How much has your firm and your role changed due to AI? My firm has not kept up. I envision everyone else using Claude to do everything and no longer needing an assistant or most of their team.

2023-2024 every consulting firm was trying to build their own internal ChatGPT for use by delivery teams. Mostly just wrappers over the OpenAI/Anthropic public APIs or over open source models like Llama/Mistral/Gemma. Starting with prompt libraries and then evolving towards RAG on top of a knowledgebase of prior deliverables. Over the last year most seem to be abandoning that approach. Mainly because the off the shelf ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini is so good there's no point. Now the focus is shifting towards building assets/platforms that get sold as a solution, as part of the client deliverable. This is a better approach but consulting firms are not SW companies and over time you're still competing with OpenAI/Anthropic/Google which is a losing proposition. Meanwhile, clients expect all productivity gains to be passed on to them as lower costs. Personally I think the entire professional services industry is cooked over the next 2-3 years. Not just consulting, but accounting, law, etc. The pyramid model and the billable hour are dead.

My firm is different, we embrace RI.

My firm is working through it aggressively with multiple models, and hiring on the technology side with the assumption that both internal and external deployments will start happening immediately and accelerate over the next 6-12 months.

We’re also planning strategically to capture arbitrage between our current rates / pricing and actual delivery hours as certain delivery components get more efficient / automated.

All of that said, it’s still early days - but I’m excited by how we’re approaching it though and the collaboration happening across the firm.

I don’t expect it to last for long - maybe 6-12 months while pricing adjusts to the new reality of AI. Though my experience is most firms aren’t truly embedding AI in their delivery models yet - so that will create some pushback on downward pricing pressure.

I’m assuming pricing compresses quickly - but in the meantime I’m planning to capture as much additional margin as possible.

End of the world is coming

OP as I continue looking for my next role, i'm wondering if AI has taken over assessments. For example, how is AI cutting down the effort to plan, asses, report, and present? Is the output quality from the entire assessment on par with the purely manual way? Is the effort delta quantifiable to an extent that establishes a baseline for the leadership? Can leadership rely on the baseline to experiment further (i.e where else can I bring AI to save X dollars)

Curious to hear thoughts

We are on our way

We’re so and so, albeit a lot of initiatives are being done and things are shifting, including embedding AI in proposal delivery, automating some repetitive projects aspects.

Still nothing beats my side by side Claude support from a personal subscription

Counterpoint - LLM models can only use the data available to them, correct? Most consulting expertise is contained in documents that are proprietary to the client and not available in the public domain. So, while AI can accelerate analysis and more quickly integrate public (or internal) information it does not immediately provide access to the experience and expertise delivered in the last X years by the industry. IMO, this all the more reason to not load prior work into AI for review. Experience-based consulting should have some time left on the clock. Thoughts?