Do consultants face a sort of existential ‘I exist, and nobody cares’ question?
If AI can research the market, analyze the evidence, generate strategic options and turn the argument into a polished slide deck in minutes, what exactly is the client paying for?
Robert Armstrong raised this in the FT last week. His argument is that much of the analytical work of strategy consulting is becoming commoditized, leaving the harder human work of trust, persuasion, organizational politics and change. That’s right as far as it goes but (we would argue) misses something important.
Before you can persuade a client to act on a recommendation, someone still has to decide whether the recommendation is any good. In other words: exercise experience based judgement. Sound judgement is the point of differentiation between humans and AI.
So the challenge isn’t simply how to use AI to make consulting faster and/or cheaper. It is how to integrate the power of AI without hollowing out the human capabilities on which the profession increasingly depends.
Adam Riley and I consider the challenge in our latest PolymathMind Substack.