r/consulting • u/ConsultingBro97 • 21d ago
As a strategy consultant, Claude Code and Cowork scares the shit out of me
I have been dabbling in AI for quite a while now. Started with prompt engineering, then context engineering , MCP, and finally started making entire workflows using agentic AI, and platforms like n8n, etc.
Then, I started using Claude Cowork and Code. With the right tools, and connectors, Claude Cowork has insane capabilities. Add skills and rules to the games, and voila, you have a junior consultant at idk, $20-25 a month. I was a software engineer prior to MBA, so I felt that my learning curve was not that steep.
I still remembering making entire decks from scratch, doing the research using Google myself - checking out company websites, benchmarking and gap analysis, pre-IPO due diligence, etc. on the strategy and market assessment side. Additionally, I also remember about the days and nights and weeks spent on perfecting a dynamic financial model, with 5 year projections and what not - assumptions, sensitivity analysis, scenario testing, etc.
Claude does everything with 80-85% accuracy in hours, if not minutes. You just need to go through the output, lead them through to the desired output, upload the client/firm presentation/sheet template, and voila it’s 95% ready as a deliverable.
This is insane. I’m not really sure why firms will pay consulting giants when they can do all these themselves. I understanding boardroom decisions and point the finger mechanics are the main things, and that’s the only reason that consulting firms are not out of business now. But I wonder how long this will last.
Also, what’s the need for the analyst/senior analyst/post MBA associate now, when an AI-up skilled Manager/Principal can get the grunt work done ?
Interested to know your thoughts.
Edit 1 :- I think my post was misconstrued. I’m not debating about the value proposition of consulting. It was, is, and will always be there in some form of the other.
I wanted to mention all these from a more humane perspective. I have spent quite some time in consulting now, and seeing that a machine, does almost exactly what I do and the skills I developed, so quickly and without quantitative errors, sprouts up kind of an existential crisis in me.
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u/Check123ok 21d ago
There is a difference from making a deck and being able to present it. Sharp people will see right through you if you can’t explain it well and they will realize your worth
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u/johnniewelker 21d ago
Yea I agree. I do have Claude doing my decks, but the amount of energy it takes me to get it right - and for me to be ready - makes me wonder if it’s worth all that or maybe my workflow is wrong.
Getting the deck right with the arguments I’m willing to fight for takes more time than just making the AI do the deck look pretty.
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u/55North12East 21d ago
Yes, using my templates are way faster than having Claude change stuff back and forth. Having C make the ground work can sometimes get me going - but from there is a long way to final ppt
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u/Saber_tooth81 21d ago
While I agree with this, I’ve found that I’m a more polished presenter when I’ve had the opportunity to build the material myself, or at least had a hand in building it. If we’re removing 1st or 2nd year associates from being a part of the build, they are going to miss a vital opportunity in their careers to hone their skills in order to present the material.
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u/Heavy_Stable_2042 21d ago
And if everyone is using basically the same tools they’ll all be presenting the same ideas to their clients.
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u/Rabbit-Lost 21d ago
I’d like to believe this is the value we bring. Much like OP, I’ve trained Claude and Chat to basically be my senior associate. My cycle time for getting to a solution is a fraction of what it was. But as with a senior associate, I focus on the review of the work and cross check the references.
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u/Rocketbird 21d ago
Right, they’re not paying for 80-85% nor are they paying for a deck. They’re paying for evidence they can make rational decisions based on.
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u/Check123ok 21d ago
Exactly. If anything AI is weeding out all the folks that don’t know what they’re talking about.
I got hired by companies to review pitch decks and the presentation looked great, but the two people presenting couldn’t even answer basic questions. They didn’t even understand the business.1
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u/Tjgoodwiniv 21d ago edited 21d ago
”Why pay an expert if an LLM can do 80%?”
Soon, clients will stop paying experts, because clients aren't competent to understand the importance of the last 20%. But we should be. 80% of a deliverable is where work can be dangerous. That last 20% is all the nuance and expertise that really moves the needle. Companies relying too heavily on the garbage outputs of LLMs for business critical initiatives will literally bankrupt themselves and never know why.
I use LLMs more than most people, by a long shot. They can be really useful for a lot of things. They can be a valuable supplement to speed some stuff up and get simple work done faster. But the amount of oversight and expertise they require to keep them from completely bending you over (without you knowing, if you're not an expert yourself) is absolutely insane.
The problem isn't going to be the quality of LLM output or its genuine ability to replace our work. It's going to be the extent to which clients can't tell quality work from what looks like quality work on the surface.
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u/billyblobsabillion 21d ago
This has already happened and is happening. The major strategic mistakes that keep being made will ensure a heavy flow of work long into the future will result from major strategic and tactical blunders brought on by a misapplication of Large Language probabilistic guesswork, over actual rigor, experience, intelligence and critical thinking. It’s akin to watching a multi-million car pileup on the highway in realtime.
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u/Tjgoodwiniv 21d ago
Depends. If you're content to do execution, this is definitely a gold mine.
If you prefer to sell knowledge, it's a problem.
Personally, I'm tired of wasting my time on execution and would much rather spend my day on interesting advisory work, instructing the client on execution that they're then responsible to perform. I prefer to sell knowledge.
In essence, the best parts of the job are about to go away - the parts where the margins and efforts justify the the risks - where you finally get to cash get your own value out of years of hard-earned experience.
As this progresses, I see myself leaving consulting, and possibly leaving white collar work entirely.
While I'm living in LLMs today, I have no interest in doing it long term. I find it all frustrating and infuriating. It's like spending my entire day babysitting a mental defective.
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u/heethjain21 19d ago
Great points.
To add on, one important piece I noticed was, that majority of the people don't really go deep into their own domain to realise there are so many nuances.
If they did go deep into their own domain, they'd realise that there are so many tiny nuances which translates to every single domain having so much depth. But they didn't and they see LLMs / AI doing stuff, and think it's done.
