The Future of Strategy Consultants

The Moment Everything Changed For Me

It was December 2022 when I first opened ChatGPT. Within ten minutes, I knew I had seen something that would change consulting forever.

The tool was far from perfect. It hallucinated, struggled with accuracy, and often produced text that needed heavy rework. But what it represented was impossible to ignore. It could generate structured thinking at a speed and scale that no analyst could match. For the first time, I saw how knowledge work itself could be redefined.

In those early days, curiosity turned into experimentation. I started assigning small research and synthesis tasks to junior consultants. I asked them to use ChatGPT to read material, structure frameworks, or generate first drafts of client documents. They returned saying, “It is not ready. It hallucinates. It makes basic mistakes.”

When I tried the same tasks, my results were dramatically better. I could get sharper insights, better structure, and faster turnarounds. Not because I had better prompting skills, but because I had spent years sitting in boardrooms and knew how to provide context — the one thing machines cannot generate on their own.

That was the real lesson. The difference was not the tool. It was the judgment behind the tool.

The New Reality Inside Consulting Firms

Fast forward to 2025. A few weeks ago, I caught up with a former colleague who works at one of the top three consulting firms. I asked him casually what impact generative AI has had on productivity. His answer was telling.

“Productivity has accelerated massively,” he said, “but so has the amount of rework.”

He explained how junior consultants now use AI tools to generate entire slides, frameworks, and reports in hours rather than days. The drafts look polished and complete at first glance. But when senior consultants review them, they often find missing lenses of analysis, inconsistent logic, or insights that simply do not hold up under scrutiny.

Before AI, a manager might receive a half-baked slide deck with rough notes and comments. They could quickly spot gaps and guide the team. Now, they receive near-finished decks that appear client-ready but hide subtle flaws that take longer to detect and fix. The result is paradoxical. Consultants are producing more, faster, but also spending more time refining, rewriting, and validating.

In other words, productivity has improved, but precision has not.

This raises a fundamental question: What happens when efficiency no longer differentiates consultants, but judgment does?

A Profession at the Crossroads

Consulting has always been about structured problem-solving. Frameworks, analysis, synthesis, and storytelling are its craft. Generative AI is now beginning to automate much of that craft. It can write case summaries, generate hypotheses, and design slides in seconds. What it cannot do is prioritize, interpret, or sense the organizational dynamics that make a recommendation viable.

For junior consultants, this is both exciting and unsettling. The early years of consulting were once defined by long hours of analysis, synthesis, and iteration. It was in those moments that consultants built their intuition — learning to see patterns, make trade-offs, and anticipate objections.

If those experiences are now replaced by tools that instantly produce a “good enough” first draft, the next generation risks losing the muscle memory of judgment.

For managers, the challenge is different. Their job used to be reviewing and coaching. Now, they must learn to become curators of machine-assisted output — verifying logic, improving storytelling, and balancing speed with quality. Many are discovering that their value lies less in producing and more in orchestrating, contextualizing, and refining.

For partners, the implications are even deeper. AI does not threaten their role, but it changes how they earn trust. Clients no longer need firms for information or data. They need advisors who can interpret, challenge, and guide amidst overwhelming abundance. Partners who rely solely on experience will be outpaced by those who learn to use technology as leverage for sharper judgment and faster insight.

And for those aspiring to enter consulting, the entry barriers are shifting. The craft will remain demanding, but the skills required will change. Knowing how to ask the right questions, design structured prompts, and translate messy client context into machine-readable logic will become as important as Excel modeling once was.

What Will Change for Consultants

The coming years will redefine the rhythm of consulting work in three distinct ways.

1. The Analyst’s Journey Will Be Compressed

   AI will take over much of the repetitive groundwork — research, data cleaning, and synthesis. Junior consultants will be able to deliver outputs that used to take weeks in just a few hours. This acceleration, however, will reduce the natural learning curve that built judgment through experience. The new generation will need deliberate coaching to rebuild that intuition through simulation, discussion, and contextual learning.

   
   

2. The Manager’s Role Will Shift from Review to Sensemaking

   Middle layers in consulting will evolve fastest. Managers will spend less time checking for typos and formatting errors and more time testing logic, challenging assumptions, and validating insights. They will become translators between what the machine produces and what the client needs to hear. Their success will depend on how quickly they can identify false confidence in AI-generated outputs and turn raw material into meaning.

   
   

3. The Partner’s Advantage Will Rest on Judgment and Authenticity

   Partners will continue to be valued for trust and perspective, but the expectations will rise. Clients will not pay for polished slides or generic frameworks. They will pay for clarity of thinking and the courage to simplify complexity. The partners who thrive will be those who bring human judgment enhanced, not replaced, by technology.

The Bigger Question: What Will Consulting Become

These shifts are not small. They go to the heart of consulting’s identity.

For decades, consulting has operated on a pyramid structure. Leverage came from scale — more people meant more hours, which meant more revenue. That equation no longer holds. AI now acts as the ultimate leverage. The traditional pyramid is flattening, and firms are being forced to ask a difficult question: What is the value of human time when machines can do so much, so fast?

The answer will vary. Some firms will double down on high-touch advisory and relationship-based work. Others will build leaner, tech-enabled delivery models that combine small senior teams with intelligent systems. A few will try to blend both, creating hybrid models where consultants work alongside AI as co-pilots rather than competitors.

But regardless of structure, one truth will hold: consulting will remain human at its core. Because no matter how advanced AI becomes, it cannot yet replicate empathy, intuition, and the ability to sense unspoken tensions in a boardroom. Those qualities are what turn analysis into advice and data into direction.

The New Craft of Consulting

In the book Alt-Consulting, I describe this shift as a movement from “efficiency-led consulting” to “judgment-led consulting.” The future consultant will not be defined by how fast they work, but by how clearly they think.

Tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude will become part of every consultant’s daily workflow, but they will not make consultants obsolete. They will force consultants to rediscover what makes them indispensable.

The consultant of the future will:

• Think like a strategist, but operate like a designer.

• Use AI to test hypotheses, not to generate them blindly.

• Build insight loops with clients, not just deliver recommendations.

• Spend less time polishing decks and more time sharpening arguments.

  
  

If the last century of consulting was about building firms, the next will be about building wisdom.

A Closing Reflection on The Future of Strategy Consultants

The first time I saw ChatGPT, I could not unsee what it meant for consulting. It was not just a new tool. It was a mirror held up to the profession, forcing it to ask what it truly stands for.

The shock that consultants feel today is the same one clients felt years ago — a realization that the model that once created advantage is now being disrupted by its own logic.

Yet in that disruption lies opportunity. Consulting will not disappear. It will evolve. The consultants who will thrive are those who learn to combine the precision of technology with the empathy of human understanding.

The book Alt-Consulting explores these shifts in detail — how partners, managers, and analysts will each face a different future, and how firms can rebuild themselves around this new reality.

The future of strategy consultants will not be written by technology alone. It will be written by the consultants who learn to work with it, not against it.