Practical Guide to Leveraging AI in Strategy Consulting

Is AI a threat to strategy consultants? Will companies turn to AI bots for strategic transformation? Will AI take my clients?
No.

Will an AI-skilled strategy consultant take my clients or my job?
Very likely, if you don’t level the playing field.

As we’ve now got past the hype and the period of uncertainty and fear, these questions about AI replacing consultants are no longer a topic. There is now broad acknowledgment that the success of consulting firms will hinge on finding a balance between leveraging AI technologies and preserving the human touch in their services.

Even if the script hasn’t been well and truly flipped, there is concrete evidence that, in strategy consulting, AI is an augmentative tool rather than a threat to jobs. It can help enhance the quality and speed of the services delivered to clients by the client-involved, personalized approach that defines the role of a consultant.

The remaining questions concern use cases, benefits, limitations, and risks. Where and how can AI provide value to strategy consultants?

An ally, not a replacement

Business leaders who think AI could replace strategic consultants may not really understand what these consultants do.

They probably think that strategy consultants simply collect information, spend hours deciphering it, and eventually insert a lump of information into a strategic framework to get the most logical recommendation out.

Not really. That’s what data analysts do. That’s not what strategy consultants do. Or at least, that’s far from representing everything that they do.

Strategy consultants understand leadership dynamics. They innovate. They coach executives. They manage conflicts. They come with experience. They understand the nuanced needs and aspirations of customer demographics… AI technology is a long way away from being able to replace human consultants.

But it’s true that AI’s capability to analyze vast amounts of information, provide on-the-spot insights to support decision-making and automate tasks make it a natural ally to strategy consultants.

A sidekick, not just a tool

To make the most of AI in strategy consulting, you first need to look at it differently. Think of AI not just as a tool but as a super-powered sidekick. It is more akin to a tireless 24x7 associate but not quite as emotionally innovative nor nimble in the way it "thinks," but with incredible computational capacity and instant access to vast amounts of knowledge.

When used effectively, AI technology can empower strategy consultants to increase the quality of the work produced for clients and boost productivity. To help you get started, we listed a few concrete uses of AI in strategy consulting below.

Conduct client and industry research

As a strategy consultant, you are expected to become experts in your clients' business and industry in the blink of an eye. You’re hired to provide recommendations that will guide seasoned executives. While you would typically specialize in a handful or fewer industries and only a specific type of client, it is not uncommon that you need to learn a new sector to advise a new client. This means hours and hours of searching, reading, cross-referencing, and understanding to gain the domain expertise needed.

AI solutions can help you improve the quality of your research while fast-tracking it. Even generic genAI apps like Claude or ChatGPT have a depth of knowledge and a conversational mode of interaction that makes them helpful, tireless, and knowledgeable research assistants. Strategy consultants can use their output to get instant education about almost any topic of interest and start forming opinions.

Now, one needs to be cautious with generic genAI applications as they can be prone to hallucinations and make things up. So, you always need to check the validity of the information provided. Even if you use professional solutions, it's still good practice to read the references provided alongside the answers to build deeper knowledge.

Analyze information

When it comes to data analysis and insights generation, AI really shines. It can process and analyze vast amounts of data in a way no human can. To strategy consultants, this means being able to glean strategic insights faster and more accurately than ever before.

Even better, the benefits go beyond speed. AI is able to identify trends and correlations in information that humans would struggle to. This supplements the findings with insights that can inform more robust strategic decisions.

The depth and speed of an AI-backed analysis increase productivity and efficiency, as well as the quality of deliverables. Nonetheless, we recommend coming back to the principle of considering AI as a sidekick. It shouldn't be used to replace human analysis, only to complement it. AI doesn't "understand" the information provided per se—it mimics understanding through algorithms. Filtering the output using your human experience and critical thinking skills is a must.

Structure decisions

Everyone understands that AI can provide fantastic insights to support decision-making. These insights are fast, deep, nuanced, grounded, and unbiased (or as unbiased as the model's training set). 