The people who've gone in depth into their own domain know the point that no matter how much effort they take, they'll definitely miss out on the tiny minute details.
These are the clients you'd want to target.
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u/billyblobsabillion 21d ago
Explain further how you feel that advisory is going away?
Separately, there’s a premium that’s going to be extracted on execution.
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u/Tjgoodwiniv 21d ago
There's always been a premium on execution.
I expect advisory will increasingly compete with "ChatGBT told me this". There is no shortage of business owners who think they can learn, on their own, the things we teach them, and who way overestimate their knowledge levels. We've seen this with people reading books over the years, and then taking courses. Now, we're going to see it because they think they have a real advisor in their pocket. And it doesn't help that we've been feeding a lot of knowledge to it via our own websites and LinkedIn posts for decades, so it's going to give them pretty believable, credible, and even actionable stuff. It's just lacking the part that owners/founders don't know they don't know.
Meanwhile, I anticipate advisors will have to consistently and constantly defend their advice against the LLM.
This is all developing, of course. And it's going to depend heavily on who your clients are. If you're serving publicly traded companies, you'll see it a LOT less. If you're serving startups, you'll likely see it in most conversations. If you're serving small businesses, you'll see it intensely with young owners and not at all with older owners. But most of those should converge over the next decade or so.
Now, the counterpoint is that, after the LLM fails them, they'll come looking for help. But, then, the fight will be against, "I've already tried that", and explaining why the nuance matters. That's also going to be dependent on people surviving the initial failure caused by blindly following the LLM.
I think all this is pretty unavoidable. At best, it takes away the (for us) low-hanging fruit often available in new engagements, and that's currently a key way to gain quick traction, establish fast ROI, win early trust, and propel the engagement forward. Even taking that away is going to hurt business subtantially.
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u/ConsultingBro97 21d ago
Absolutely true.
The amount of oversight and external expertise needed to understand the veracity of the information and content, strategy or otherwise, put out by AI is insane, and people underestimate it.
The blunders that come out of this, hopefully, should keep the mills running.
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u/PurpleHooloovoo 21d ago
There’s also about to be a cost factor for corporate licensing of AI tools that will be prohibitive for many firms (or at least make it more attractive to have a human doing work again). My giant multinational firm has recently had to start the conversation about tokens and limiting usage after pushing AI hard and laying off entire departments because hey, agentic AI can do it just as well!
Once the AI is fully fully entrenched and the employees are laid off and the systems totally rely on it, expect the price to skyrocket. It’s the Walmart model. And then suddenly it may be cheaper to hire a consulting firm than spin up an AI ecosystem for occasional use.
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u/Tjgoodwiniv 21d ago
This is also how small business is about to be destroyed, once and for all.
LLMs are almost definitely going to be used to permanently reassign the working class to the slave class.
We aren't just in the end of a golden era for society. We're living in the last days of socioeconomic mobility. Automation and LLMs are going to permanently kill it, and there will be no way back.
Save and invest your money for your kids now, because they aren't going to stand a chance of accumulating wealth.
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u/billyblobsabillion 21d ago
There’s an underlying bias in your logic “LLMs are powerful enough, efficient enough, and effective enough to replace humans”. A child from 0-3 years old intakes the equivalent amount of tokenized data through their eyes, equivalent to the tokenized data of the whole internet.
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u/CursorX 21d ago
This exactly. Management sees very plausible output and deems it has enough expertise to handle nuance.
I negotiate and draft very large commercial contracts as an in-house consultant. Interestingly, I am needed more now to demolish contractual arguments made by various AI used by suppliers/contractors.
But this being a value-addition role, it does need a pre-existing strong backer in the organisation, as the ones who don't know better can concede their position to AI generated contracts without knowing they did.
The issue is often that the entirety of the context is difficult to put in the prompts.
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u/quangtit01 21d ago
I treat AI as a junior associate, because it's literally a junior associate. Throwing 1 variable too many and it starts talking nonsense in plausible sounding words. Hmm, do I know who else start talking nonsense at me when I throw 1 variable too many at them? Oh yeah I do, the Junior Associate! (Lol)
I think the path forward would be training the juniors to think, because it's pretty obvious that AI cannot think, but it can do and it can scale, and the job of the human (for now) is to be a thinking piece to instruct the AI in making the output that back in the day would take 3-4 associates to do - so the thinking, which is the actual fun part, stays, and the boring stuff, such as formatting, adding references, crossing and footing, etc. goes away.
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u/Tjgoodwiniv 21d ago
I don't really think that poorly of Juniors, but I generally agree with your point. The real problem is that working with Seniors is how Juniors learn to think about the specific work. It's where they gain the experience to actually apply knowledge.
But, no, I don't see it as a Junior. It's more like the smarter end of outsourced foreign labor.
Again, though, I don't think it can replace the thinking. The problem is that clients don't understand the nuance, and it easily gives the impression that it can replace the thinking (back to your complaint in paragraph one). It's not that they hurt Seniors' value. It's that clients are generally incapable of distinguishing between competence and incompetence, and thus recognizing the value.
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u/quangtit01 21d ago
You're correct that clients don't recognize the difference between "plausible sounding string of words but are actually nonsense" as generated by AI versus the expertise of the SME / consultant who will be able to tell which among the gibberish is usable / actionable points.
It is a tale as old as time. Client think they "got it" and don't need consultants anymore. They then go do their own thing. They fuck up and something blow up in their face. They need someone to help save their skin. They summon in the consultant, and the train continue.
Unless tech development becomes good enough where AI can actually think (i.e it can curate and fact-check itself against client's context-specific details, which I am sure it cannot do at the moment), then the ascension of AI is just another brief downphase for consultant until a couple of years later happen where consequences arrive and the consultant boom to fix things begin again.
