Consulting is dead. Long live Consulting.

After 12 years as a consultant, I’ve quit consulting to be a consultant. This is my third attempt at escaping consulting, but instead of moving to a client role, I’ve joined forces with a couple of others to start Corci, riding this AI wave to redefine what consulting should be. It feels like my consulting career is just beginning.

It’s no secret all the large consulting houses are struggling. The Big 4 have or are restructuring, and while the MBB use more euphemistic terms, the results are the same. They sell their consultant’s time, but clients aren’t buying hours. It’s not because the market is less competitive or technology less disruptive; it’s purely because costs have increased and money is prioritized elsewhere. The backlog of projects continues to queue up for when the money returns. But if a consulting house is bunkering down to simply wait for normalcy, a rude awakening awaits them.

Consulting made large margins because they have been self-important gatekeepers of knowledge. Companies hired me because I knew how to change their operating model to be more agile and product-centric. The fact of the matter is that I have just done it a few more times, failed a few more times, and can articulate and guide them past likely obstacles. This isn’t knowledge they could easily access… until now.

GenAI chatbots (like ChatGPT) are tearing down information gatekeeping and making highly contextual information widely available. Want to know how to shift from being a legacy life-insurance provider to a digital product-led company? Ask ChatGPT. Want to simulate different scenarios on how competitors will respond? ChatGPT can model it. What is the size of the market for edible rocks? Gemini will be able to research it for you. You’ll be surprised at the results and how little most consultants can add.?

I’d be silly to think a client will make critical business decisions based solely on chatbots, but I’d also be silly to think clients won’t be significantly more selective about what constitutes value from consultancies given what they can now get from ChatGPT.

Here are three areas that I think will be impacted:

1. Clients will only want to pay for expert knowledge, and consulting graduates might even disappear.

ChatGPT has made knowledge free and Co-Pilot is automating significant amounts of admin, so clients will only pay for expert judgment and rightly demand the consultancies offer their people these tools to work more efficiently and reduce their onboarding time. Where does that leave the consulting graduates who took notes in meetings, did basic research, and collated information for the slides? They likely won’t have the luxury of a 2-year graduate program that I was afforded. Clients can rightly ask those activities to be done by the (already maxed out) senior consultant using ChatGPT/Co-pilot rather than subsidize the consulting firm for training their graduate. What was already a steep learning curve is becoming steeper. Competition between graduates has now become competition against an all-knowing machine that can work 24/7 and is improving rapidly. There will be a point where the salary of a graduate will exceed what consultancies can justify charging clients.

If you are paying for a consultancy: Ask them, how are you leveraging AI to optimise your work and advice? What value is each of your consultants bringing to me?

If you are a consultant: How do I incorporate GenAI as my personal sounding board to test my advice before I provide it? How can I use AI to accelerate my hard skills and where I can quickly develop my soft skills?

2. Delivering more than just PowerPoints and hypotheticals.

Consultancies currently run a leveraged model where projects are staffed by several junior staff and led by an experienced consultant spread across multiple projects. This balances expertise with cost, especially where the margins tend to be higher with the juniors. But as per the point above, clients are only willing to pay for experienced consultants who deliver change and not just powerpoints. This has the effect of shrinking the total fees (less people = less fees). Selling more experienced consultants is not an alternative because there simply aren’t that many of them. Some consultancies are trying to go down the premade solution route (essentially selling a jack-of-all-trades framework), but with ChatGPT, clients have access to that for free. Clients will want to tie fees to outcomes as simply knowing the journey has little value anymore. (Cue the memes about consultants and PowerPoints). This benefits the client but will strain consultancies with lofty revenue goals who aren’t doubling down on implementation/agency models.

If you are paying for a consultancy: Ask them, how are you turning your advice into actual change that enhances my brand and competitive advantage? Do you have the experience in doing this, and if so, how have you adapted it specific to my pain points and implemented the change that is tailored to my organisation? ?

If you are a consultant: What unique expertise am I providing? Do I know the divide between where my knowledge is based on theory / frameworks and where it is gained from actually implementing it and seeing it succeed? And if so, how do I do more of the latter?

3. Value moves from knowledge to capability.

Clients too are facing disruption and are forced to differentiate their value and demonstrate it early. With the value of knowledge diminishing and the market being more disruptive and fast-paced, businesses will want to grow and focus their capabilities where they differentiate. For everything else, they will find the cheapest way to ‘keep the lights on’ (consultancies that have large global delivery scale have already benefited from years of offshoring). Consultancies that not only advise but have the capability to build the client’s capability (either through training them or helping them find the right employees) will be far better equipped to help their clients face the unknown future.

If you are paying for a consultancy: Ask them, how are you making my people and organisation more future-ready and less reliant on you?

If you are a consultant: How do I move beyond simply a sage on the stage to a coach and mentor to my clients who can help them when the unexpected happens?

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At Corci, we see the vital shift in where consultancies are valuable to our clients, their people and their customers. We give our clients the capability to modernize their products, operations, and people. Our consultancy services are short-term and targeted, to match the market that is moving increasingly more rapidly. We also recognize our clients are the best at what they do, so to help them succeed into the future, whatever it might bring, we give them the skills to navigate it themselves. Corci provides professional development and coaching to accelerate the skills of our client’s people, and where there are major gaps, we search the market to find candidates to fill the skills they can’t train or develop internally.

If you are curious to bring us on to shake up and get more from your existing consultancies, let me know. If you are someone who wants to future-proof your consulting and management skills, I’m also here to help.

Follow me for more as we build Corci and rethink consulting.

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