AI and Management Consultants: What's Actually Happening and What to Do

The honest assessment

Management consulting has a dirty secret. A lot of what consultants charge £2,000 a day for can now be done by a chatbot for about £20 a month. Not all of it. But enough to make some partners very nervous.

Here's what AI can do in consulting right now. Conduct market sizing and analysis. Generate strategic frameworks (and if we're honest, most consultants were using the same five frameworks anyway). Produce competitive analyses from public data. Write structured reports with recommendations. Create presentation decks. Analyse financial data and build models. Summarise industry research. Draft proposals and statements of work. ChatGPT can produce a passable McKinsey-style strategic analysis of any industry in about ten minutes. It even structures the output with the pyramid principle. Claude can synthesise multiple research sources into a coherent strategic narrative. Gamma can turn that narrative into a slide deck.

What AI can't do is the part of consulting that actually matters (when it actually matters). Walking into a dysfunctional executive team and figuring out that the strategy problem is actually a people problem. Facilitating a conversation between a CEO and a board who fundamentally disagree about the company's direction. Making a recommendation that the client doesn't want to hear and presenting it in a way that leads to action rather than defensive denial. The political skill, the relationship management, the ability to tell important people uncomfortable truths without getting fired... that's human work.

Here's the awkward part though. A significant portion of consulting revenue comes from the analytical and reporting work, not the advisory work. Junior and mid-level consultants spend much of their time building decks, analysing data, conducting research, and formatting deliverables. These are the tasks AI handles well. The senior partners who sell relationships and wisdom are less affected. The analysts and associates who produce the work product... they're in the crosshairs.

Your exposure level: Medium

Medium exposure, but with a steep gradient between senior and junior. If you're a partner with deep client relationships and industry expertise, your exposure is low. If you're an analyst building PowerPoint slides at midnight, your exposure is high. "Medium" is the average, and averages lie.

McKinsey, BCG, and Bain are all investing heavily in AI. Not just for their clients... for their own operations. McKinsey's internal AI tools help consultants with research, analysis, and content generation. The firms are candid about this changing the staffing model. If AI handles the research and analysis that used to require a team of four analysts, you need fewer analysts. The leverage model that has defined consulting economics for decades... one partner supported by a pyramid of increasingly junior staff... is being restructured.

For boutique and independent consultants, AI is a double-edged sword. On one side, it makes you more capable. One consultant with AI tools can produce deliverables that used to require a team. On the other side, it lowers the barrier to entry. If anyone can produce a strategic analysis with ChatGPT, what's the consulting premium paying for? The answer is experience, judgement, and relationships. But you have to actually have those things, not just claim them.

The firms that are most transparent about this shift are already redesigning roles. More emphasis on client interaction, facilitation, and implementation. Less emphasis on research and analysis production. The consultant of the future looks more like a coach-adviser-implementer than a researcher-analyst-slide-builder. Whether that appeals to you depends on why you got into consulting.

The 90-day action plan

1. This week: let AI build your next deck. Take a recent client deliverable. Give ChatGPT or Claude the brief, the data, and the key messages. Ask it to produce the analysis, recommendations, and structure for a presentation. Use Gamma to build the slides. Compare the result to what your team produced. The quality gap is smaller than you think. The remaining gap is your value. Know it precisely.

2. Week two: automate your market research. Use Perplexity for market sizing, competitive analysis, and industry trend research. Use Claude to synthesise multiple sources into a coherent narrative. Build a workflow that turns "do the market analysis" from a three-day exercise into a three-hour exercise. Document the time savings.

3. By day 30: develop your facilitation skills. The part of consulting AI can't touch is the room. The workshop. The executive offsite. The steering committee where things get heated. If you're not already excellent at facilitating complex conversations, invest in getting better. This is the most defensible skill in consulting.