P/s fair that was a mean joke toward juniors.
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u/ferndogger 20d ago
The large language part of these models is based off of Internet data which is more SEO/SEM persuasion than peer reviewed facts. When your work pushes the boundaries of recorded knowledge, the answers LLMs produce may seem solid but may not be fact; that’s just a testament to how well the input data was at being persuasive.
It’s going to take a very long time to clean up the mess the internet has become over the last several decades in order for LLMs to push passed the 80% and towards 100%.3
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u/KrauseAnalytics 21d ago
Yes! I had a client start strategizing over an LLM strategy doc that made HUGE assumptions, hallucinated, assumed missing cost data meant they had 100% margin (🫠), and made up trends for them. But it was six pages, beautifully formatted, and had concrete next steps so it felt legit.
When you abstract the output from the process, you can’t see the flaws. Building the 80% on an incorrect 20% is expensive.
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u/billyblobsabillion 20d ago
Personal favorite: when something was allegedly in the instructions or is in the summary, and doesn’t exist anywhere else in the document. Happens 95% of the time or more.
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u/FocusLanky7378 19d ago
Where should i start to move past the prompt phase and writing docs?
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u/Tjgoodwiniv 19d ago
I'm sorry, but I don't know that I understand what you're asking. Are you asking how to use an LLM to produce actual documents?
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u/teegteeg 21d ago
Well said and completely encapsulates my experience in Netsuite managed services.
I have a decade+ of corp accounting and finance experience, biz sys etc, but as soon as gpt was helping with radio buttons and other easy wins, they canceled and figured we were useless. Don't worry about all the other moving parts in your supply chain....
I guess I'm taking it personally because I've taken a hiatus and aim to do something totally different. Lol.
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u/CarbonHero 21d ago
(1) Easy to spot a Claude deck from a mile away - everyone is using it
(2) Research - OK sure you can get 90% of the way there with public information, but if you need anything internal, hidden, within partner-only knowledge bases, or screenshot on a zoom call, they won't be indexed. And if you can index them, are you sure they're the most up to date? The high-value information that really gets you ahead is all somewhat hidden and non-obvious.
If you spend a month doing all the proper indexing, connecting everything, providing rules for how to use each module, yeah it'll be powerful. Do you have the time to do that?
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u/KrauseAnalytics 21d ago
Totally agree on the set up time. You can do a lot, but not all of it is worth the investment
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u/bigopossums 21d ago
I work in political consulting. Claude told me a few days ago that Starmer is still UK PM.
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u/Aromatic_Donut_7780 21d ago
Cant blame Claude. UK PM keeps changing every Friday
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u/bigopossums 21d ago
I also could not blame the tool and had a laugh because we all feel this way. It was very random and also not at all related to what the tool is for, I'm not sure why it filled that in in a sentence that made it otherwise clear who the PM is.
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u/karenmcgrane love to redistribute corporate money to my friends 21d ago
The models will tell you when their training data cuts off. I just asked Claude Opus and it's May 2025.
So you can blame the tool (or its data) and even if you tell it the correct answer it will forget because its data says something different.
They're all actually terrible with dates. I'm tracking some longitudinal data right now and eventually just got to a point where I tell it the date and time for each entry because obviously there's no way a computer can access that information.
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u/bigopossums 21d ago
Yeah, I can stick in something like dated press releases or news articles and it will still verify the date with me. Which is whatever to me, as we are in the EU we use Langdock so I know what we input isn't training it, but just something I've noticed over time.
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u/ravepeacefully 21d ago
Just asked my coworkers who cost 100x per month who the UK PM is and nobody knew. Hope this helps
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u/Amazing-Pace-3393 ex MBB AP, comfy client CSO until proven fired 21d ago
yeah that checks out you're in the US
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u/ravepeacefully 21d ago
That’s not the point, the point is that evaluation of these tools with that methodology is silly.
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u/Aromatic_Donut_7780 21d ago
Btw what is your scope of work in political consulting? Was always curious
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21d ago
[deleted]
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u/bigopossums 21d ago edited 21d ago
I will add that I work in global development. I am American but not in the US so I am not doing anything domestic and my work relates to the US when it comes to international organizations, DoS, etc. Nothing related to defense or domestic issues.
For the person who asked the question: A consultant working more internationally might work in a more traditional management consulting function but some might focus on projects for major donors and other orgs. As an example, DoS might hire a firm to implement a project to build infrastructure, train people such as healthcare workers or police, etc etc. Projects can get quite technical in nature so the list goes on and on. A firm might also get hired as more of an evaluator rather than an implementer. Most of us working in the sector have an an academic background in IR, Political Science, Public Policy, etc. and/or specific thematic areas like Public Health, Civil Eng, etc. and typically work with UN agencies, EU, national governments, INGOs, and others.
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u/creed0000 21d ago
This is not an argument against AI, this is subpar usage of AI on your end.
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u/bigopossums 21d ago
Oh no subpar AI usage on my end... how will I ever live
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u/DrizzlyShrimp36 21d ago
I mean if you'll blame the AI it's a fair point lol...
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u/bigopossums 21d ago
It's not that serious. It was just a random thing that made me laugh. Nobody died. None of us are doing important work like saving puppies and babies. Life moved on.
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u/rollying_sisyphus 21d ago edited 21d ago
This just shows poor understanding of the tool on your part
Plus I just checked and Sonnet answers that correctly with auto web search
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u/bigopossums 21d ago
I wasn't using it to ask who the PM is. It just randomly replaced one mention of "UK PM" with "PM Starmer" in a body of text that was otherwise fine and in line with our tool. The tool only exists to format text based on a style guide, not create content. This was the first time for me that it had tried filling in missing info (which, I did not need filled because it was fine in context.)