AI has some other exciting benefits when it comes to supporting decision-making. For starters, it can contextualize insights, empowering you to research deeper and challenge your preconceived ideas. An example of this could be recommendations to look at the efficiencies that certain companies in a completely different industry are driving across their manufacturing chains. 

AI can also help you frame how you make a decision by providing an appropriate decision map adapted to the data and the problem at hand. For instance, given a specific set of information and a business question, Quantive StrategyAI will create a dynamic decision map to navigate your business question. Depending on the strategic issue, this decision map includes relevant areas to consider, such as product development capabilities, marketing imperatives, or financial risks.

For those who are adepts of frameworks, AI excels at frameworks. It can not only proactively suggest strategic frameworks based on the decision to make but also pre-populate these frameworks with relevant insights and recommendations based on the data provided.

Finally, AI can substantially help mitigate bias in decision-making. AI doesn't have an agenda. It is there to help and provide the best possible answer given certain information and parameters. This is great for challenging mental shortcuts.

Collaborate better

AI, combined with digital collaboration and data, can do wonders for stakeholder management, collaborative brainstorming, and alignment.

Innovative digital collaboration tools such as smart digital whiteboards and virtual working spaces help you move from "let's find time to get in a room and discuss this" to a more dynamic, more effective form of collaboration. There, AI can help act as a moderator, an advisor to each stakeholder, and a virtual coordinator to align faster. 

For example, tools like Miro or Quantive StartegyAI's whiteboards can help you collaborate faster and more effectively with your clients while integrating powerful AI assistants to create alignment, generate ideas, and refine strategic plans.

Simulate scenarios

Not sure which path would be best? Which is the most likely to succeed? The answer is often more hours of research and analysis. But there, too, AI can help. AI can simulate future business scenarios, integrate trends, or evaluate the likelihood of change happening.

For each requested scenario, AI can rapidly identify and assess risks by analyzing current market or company information and comparing it with the vast universe of previous scenarios that have played out in the past.

In minutes rather than hours, various global political, social, or climatic scenarios can be played out so that you can see what the likely outcomes are to support and change decisions.

The speed and quality of the output, combined with human experience, can then be used to develop risk mitigation strategies, set accurate forecasts, and make every strategic recommendation much more robust. 

Pressure-test strategies

AI can be of fantastic help to check your strategic recommendations. 

Will these recommendations create an element of differentiation for the client? Are they transformative? Too transformative? Who failed to do this in the past? These are great questions you can brainstorm with AI once your strategic recommendations are ready. 

AI can equip you with feedback, including challenges, reminding you of the outcome of previous instances of strategies that you're about to recommend. It can respectfully challenge your intuition and experience against extensive real-world knowledge. In that regard, AI can push you to be better for every client engagement.

Generate strategic and execution plans

The insightful strategy that lives in a PowerPoint and never gets implemented because few understand it, and fewer even know how to concretely implement it. Sound familiar?

The key for strategic recommendations to be successful is that they have to be implemented quickly. Otherwise, the business and the market move on, and they become obsolete. Plugging the strategy execution gap is often a huge challenge for strategy consultants and the executives they guide.

How do we turn this into a plan of action?

There, AI can help you turn your strategic decisions into a top-level action plan with all the contextual information required for execution stakeholders. To go one step further, the same AI can be used to help the execution stakeholders go from a top-level plan to a detailed plan that can be kicked into gear rapidly. Take your research, strategic recommendations, contextual knowledge about the organization, and desired KPIs, and let AI help you iterate collaboratively on an execution plan in hours rather than weeks and months. In doing so, you help your clients get faster time to value. You also increase their buy-in and their likelihood of success.

Automate admin tasks

Strategy consultants are recognized for their critical thinking, transformative recommendations, and unparalleled management skills. But just like everyone else, they also need to do a fair amount of admin. Think data entry, report generation, expenses, administrative letters… All repetitive and time-consuming tasks that do not require you to be a strategist in any way. 

