Every conference panel seems to start with the same anxious question: “Will artificial intelligence make consultants obsolete?” It is the wrong question.
AI will devour the work that never belonged to us in the first place. It will wipe out endless slide decks stuffed with benchmark charts. It will automate spreadsheet gymnastics that try to prove what everyone already knew. It will make copy-and-paste playbooks that treat every company as identical look like relics. That is not consulting. That is outsourced administration. And yes, AI will do it faster and cheaper. Good riddance.
Remember when the arrival of spreadsheets in the 1980s wiped out armies of corporate bookkeepers? Or when Bloomberg terminals made human stock-quote runners redundant almost overnight? Generative AI is the next wave of creative destruction. For decades too many firms sold expensive labour disguised as insight. Their secret sauce was simply a room full of bright graduates willing to burn midnight oil. Think of the old big-firm war stories: jet-lagged analysts hammering out 120-slide decks at three in the morning, a modern echo of Victorian textile mills where productivity meant bodies working longer hours. Large-language models have pulled the curtain back. The junior analyst army now has a silicon replacement that never sleeps. If your value is measured in hours of analysis, start writing your farewell note.
When every company has access to the same data lakes and GPT-powered dashboards, advantage moves upstream. It will belong to those who can frame the right question. Peter Drucker warned that there is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. It will belong to those who can read the politics in a boardroom, the kind of nuance Bismarck once called the art of the possible. It will belong to those who can turn insight into change. AI can predict a sales cycle. It cannot convince a sceptical vice president to change her compensation plan. It cannot rebuild trust between marketing and sales after years of trench warfare. That is the work of a true consultant.
ChatGPT and Midjourney can draft strategy papers or create workshop visuals in minutes. These are tasks that once justified hefty consultant day rates. GitHub Copilot is writing code as fast as many professional developers, forcing software shops to move up the value chain. In the legal world Harvey AI now drafts first-pass contracts, pushing law firms toward higher-order advisory work. Each of these examples is a live reminder. The commodity tasks go first. The judgement tasks rise in value.
History loves a middleweight. It was the Florentine merchant houses of the Renaissance, too small to field armies and nimble enough to avoid being trapped by tradition, that financed the Medici’s rise and sponsored the art that defined an era. Today’s mid-cap B2B firms are their heirs. Big corporations already fund AI transformation offices. Start-ups are born digital. Mid-caps are squeezed. They are pressured to adopt AI yet they lack internal expertise. They need a boutique partner, someone who brings proprietary frameworks, uses AI as a lever, and stays close enough to feel the client’s pulse. Not a software vendor. Not a body shop. A performance partner.
The next decade will not belong to firms that sell hours. It will belong to those who combine human judgement with AI firepower. It will belong to the boutiques that orchestrate change rather than crunch numbers. AI is not coming for consulting. It is coming for bad consulting, just as the steam engine came for the horse-drawn carriage and the spreadsheet came for the manual ledger. That is the best news our industry has heard in years.
Where do you see AI exposing the weak spots or creating new space for trusted advisors?
Learning for Performance 