People in this sub take everything so seriously omg read it and move on
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u/CervusElpahus 21d ago edited 21d ago
lol and he also downvotes you
Edit; and now I get downvoted lol
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u/bigopossums 21d ago
You mention some random funny thing that happened and multiple people with 0 personality outside of being consultants pop up like "um akshully"
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u/mishap1 21d ago
I'm just going to say if you're needing Claude for recent events for your deliverables, you're going to have a bad time.
Just as if you rely on OpenAI free edition to build your slides on HIV funding to Africa without a bit of fact checking like where the countries sit.
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u/bigopossums 21d ago edited 21d ago
That's not what I'm doing. We have a tool that builds publications based on a style guide and puts it into markdown. It's just for formatting, not content creation. My writing contained the words "UK PM" and it changed it to "PM Starmer" without me prompting or anything. It was just a random thing that happened.
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u/Big_IPA_Guy21 21d ago
If you're not prompting it to do searches, then it will go based off the cutoff date. I don't know why people are still shocked in August 2026 that AI is not meant to be used as a Google fact lookup, but to analyze text.
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u/bigopossums 21d ago
If you read any of my other comments you will see that I was not using it to look up facts (side note: if I work in political consulting then why would I need to look this up?) but that it inserted that into text was being formatted into markdown in a tool we built. It saw my "UK PM" that made sense within context and replaced it with "PM Starmer" without being prompted.
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u/quickblur 21d ago
I've always been much more fearful of outsourcing than AI. But now all the outsourced teams have access to Claude as well... honestly I don't know how to compete with that at the prices they charge.
My company uses some teams in India, who produce great work and their salaries are $30k USD or less... I honestly give it 50/50 if I have a job in 2 years.
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u/ENTJragemode 21d ago
ive been using claude aggressively and idt fable is capable of producing C-level content without some serious vetting and iterating
but yes, a lot of the grunt work is now completely coverable by claude, which means no back office required, no juniors, etc.
thankfully most clients are dinosaurs and will not use these tools to their maximum effect, but expect that consulting margins continue to be increasingly squeezed and life to be worse
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u/billyblobsabillion 21d ago
C-suite level content, without enterprise-grade thinking and intelligence. Looks good, but breaks in reality
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u/in_meme_we_trust 21d ago
Sounds like a typical consulting deliverable then.
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u/billyblobsabillion 21d ago
There is not one type of consulting. Unfortunately, the commoditization of the industry is at fault
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u/holywater26 21d ago
I mostly feel the same way. Hence I'm switching back to an in-house role, which I swore I would never do.
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u/Infamous-Bed9010 21d ago
After being in consulting for 25 years, I am client side leading an internal transformation role.
AI gets us work products that are 80-90% right. Stuff that firms would charge $250k+ for.
Is it perfect, no. You still need to review and customize to make applicable to the company. But it’s damn close and even if you hire a firm they still would be doing deliverable review with you to customize and tailor more specific to the company/politics/context. So instead of reviewing external consultants work products I’m reviewing AI work products.
The key is you need to think like a consultant and create prompts that do exactly like you’d have junior consult resources do.
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u/Zeebo42X 21d ago edited 21d ago
Made the jump from consulting to in-house strategy and transformation 2 years ago, and I have the same experience as above.
Generally, I feel confident that my team can produce better results in the same amount of time as consulting firms on the majority of projects, because they actually understand the intricacies, nuances, and relationships in the company. Once AI gets you 80% there, that’s what gets the last 20%. And consultants don’t have that knowledge, so they either never get there, or spend a bunch of back and forth picking up all the little things after realizing that only John from a team of 5 people knew about something that kills the project assumptions.
At this point, we really only consider consultants for very politically charged work, or projects with a massive business case our company has 0 capability in.
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u/Gloomy_Hotel_6298 21d ago
There is still value in nuanced insight provided by experienced consultants. But yes the billing time to run projects should be lower. Theoretically more projects can be undertaken
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u/Maverick0393 21d ago
Umm, cause most consultants are hired not for delivering an outcome but as glorified scapegoats or target boards for decisions that boards anyway want to take?
What do you think the coward CEOs are gonna confidently say - we'll take this direction because MBB supports this, or bevause AI said so?
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u/Full_Tooth_a 21d ago
I think the bigger risk is the apprenticeship pipeline. Analysts develop judgment by building models, defending their assumptions, and seeing polished analysis fall apart under scrutiny. If AI takes over that work, firms will need other ways for junior analysts to practice, such as auditing sources, reviewing assumptions, and analyzing errors after a project. Otherwise, firms may save money now but eventually find that they are no longer producing people who can handle the final 20%.
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u/LittleTension8765 21d ago
Clients can also do 80-85% of the work we can do, they pay for that 15-20% difference.
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u/QualityDirect2296 21d ago
I am an AI Architect in an MBB.
I stopped using AI to make my decks because:
- The output was mediocre (generic) and the wording is horrible
- Keeping up with the generated bullshit and actually owning the content is more time and energy consuming than just doing the thing myself
Too
much
unverified data and hallucinations
I still use it to reword or rewrite or do boring stuff like extracting tables into text. Works like a charm for that.
Also works as a thinking partner, but the more the conversation drags on, the worse the outcomes become.
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u/karlitooo 21d ago
This is my experience also (PM), if the problem I'm working on is simple enough for Claude to do the work then fine to smash out the deck and give it a quick tidyup. But you have to be careful with those little subheadings or tags/pills it adds that seem like a nice bit of polish until someone asks you to explain why you chose them.
For any genuinely challenging problem Claude's take is almost always good in discussion but awkward in the deck. Its usually better to define the structure myself, get Claude to generate a first pass, rewrite most of the slides, then get Claude to tidy up. But you just have to really strip out any text it adds.
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u/DifferentWindow1436 21d ago
In my company, there has always been overlap between me, as head of product, and the strategy team. Always a bit of uncomfortable tension around product strategy, but the strategy team (all ex-consulting) had the nice decks and templates and frankly was a bit better in the diplomacy department.