AI isn't magic. It won't make the admin go away. But it can automate a fair number of these tasks. A large number of AI assistants or copilots are popping up in popular productivity tools with a welcome effect. They help free up time from these routine tasks so that you can focus on more high-value activities, such as strategy development, client communications, and stakeholder management. By increasing productivity and freeing up time for higher value tasks, it improves profitability, but also the quality of the client work, leading to increased client wins and retention.

AI is only as smart as the information it has access to.

Everyone talks about the wonders of prompt engineering for getting what you want out of AI. However, an equally important piece is to provide it with the right information to support your usage.

For instance, to get an insightful analysis of your client's market potential, your AI-sidekick will need the following documents, at the very least: market research reports, industry forecasts, market size and growth data, consumer trend analysis, market segmentation reports, and competitor market share data.

But suppose you need to help your client reset their sustainability strategy. In that case, you will need the following documents: Sustainability reports, environmental impact assessments, CSR reports, regulatory compliance documents, sustainability strategy documents, and industry sustainability benchmarks.

While AI offers numerous benefits to consultants, the crucial task of navigating the ethical and privacy concerns surrounding its use remains. Ensuring that sensitive client data stays confidential and protected cannot be overlooked.

Several governments have started underlining regulations to protect against breaches, biases, and misuse stemming from AI. As challenging as it might be, you must be proactive in implementing measures that comply with emerging regulations. You must also proactively address the topic head-on with clients and ensure that their data will be safe and used responsibly.

As strategy consultants keep experimenting with AI, success will lie in finding the right balance between using the technology and preserving the human touch in the services delivered.

We recommend viewing AI as an augmentative copilot rather than a tool to replace human work—something that enhances consulting capabilities and enables you to deliver services more effectively without sacrificing the client-involved, personalized approach that defines your profession.

Looking at AI through this lens also alleviates the fear of job displacement, especially among junior associates who often get delegated tedious, information-crunching work. Yes, AI will make this work easier, but it won't eliminate the need to have junior associates on your side for important projects. Similarly, AI isn't capable of replacing senior consultants either.

While AI shows huge promise, it does have its limitations, in particular when it comes to complex and nuanced strategic decision-making. It also lacks the human expertise, creativity, and critical thinking required to handle certain aspects of the consulting process—brainstorming, preparing client briefs, getting different perspectives, communication, stakeholder management... With AI at your side, you can free up time to focus on tasks that require creativity, intuition, and/or experience that only human consultants can provide. It will also help your junior associates, if you have any, have a much more fulfilling experience and grow their core skills faster.

But even if you manage to find that perfect balance, we recommend that, every now and then, you continue to apply your human skills where you would normally apply AI. Just to keep them sharp. Similarly, junior associates should not be reduced to interfaces to make AI work for you; otherwise, they will not be able to develop these critical-thinking skills that will make them great associates or partners later. Indeed, there's a tipping point.

Let's use an analogy: if you've grown accustomed to using a calculator for every single addition or multiplication you have to do, after a while, you might struggle to multiply in your head.

With the progressive changes that AI brings, consultants also need to:

1. Develop a new set of skills
2. Remain proactive.

Embracing AI technologies and equipping yourself with the necessary skills and knowledge to navigate the digital terrain is essential. Especially as the field is evolving quickly. Many opportunities to improve abound every month, and pitfalls, too. Yesterday: text, then images, then videos, then automatically generated presentations

Understanding the latest AI trends, coupled with insight into how you and your clients can leverage these developments, will help you differentiate in the consulting field.

Will AI replace me as a strategy constant? No.

Can AI help me deliver even more value to my clients? Yes, most certainly.

The speed and efficiency of AI information processing can help strategy consultants improve productivity, efficacy, and the quality of the client work.

Amongst other things, AI can be used as a digital sidekick to perform research, provide insights, frame strategic decisions, improve stakeholder collaboration, and automate admin tasks. But AI isn't the number one differentiator. Combining AI with human experience, intuition, and critical thinking is the key to success. As the field of AI continues to grow, strategy consultants will need to grow with it and find new, powerful uses for AI in the process.

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