4. By day 45: build AI into your methodology. Don't just use AI as a personal productivity tool. Build it into your consulting approach. "Our diagnostic process uses AI-powered analysis of your financial data, combined with senior consultant judgement and stakeholder interviews." That's a differentiated offering, not just a faster version of the old one.

5. By day 60: go deep on implementation. Strategy consulting has always had a gap between recommendation and result. Clients buy a deck, nod wisely, and then nothing changes. The consultants who can close that gap, who stay to implement and get results, are the ones clients value most. AI can write the strategy. It can't make it happen. That's your territory.

6. By day 75: build thought leadership with AI assistance. Write articles, produce research, and build a point of view on your area of expertise. Use AI to research and draft. Add your experience, your perspective, and your specific insights. Publish consistently. The consultant with a public body of work gets inbound enquiries. The one without it chases leads.

7. By day 90: restructure your pricing. If you're at a firm, advocate for value-based pricing over day rates. If AI makes you three times faster, day rates penalise efficiency. If you're independent, price by outcome or project. "£50,000 for a market entry strategy" is more defensible than "£2,000 per day for however long it takes" when the client knows AI exists.

AI tools you should be using this week

• ChatGPT for Work — The consulting Swiss army knife. Market analysis, strategic frameworks, financial modelling, proposal drafting, and client communication. Feed it detailed context about the client and the problem. The more specific your input, the less generic the output. Use it as an analyst that works at 3am without complaining.

• Claude for Work — Better for complex analytical work and long documents. Paste in annual reports, strategy documents, and research papers for synthesis. Excellent at structured thinking and producing arguments that follow logical frameworks. i find it handles the nuance of consulting work better than ChatGPT.

• Gamma for Presentations — Creates presentation decks from text briefs. Won't replace a strategy deck designed for a board presentation, but for internal reviews, proposals, and workshop materials, it's remarkably good. Cuts deck creation from hours to minutes.

• Perplexity for Research — Real-time market data with citations. Essential for market sizing, competitive analysis, and industry research. When you need to brief yourself on an unfamiliar industry before a client meeting, Perplexity is the fastest path to competence.

What to say in meetings

In client pitches: "We use AI-powered analysis to deliver more comprehensive research in less time. That means our senior team spends more time on the strategic questions and client interaction that actually drive results." Clients care about outcomes, not methodology. But knowing your methodology is AI-augmented makes you look current.

When partners discuss the staffing model: "AI handles the research and first-pass analysis that we used to staff analysts on. I'd recommend we restructure project teams to be smaller and more senior, with AI handling the leverage work. Here's what that looks like economically." Be part of the solution.

If a client says "I could just use ChatGPT": "You could. And you'd get a generic analysis based on public information. What we bring is industry-specific expertise, access to proprietary benchmarks, and the experience to know which recommendations work in your specific context and which ones sound good on a slide but fail in practice." Don't be defensive. Be specific about what you add.

If the worst happens

If you're made redundant from a consulting role, you have one of the most versatile professional skill sets in the market. Strategic thinking, client management, analytical rigour, presentation skills, and the ability to get up to speed on any industry quickly. These transfer to corporate strategy, private equity, venture capital, general management, and senior operations roles.

Natural adjacent moves: head of strategy (corporate), investor (private equity or VC), startup founder, interim management, or board adviser. Many former consultants also build successful independent practices, particularly if they've developed a genuine specialism. The independent consulting market rewards expertise and relationships more than brand, and AI tools make it possible for one person to deliver work that used to require a firm's resources.

One observation from watching consultants get restructured. The ones who struggle are the ones who relied on the firm's brand and methodology rather than building their own expertise and relationships. "I worked at McKinsey" opens doors for about six months. After that, people want to know what you can actually do. If you've spent your career building genuine expertise in a domain, developing relationships with senior clients, and learning to deliver results rather than just recommendations... you're not dependent on any firm's brand. You're a brand yourself. That's the goal, whether the worst happens or not. It's a better foundation than any partnership.