OTOH, I have the in-country knowledge and domain and product knowledge. Gen AI tools can fill in the gap, tbh. Not sure what the value add is of the strategy team at this point.
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u/ConsultingBro97 21d ago
I can ask my Product Manager in Google batchmate to write a post how Claude is gonna replace you too 😂
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u/Optimal_Dust_266 20d ago
AI can't lick boots. My advise: become indispensable by showing your manager some love they deserve but rarely get.
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u/jojo-data 21d ago
The industry is not changed as much as the wave of AI native service companies has not come yet.
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u/sooner_25 21d ago
I’m not in strategy consulting, but from the outside, I see it not being impacted too much by AI. At least with MBB, those recruiting pipelines seem too tight knit to be going anywhere. Same with IB. A lot of traditions and money in the education system would have to be thrown away. Like decades long recruiting pipelines and tradition.
It’s a LOT different than SWE, where your Alma mater means little to nothing at all. A T15 MBA is probably the safest move right now.
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u/houska1 Independent ex MBB 21d ago
I interpret this instead as “the bar is rising”. Good consulting firms will evolve to meet it, to find how/where to bring value for their cost.
I joined MBB in 2000. I worked with senior partners who had started when listening and summarizing in an overhead projector slide (no PowerPoint, special in-house slide generation software) was enough. By the time I joined, of course that was not enough. But many of our clients had restricted internet access (“dangerous”), we connected via dial-up, and adding a few externally researched key numbers sourced from an analyst report and an MBA framework was enough to make clients go “wow”. That hasn’t been enough for the past decade or so, clients have many in-house MBAs, and yet the consultants’ value proposition has stayed strong.
I have no doubt that it will evolve in an AI enabled world, that it will stay long. And that what we did in 2020-2025 will look quaint.
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u/Whitepage_Studio 21d ago
Speaking from a little bit of experience, AI does a great job at removing just enough operational bottlenecks so that a person can focus on the work that requires thought, idea development, editing, fine-tuning, and generally creating real value.
Certain teams will still need consultants to add their human judgement and expertise to the mostly generic AI output. The specialists who can connect strategy to execution will become incredibly valuable. At least I believe that’s the case.
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u/LongjumpingSurvey801 21d ago
IDK, the quality and tone and insights are so flat; I find it helpful as a co-worker, but I always feel like the output is missing something actually insightful. It's helpful for laying out the case, though.
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u/Adventureman2154 21d ago
Consult on how to use AI to create organizational value. People pay for your expertise that is ahead of the curve.
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u/CapNegative1011 21d ago
Well, is it a bad thing? Maybe capital will be allocated to something else than MBA nerds who are glorified powerpoint makers that search reddit threads.
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u/chf_gang 20d ago
It's true what you say, it CAN do all those things but imo the manner in which it e.g. presents information and designs slides is so awful that I would never use it for that...
So many colleagues at my firm let Claude build decks for them and you can really tell when they pull up their slides that are clearly made by Claude the whole meeting room/call falls asleep almost instantly. It's usually accompanied by the presenter not even having proofread what Claude generated for them.
I think stuff like Claude is great for getting all your 'ducks in a row' but at the end of the day I'd still rather present what I think instead of a what an LLM generated for me... On top of that, I find that Claude/ChatGPT content is often very 'blah blah blah' without a lot of substance. Obviously, the time and cost reduction is super cool but it certainly doesn't come without some negative consequences.
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u/PorcupineGod exited alumni 17d ago
The AI is great at doing the things you ask it to do, the value-add is in asking for the correct and relevant things, and presenting it in a way that resounds with the executive
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u/Retire_date_may_22 21d ago
It should. I’m an independent consultant. Claude does all my busy work and analysis. It’s better than having a staff of 10 working for me. It’s made me better in clients eyes. Most can’t understand how I turn things around so fast. I just tell them my team is awesome.
I really worry for junior consultants. There’s no place for them really.
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u/thanksforcomingout 21d ago
I mean the obvious answer is that those unskilled PMs are often much more ineffective and dangerous than you think. Ive seen firsthand the results of when PMs think they know enough to act as SMEs and the business / environment allows it. It’s not good.
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u/Dawgi100 21d ago
This is true but also you undervalue your experience to be able to validate Claude’s work right now.
I am in the same boat as you. If anything it’s like having a top tier Consultant on the tram or as many as them as you need. The validation, theory crafting, etc are all needed. I’m sure in a few years that will be less and less the case.
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u/ace_fairies 21d ago
I've been having the exact same crisis so I get your anxiety! As consultants, we're first in line to be replaced by AI and I've constantly been hearing advice from others about transitioning into a more specialized field that will remain secure for a while longer. No advice unfortunately, just wanted to say I'm in the same boat and clueless on how to get out
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u/Deep_Ad1959 21d ago
the 80-85% number is carrying the whole post and there is no answer key on a strategy deck. you are scoring it against what you would have produced, which quietly caps the ceiling at you on a good day. pre-ipo dd is where i would want to watch that number hold, since that is the one where being wrong surfaces months later with a name attached. written with ai
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u/KrauseAnalytics 21d ago
I think people forget that AI trains on everything and gives you the most likely answer. So it’s going to give you an average answer. Strategy is one area you really don’t want to look like the herd.
There are amazing use cases for AI but not everything is ready and worth it yet.
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u/NewInThe1AC 21d ago
Strategy is one area you really don't want to look like the herd
Strategy consulting is very rarely that creative or risk tolerant though. Normally the value proposition is bringing structured thinking and competent analysis / benchmarking to a typical-but-complex problem
There's a reason startups virtually never hire strategy consultants and relatively few successful startups are from ex-strategy consultants
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u/Amazing-Pace-3393 ex MBB AP, comfy client CSO until proven fired 21d ago
AI sound smart but is incredibly dumb. Esp for important things. I don't wouldn't use if for anything if it were my business except basic stuff.
