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With the rise of artificial intelligence and its impact on the consulting industry, what do you think will be the potential positive and negative effects for consulting industry overall? Additionally, what solutions do you suggest to navigate the challenges and opportunities presented by the integration of AI in the industry?
That aside, I believe AI will have a great effect on consulting. I imagine it becoming a sort of colleague supporting you on a client engagement. It could provide you with data, help you brainstorming for solutions and help you assess information.
However, I expect human consultants will continue to remain for the foreseeable future the main link between clients and the outside world (digital or real). It's still consultants who will need to tailor the information and recommendations provided by AI specifically for the client context.
In fact, I'm currently away this weekend with a group BCGers (some still at the firm, some not). We've been talking through this all weekend. Also caught up with some Partners in Sydney last week.
Here are some of the points raised in discussions:
ChatGPT and AI as is currently stands does not present a risk to consultants
The LLM version of AI likely has a peak capability that does not present a risk to consultants (It's not “real” human-like AI)
AI has strong potential to help consultants do their jobs better/quickly
The end result = either somewhat fewer consultants needed for the same work (~20%), more work, or slightly better work life balance
ChatGPT's answers for real worl consulting problems are not good (just like we're seeing for medicine/law)
Clients can't just "use chatGPT' to design their entire organization's strategy
India is very much at risk due to the type of tasks offshored (offshoring of coding and offshoring of research and offshoring of powerpoint editing)
ChatGPT will be the “onshoring” off offshore India work
There will likely be a future where OpenAI or other producers of LLMs spin off either cloud instances or on-premise instances of their LLM that is specifically fed data from the massive internal/confidential database of any of these consultancies to then become much better at promping by consultants
Storylining, brainstorming, powerpoint presentation creation, all become much easier for consultants
Consultants still needed for prompting/organizing point 9, editing point 9, making sure no issues in point 9, tying all of point 9 together
AI cannot replace stakeholder management, figuring out what the objective is in the first place (huge problem), getting alignment, pushing progress, running workshops, running presentations etc. etc.
TDLR: AI is a net benefit to consulting as it cuts costs (India/offshoring and slightly fewer consultants needed) and it lets consutlants focus on things they do best
To be honest, it may result in a lower need for analysts, but higher for manager and above, i.e. more experienced people, definitely better problem solvers.
It becomes even more valuable to be able to ask the right questions. But also to be able to validate the answers (so analyists have to be even better).
So overall, this will be good for highly capable and experienced consultants, as their skills will become even more valuable and their productivity will be doubled.
To give you some question: ChaptGPT is like that consultant that makes great slides and is a good comunicator but 30% of the content is off or wrong. This consultant usually gets fired, because no one can trust the work. In the case of ChatGPT the difference is that one can get the work done instantanously so you can use it as a STARTING POINT. But never, never, NEVER, never ever as an output.
It's tempting to ask ChatGPT, but let's stick with the human response for now :) As a person who worked in consulting and AI industries, I believe to have a good perspective on this question.
TLDR: AI should significantly augment/enhance consultants in the short to medium term, so that AI becomes a critical skill (similar to PowerPoint/Excel now), while in the long term, it may take over a large part of the consulting market and somewhat changing the nature of work.
Short to medium term We already see that current AI tools can make consultants much more efficient and help them to structure problems, write texts, create slides, etc. I was especially surprised by ChatGPT's reasoning and structuring capabilities as I've already used it multiple times as my brainstorming partner to structure difficult strategical problems. It certainly did not provide a ready-made solution, but it jumpstarted and accelerated my work. Regarding the impact on the industry, I expect one of the things to happen (depending on the specific market):
Case teams become smaller in size
More work is done for the client
Work-life balance improves
Long term We should understand that currently, all AI tools are still in their early stage, but they already show us a teaser of what to expect in the future. If some time ago the talks of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) were mostly theoretical, now they transform into specific roadmaps of achieving AGI in the nearest ~5 years. It could seriously disrupt the consulting industry as the analytics aspect would be no longer required. AI would probably be able to answer all analytics-related questions faster and better than humans. It's not a speculation as we already understand how it could be achieved. Moreover, it's not a secret that right now clients often do hire consultants to pass responsibility from corporate management to external experts in terms of difficult business decisions. AI could be as well used for these purposes instead of consultants. So which kind of work might be consultants left with:
Business translation between AI and Business: now there are business translator roles between Data Science and Business teams, and there might be the same with AI in the future
Communication and people skills: it's often important for consultants not only to find the right solution but also to convince the client to implement it, and I expect this communication aspect to still be critical in the future; however, the development of Conversational and Emotional AI might impact this area as well, but it's too early to draw any conclusions
Ethics and frameworks: AI usually plays by rules set by humans, but who does set these rules? In general, the rules might be set by governments and other large institutes, but what about a specific organization? Consultants might be a good choice to help organizations in this task by guiding AI implementation and governance
What should we do about it? The answer is easy - invest in your AI understanding and skill. It should be crucial for your performance in the industry. Do you know that some long time ago consultants were drawing slides by hand on paper? Now it sounds funny, and anybody without PowerPoint (or similar software) presentation skills is mostly not relevant in the industry (at least, in the junior to middle positions). I'm completely sure that the same would happen with AI tools in the nearest future, so it's better to invest your time in it right now! You can already start experimenting with text writing or slide creation as I do. Here is a long list of some potentially useful solutions for your experimentation:
Case Coach | Bain & Company | PwC M&A Deals Advisory | INSEAD MBA | SG & SEA
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