Who needs consultants in the age of AI

[Perigee Lewis]

The Financial Times has a genuinely pointed piece asking whether traditional management consultants are actually facing a real existential threat from AI, and its a good read given how much of that industrys value proposition has always rested on information and analysis that AI tools can now increasingly replicate cheaply

The core of the argument is that a huge portion of what junior and mid-level consultants have traditionally been paid enormous day rates to do, gathering research, building slide decks, synthesizing industry data and drafting strategic frameworks, is exactly the kind of structured analytical work that current AI models are already quite good at handling in a fraction of the time

This creates a genuinely uncomfortable question for the big consulting firms, if a client can get an AI model to produce a competent first draft of a market analysis or strategy deck in minutes rather than paying a team of analysts to spend weeks on it, what exactly are clients paying the traditional consulting premium for anymore

The counterargument the piece explores is that the actual value of top tier consultants was arguably never really the research and slide production itself, it was always more about the credibility of an outside expert opinion, the political cover of being able to point to an external recommendation, and the judgment and relationship building that comes from years of pattern matching across many different client situations

Some firms are apparently already restructuring around this shift, leaning harder into the parts of the business that are genuinely hard to automate, deep client relationships, highly specialized regulatory or industry expertise, and actual hands on implementation work rather than just strategic recommendations that get handed off and often ignored anyway

The piece leaves the question open ended rather than declaring the industry dead, but the framing itself is telling, when a major business publication is seriously asking whether an entire prestigious white collar profession still justifies its fees in the AI era, that alone signals how much the ground is genuinely shifting under this industry

0D600619 6521 4De2 963E C6F44F6E5468www.ft.com

[CyberRider56]

The political cover argument is honestly the most durable part of the traditional consulting business model, executives paying for an external recommendation specifically so they can blame someone else if it goes wrong isnt something AI can replicate

[Evan0]

Junior consultant work being the most automatable part of the business is going to create a real talent pipeline problem eventually, those junior years were always how future partners learned the industry and built their networks

[NovaPrime68]

I think this genuinely undersells how much of consulting value was always about access and relationships rather than the actual analysis, a McKinsey partner getting a CEO on the phone is not something an AI subscription replaces

[Thanos71]

The AI can produce a competent first draft argument is doing a lot of work here, competent isnt the same as excellent, and for genuinely high stakes strategic decisions companies may still want the best human judgment layered on top regardless of cost

[Encrypted Daniel]

Would love to see actual client behavior data here rather than just industry speculation, are companies actually cutting consulting budgets because of AI tools or is this more of a theoretical threat that hasnt really hit revenue yet

[Caitlin_75]

If AI genuinely commoditizes the research and analysis layer of consulting that could actually be good for smaller companies who could never previously afford McKinsey level analysis, democratizing access to that kind of structured thinking has real upside beyond just threatening the incumbents