Welcome to This Week’s Edition of the Lo Down!

This week, I sat back and evaluated an industry with an AI lens (this might be something I do going forward!) and reflected upon building up Automated.

Let’s dive in. 🚀

𝌡 AI and its impact to management consulting

Today I’m going to explore AI and its changes to the consulting industry.

My friend the Management Consultant, a semi-anonymous identity for a real life management of a big four firm, writes a management consultant (I’ll call it MC now) specific newsletter called newsletter.consultingintel.com, with over 3000 subscribers.

I was reading the draft of his book on the industry, and it got me thinking back to my previous life as a consultant at BearingPoint and Booz Allen Hamilton, where I consulted for the defence industries.

I was a pretty decent consultant, actually. Actually more than decent - I was very good.

I was one of the fastest promoted Senior Consultants, and had both completed and won big proposals at an early age. And I was very good at developing frameworks and methodologies, effectively proposing and presenting my ideas with 2x2 matrices and the like.

But consulting didn’t hold the same fascination after a while. Perhaps it was the lack of rotation into different projects. Maybe it was being stuck in the same industry (defence). Perhaps I felt the skillsets I had acquired I couldn’t quite see the trajectory.

Until the last couple of days.

Just recently, I was reminded that McKinsey had developed a GenAI named Lilli, leveraging over 40 carefully curated knowledge sources, with more than 100,000 documents and interview transcripts, both internal and third-party content, and a network of experts across 70 countries. 

Now this isn’t unusual; back in my time there were knowledge management tools to institute knowledge across the firm and promote sharing. So this playbook is tried and true.

And as I said before in a previous post, my friend was able to achieve the same results (or so he says) from an MC by querying OpenAI’s Deep Research his own company’s stock ticker symbol.

And so I thought, and reflecting on what the Management Consultant had written in the book, is the role of the MC in the age of AI?

As mentioned in the Management Consultant’s draft book, the traditional MA’s role isn’t analysis. It isn’t fancy frameworks and ideas and methodologies.

It is trust. It is the soft power, to persuade, and to sell an idea to the client.

And actually, the client already knows the answer 90% of the time. They know the answer and what to do.

They just want someone to affirm that idea and to build a case around that idea that they can take up the flagpole.

So if we were to extrapolate then what MC means in the age of AI, I think simply it would be more of the same - helping senior managers and leaders interpret AI initiatives. How to integrate AI into their practices. And ideas on AI they could bounce off of. So that they can firm up their thinking and establish AI initiatives within their organization.

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