind its delivery teams. The benchmark tracks this ratio across the peer set over multiple years, capturing how it has evolved and what drives variation across firm types. Understanding where your firm sits within the peer distribution is one of the most direct applications of the report’s data.
Which consulting firm types invest most in R&K?
The benchmark reveals meaningful variation across firm types, with some maintaining high R&K ratios as a deliberate strategic choice, and others operating with lean R&K structures that reflect the way knowledge is distributed in their delivery model. The specific rankings and ratios are available in the full report.
Why are some firms concentrating R&K in higher-cost locations?
The benchmark captures a shift in location logic across the peer set. Rather than purely optimizing for cost, several firms appear to be prioritizing proximity to their consulting teams and client markets. The full report details how this plays out by region and firm type.
How is AI affecting R&K function design?
AI is influencing both the size and shape of R&K teams across the industry, but not in a single uniform direction. Some firms are using AI to justify leaner R&K headcounts, while others are investing in larger, more capable teams that use AI as a productivity layer rather than a replacement. The benchmark captures these diverging trajectories, and Infomineo’s B.R.A.I.N. AI orchestrator reflects our own thesis on how human expertise and AI should work together in practice.
What is Brainshoring and how does it relate to the benchmark?
Brainshoring is Infomineo’s model for delivering high-quality R&K support to consulting firms at scale, combining domain-specialist teams with governed AI workflows. As the benchmark shows, many firms are navigating real trade-offs between R&K capacity, cost, and AI readiness. Brainshoring offers a way to resolve those trade-offs without the headcount overhead of a fully built internal team, while maintaining the human judgment and quality standards that consulting clients expect.