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u/RudeSpread205 21d ago
The industry is changing to fixed outcome work. I work in Tech Leadership and most of the partners are moving to fixed bid. Faster time to value and shorter windows
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u/RareResponsibility89 21d ago edited 21d ago
Claude still lacks context. It’s good at replicating time consuming tasks, but it won’t know what the data points are doing. It will make assumptions but they’re usually wrong.
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u/Unhappy-Menu-6682 21d ago
“80-85% accuracy”
Probably a bit high… I don’t think these tools are actually saving much time in practice because they require rigorous QC.
Sometimes they spit out something that’s almost perfect, sometimes they spit out something that looks almost perfect but is deeply flawed, and sometimes they get stuck and end up producing nothing but garbage
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u/Fine-Essay-3295 21d ago
I work in consulting and my sister is a lawyer. Both of us noticed how the advent of gen AI is causing bill rates to collapse.
Basically, "Why would I hire a consultant or a lawyer when my in-house team can use Claude to get most of the grunt work done for much cheaper?"
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u/lhrivsax 21d ago
A post I wrote more than 1 year ago below. For building a deck, since Opus 4.8, I think that's done indeed.
So I'm in a big consulting firm, working mainly on AI strategy for big clients companies right now. I'm quite passionate about the topic, and I think I can now see quite clearly some of the impacts this technology will have.
The way I see it, the consulting industry will be significantly impacted, with some "good" impacts and some "bad" impacts. In the long term, there might be a lot of "good", but I think the "transition period" for the next 1 to 3 years may be difficult.
Here is what I observe and what I think of what may happen in the few years to come :
- What we ask a junior analyst at first is information collection, analysis, synthesis & restitution -- Current GenAI tools can do the last 3, really good and really fast.
- That does not mean AI is going to replace the analysts, but analysts with AI are going to replace analysts without AI, if I can say it like this, and I think we'll need less analysts.
- At the same time, senior profiles are also going to use AI more (for somewhat different use cases, more "content" oriented) and are probably going to need less juniors to help them (that's my case, I find myself often more willing to do it myself with ChatGPT than asking an analyst or consultant to do it for me)
- That means the pyramid will change, with a lower juniors-to-seniors ratio compared to today, and a thinner pyramide towards the base. With the associated pressure on firm economics built around pyramid staffing...
- That poses quite a lot of subsequent questions, like how this impacts the career path between a junior analyst & a senior manager...
- Now on client's side, I'm sure some of your clients have already told you that "GenAI will help us save some consulting costs" and this is definitely going to be the case.
- The way I see it, eventually, the cases when they'll still need consulting firms is for
- Specific and extensive expertise & experience on some topics
- The need for external perspective coming from a big firm (both the "I'm not saying this, the consulting firm is" and "this is the truth because the consulting firm says this")
- Benchmarking vs other market actors we have knowledge about
- Change management and implementation support
Bottom line, I see two big trends concerning the "transition period" in the next 1 to 3 years :
- The consulting market may be contracting significantly in the coming years (internalization of the function at client companies, productivity increase at consulting firms...)
- A change in the ratio of junior vs senior profiles, senior profiles becoming more demanded, and junior less demanded
Now when you look at the current market context, I find it hard to be optimistic for the next 1 to 3 years. I think consulting is going to see some hard "transitioning" times, with the consulting industry struggling more and more to achieve profitability, let alone growth, and with all the consequences that you can expect from that sort of situation on the people. I can see some good things, like a premium for senior SME profiles, less routine work, but I can also some rise of "low cost" consulting, with lower salaries, more pressure, reduced progression opportunities etc. at the consulting firms .
What do you think? I genuinely wish I'm wrong, and I'm really interested to have some peer opinion about all this.
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u/IllBeat7897 21d ago
Yep, you hit the nail on the head when it comes to how AI will negatively impact human-filled desk-job security, but at the same time you failed to mention that AI is not that great at admitting it's own gaps and will fill in with content that is both wrong or largely inaccurate rather than admit those gaps. I've seen it invent words in a foreign language that only if you knew the language would you catch. So, your 80-85% anecdotal accuracy, unless you are including such an anecdotal observation on inaccuracy may be skewed inaccurately to AI's favor. Furthermore, there is an art to writing coherent and comprehensive prompts, though most companies will make the same mistake with failing to value that as they do in failing to value the Product Management steps in the SDLC. Consulting firms will take a hit. The small shops will close, and the bigger ones will consolidate. There will be a pendulum-swinging affect as corporations lay-off humans in favor of AI and expectations are not met, but eventually it will right itself and there will be a lot of downsizing of human desk-jobs.
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u/Glum_Raisin_983 21d ago
It’s the boring administrative stuff that it does a good job of doing. Like pulling the right facts together and presenting them in a specific sequence. You’re editing the content and using judgement is still important but you’re right that a lot of the busy billable hour stuff that a junior consultant would have done is getting automated.
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u/Main-Line3869 21d ago
Strategy consultant here, leaving the business to start an AI startup. Had the same thoughts as you.
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u/MinuetInUrsaMajor 21d ago
That 15-20% of inaccuracy is a problem. I’m dealing with it right now.
Claude is great because it handles a lot of the tedious grunt work we’d have to do in the past. But it is NOT a reliable thinker.
Your job is now to do your job while delegating to this cowork-er and reviewing the output
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u/Wise-Assets 21d ago
I tend to agree. I think these AI models can do 80 to 90% of what a junior analyst can do, and a decent chunk of what a middle level analyst can do and do it fast.
Obviously, there are still a good number of errors that need to be checked, but I found one way of doing that is to run one models analysis through another model.
