Is AI going to be the death of consulting? Probably not, but it is highly likely to reshape the market. The firms that win will integrate the best of humans with the best of technology. Clients will want to move faster to react to a more agile market. That means consulting firms will need to move faster.
AI is impacting the entire transformation lifecycle - my Instagram feed is full of “Five prompts to replace McKinsey” clickbait. It talks less about the impact it’s having on the nuts and bolts of execution, but it already exists, it’s just not as much of a hot topic.
A typical transformation lifecycle runs through strategy, discovery, design, mobilisation, delivery, deployment, and embedding. AI has an impact at each stage. In strategy, it sharpens the vision, tests assumptions, and accelerates option development. In discovery, it synthesises evidence at a far greater scale and turns it into usable artefacts quickly. In design, it speeds the translation from insight into target processes, requirements, and prototypes. In mobilisation, it accelerates planning, governance, and prioritisation. In delivery, it compresses build, test, and feedback loops. In deployment, it improves readiness, training, and launch support. In embedding, it helps track adoption, benefits, and continuous improvement.
Right now, I don’t think AI removes these phases, but there is a question in my mind about the longer term. A lot of our delivery methods are about minimising risk of failure in build. Now that build is lower cost, do we change our risk tolerance? In any case, there’s no question that AI, used well, makes each phase faster, more connected, and more iterative. As that happens, the constraint shifts away from producing the work and towards agreeing the change and absorbing it. As the time-to-implementation shrinks, the constraint becomes our human ability to agree and absorb change. Implementing change in a large business is nothing like how B2C change happens - a new feature doesn’t just turn up and get adopted.
There is also some interesting economics here. Every project I have ever worked on has been constrained by ROI. As the cost of implementation sinks, the bells and whistles that really deliver value become possible, and projects that currently don’t pass the ROI gate become viable. Will accelerated delivery mean that more projects get done?
So what does that mean for the consulting market? The firms that win will connect strategy, delivery, and change. The speed of execution means that handoffs become a major friction point that won’t work in the future. Why hand off, when you can get one firm to do the lot?
Let’s start with the biggest impact: the system integrators. Frankly, I don’t see a future for 10,000-person firms doing system integration in the age of AI. We are already seeing the hyperscalers making statements like “90% of our code is written by AI”, and their code is significantly more complex than SAP or Salesforce configuration.
This impacts the Big 4, but in a different way: they may need to shrink their delivery arms, but they are well placed to succeed on the more human side.
The strategy firms are perhaps best placed to win, if they can adapt and build the execution muscle. Executing actual change, vs providing a deck, are two very different things, but they have the smarts and the network to achieve that
Big or small, all firms are going to need to adapt to the new world, but perhaps the advantage the boutiques have is our ability to move quickly.
Putting accelerated delivery into practice
CAMai, our AI-enabled transformation methodology connects strategy, design, and delivery, cutting out the friction of traditional handoffs. If you want to shift from months of planning to real progress in days, while keeping human expertise at the heart of it all, find out how CAMai can help.