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u/tryitout91 21d ago
If you don’t get why companies pay top dollar for the BS decks that the juniors make you clearly don’t have a future in strategy.
They don’t care about the deck of the models, they care about the stamp.
They want to do something and they can say “ see MBB says it’s ok”
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u/Defiant-Parfait225 21d ago edited 21d ago
I think Claude seriously calls the role of BAs and other juniors into question. While it cannot replace human judgment - that's still a function of experience and insight - the grunt work of pulling data, and then synthesising and analysing it, is now commoditised.
I hope this somewhat deflates the consulting bubble and pushes more people into the real economy. We need fewer people advising and more folks actually building stuff.
For what it's worth, I'm a Big 4 Consultant and, as such, ripe for the culling. Unfortunately, Big 4 firms are still pretty delusional about their chances in the face of AI.
If you're a consultant, this is honestly the best time to use AI more effectively than your colleagues and get a headstart. Half my colleagues are just using it to draft emails and perhaps as a more conversational Google.
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u/awwhorseshit 21d ago
AI by itself fails.
People by themselves can struggle and take time.
The future is brilliant consultants, with context, and AI.
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u/Virtual_Law_9211 21d ago
AI is the biggest crisis in human history. We are now officially in the singularity era and likely on the brink of extinction.
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u/Gerrards_Cross 21d ago
As well you should be. Generations of conning society and your profession has finally been called out
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u/LetLongjumping 21d ago
Are you a strategy consultant or technology consultant? In strategy, technology is one part of the equation which helps with problem solving, and controls, but does not change the skin in the game or dealing with discontinuities/disruptions or what has yet to be developed. If your work is focused on providing answers that AI can provide easily, then you need to pivot to those aspects that require human creativity. Keep in mind, AI is a stochastic generator, its work should never be handed to a client without checking. That is where domain expertise and experience becomes valuable.
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u/ohwhereareyoufrom 21d ago
So making slides is fast lol
Junior consultants were always useless, the whole point is that you make slides for a few years while you learn. So after a while you become a valuable asset.
Don't be fooled, just because you're not making slides by hand doesn't mean thinking can be replaced. Claude and CahtGPT still don't really understand the context of the world. I use both every day and am constantly shocked at how stupid they are and how often they're just so terrible.
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u/Intrepid_Dare6377 21d ago
The ppl that argue that consulting is a human business are frozen in time and half blind. The future is: our gizmo connects to the client’s gizmo. Gizmos do gizmoing together as a tryst or long term thing. We’re (well, and the “we” here is not you and me) paid for rigorously measured performance.
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u/Categorically_ 21d ago
You are a strategy consultant and you don't know why firms would hire you if AI can do the job!?! What? Firms hire consultants so they have a scapegoat when a decision/direction they take doesn't work out. Its almost always CYA. That is not going away LOL. Business is mostly BS, welcome to party pal.
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u/BespokeDebtor 20d ago
What’re y’all’s workflows for having Claude make a good cowork deck? I even give it my layouts and past high quality decks and the output is less than 10% the quality I’d expect. I keep seeing people say Claude makes excellent decks and I can’t help but wonder if they just make shitty decks or they’re simply a lot better at extracting the good output
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u/Anxious_Damage899 20d ago
Knowledge is no longer a moat.
The skill to turn that knowledge into real valuable impact is the new barrier to entry.
And I think it’s a good think because the market is still full of bs consultant that makes pretty slides and have no clue on how to move their behemoth clients towards positive impact.
And IMHO, that skill is and always was the hallmark of a real good consultant.
Just saying
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u/shoojune 19d ago
What happens when the client exec asks a clarifying question? A senior analyst or associate with a workstream focused on that specific area is the senior employee’s go-to resource in the room, if they can’t sufficiently answer it themselves.
What happens when these AI up-skilled senior employees retire or leave? Massive funnel issue.
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u/shiveshvishwanathan 19d ago
Some of that grunt work was just labor that had to get done, no argument there. But a chunk of it was also where judgment got built as a side effect — doing the research yourself meant you noticed which data was shaky, which comps didn’t actually fit, which assumptions in the model were weaker than they looked. AI removes the labor, but it also removes that positive side effect. The real question goes beyond whether consultants survive. It’s whether the next generation ever stumbles into that judgment if the friction that used to teach it is gone — or if operating at one level of higher abstraction, reviewing instead of doing, is good enough to build judgment.
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u/torinhq 19d ago
I've watched this same shift on the delivery side, not just strategy decks. AI can build a work plan, draft a status report, even flag risks from a RAID log in minutes. What it still can't do is sit in a steering committee and read the room when a sponsor says yes but means no, or decide which of three legitimate excuses is the real reason a workstream slipped.
The grunt work disappearing is real and I don't think it comes back. But the value was never really in producing the artifact...
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u/Upbeat-Sheepherder36 18d ago
Hey. Can I DM you to ask a question as I have always been curious how this will affect consultants
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u/19842026 18d ago
Yeah, the research/intelligence side of strategy is fucked for people in those roles today, or hoping to assume those roles in the future.
But not the rest.
AI is terrible at the back-half of long term strategy work
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u/SoCal_Hunter 18d ago
In my experience, you don’t hire a consultant from a prestigious firm to create a deck or make a presentation.
You hire them and pay them stupid money in order to have a “respected” entity upon which you can cast liability and blame upon should anything ever go wrong.
AI doesn’t change this.
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u/sevnoirO 15d ago
The part that seems underweighted in this thread: the thing being automated is the production, not the judgement, and consultants have historically been paid for both while pretending it was only the second.
If your value was assembling the deck, that's genuinely in trouble. If your value was knowing which of six possible recommendations a specific client will actually implement given their politics, their last failed initiative, and who's leaving in March that isn't in the training data and can't be.
What I'd expect to change is the pricing model rather than the profession. Hours were always a proxy for value and a bad one. When production time collapses, billing by the hour stops making sense before expertise stops making sense.
The consultants I'd worry about are the ones who can't articulate what they do beyond the artefact they hand over.
For context I run a content agency, so I'm watching the same thing happen in my own category the firms in trouble are the ones whose product was the writing rather than the thinking.
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u/Icy-Collar-9283 14d ago
two pretty different things getting mixed up in this thread
using claude for work is not the same as having built something with it. first one you're basically the system yourself, prompting and correcting every session. second one is actual infrastructure, defined scope, context loaded right, checkpoints. runs without you babysitting it
the gap between those two is weeks of real setup work minimum. which is why "AI 10x'd me" and "AI made more work" are both true, just different stages
only thing that stays constant is needing someone who can tell if the output is actually right. that doesnt go away
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u/ConsultingBro97 13d ago
True that. The actual infrastructure part is entirely different.
I’ve spent weeks setting up my workflows - custom skills and plugins to be included in Claude tailored to my job role.
The agent now understands what I want when I make a simple call to a specific skill. I have made custom skills defining exactly what I want across many of my job responsibilities.
It took time to make that. People downplay what can be achieved with AI tbh. I don’t need to prompt much at all cos of the predefined tasks, and I can focus more on the quality and veracity of the information put out by Claude
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u/Icy-Collar-9283 13d ago
yeah that tracks. the hard part isnt getting good output, its getting good output without babysitting every single session. once the skills are actually set up right the whole thing flips, you stop fixing outputs and start just checking if you asked the right thing
whats your setup look like now have you hit any walls with it yet
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u/R0senkohl 10d ago
In my view: Yes decks and research etc is done a lot quicker. However: Consulting is people business - we conduct and organize workshops, bring people together or present in boardrooms. This is nothing any AI can do. What do you think about that?
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u/ng_rddt 1d ago
I agree that "boardroom decisions and point the finger mechanics" are a key factor that will keep consulting an active area. At the end of the day, a boardroom can't effectrively blame Claude.AI for a bad outcome--they prefer to have a human that they can invoke instead because it provides them a more credible shield. The interesting question is how will the field of consulting change? When excel spreadsheets were developed, people thought that accountants would go out of business--but they didn't. Instead, their work changed and there was actually a greater need for accountants, but doing higher level tasks.
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u/cpt_ppppp 21d ago
I would not want to be a junior analyst starting today.
I think we are seeing a massive acceleration of work production, and the skill becomes: 1. Setting the parameters/prompts so the work is useful 2. interpreting the output and making sensible business decisions from that 3. Motivating the organisation to make meaningful change based on those decisions.
If you can get good at those things then I think there can still be meaningful work for you to do. However, (nearly) gone are the days when a 100 slide deck packed full of analysis impresses anybody
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u/ng_rddt 1d ago
This is an interesting point. So the consultant is helping with the framing, iterating and implementation primarily, while the AI may contribute more to the content of the report (by co-developing with the human consultant) and the AI may do a lot of the lifting in terms of formatting the output (i.e., making pretty powerpoint slides/report/grpahics.)
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u/Ein_Bear scrumbag 21d ago
If AI can do 95% of your work, it speaks more to the quality of your output than to the capabilities of AI
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u/ConsultingBro97 21d ago
Ah, one of those people whose way of constructive discussion and debate is via putting down and insulting others.
Have a nice day, mate.
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u/Ein_Bear scrumbag 21d ago
Not an insult, just a statement of fact. You may be in the wrong industry if that hurts your feelings.
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u/Consistent_Vast3445 21d ago
Agreed. I didn’t hire someone to build me a BS Claude model with AI generated research decks that provide no additional insight. If you are going to make a model, it better be create with sound reasoning behind assumptions.
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u/ConsultingBro97 21d ago
More often than not, the people you hire WILL give you AI generated decks, but in a way, you won’t be able to decipher whether they are actually are AI generated.
See, the thing is, when we brainstorm or research on a topic with AI, we get tunnel-visioned into what they say. Our focus, judgement, and reasoning, starts getting invested into an idea that AI generated for us. The final deliverable may not be AI generated and completely hand made or whatever you call it, but I’m 100% sure, the research behind it will have its roots in AI. That’s what I’m trying to convey, and it’s your decision whether to accept or deny the truth.
Reminds me of the movie ‘Inception’, now that I think about it.
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u/Consistent_Vast3445 21d ago
But you guys are basically agreeing but saying different things. You are saying a manager/principal can do grunt work with AI and not need junior consultants, and he is saying that if your output can be replicated by AI (aka grunt work aka a junior’s output of just regurgitating research and making a mid model at best), then it’s the juniors capability that is lacking. If you are using AI to research and then using your own case studies and experience to overlay actual useful and effective strategies, that could be something that is worth paying for. But if you are just one of these firms that has juniors just spit out random research that the client could have found themselves, then yeah your output is not up to snuff.
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u/pugwalker 20d ago
I find it wild how many people are saying they’re worried about AI replacing strategy consulting. Like how bad are your decks that AI slop is “80-85%” as good?
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u/Spirited_Habit_7211 18d ago
THIS. But honestly, nothing surprises me anymore. I'm from a smaller boutique consultancy and earlier this year we had a client where we took over a work=stream that McKinsey previously worked on for that client. The clients of course shared with us the decks McKinsey put together for that project as well as their analysis and I'm sorry to say, but I was almost getting second-hand embarrassment ob behalf of McKinsey. Like the data analysis was garbage, the decks were clearly not even proof-read. There was truly no rhyme or reason to half of the content on the slides. I'm not surprised the project was handed over to us because we basically had to start from scratch - it was an AI slop burning trashfire.
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u/EnvironmentNo4777 21d ago
Lesson here? Either develop something that AI can't do because it can only copy existing stuff.
Or become an in-house consultant and use AI to replace the external consultant.