AI for Consulting Firms

Industry Overview #

Consulting is a business built on expertise and leverage. Your clients pay for insights, analysis, and recommendations they can't produce themselves—and they expect exceptional quality delivered efficiently. But the economics of consulting are increasingly challenging. Clients push for more value. Competition compresses fees. And the research, analysis, and deliverable development that underpin great consulting work consume significant time and effort.

AI changes this equation. Not by replacing the expertise your consultants bring, but by amplifying it. Research that once took days can be synthesized in hours. Analysis that required teams of analysts can be produced by smaller groups working smarter. Deliverables can be more comprehensive and more polished, developed in less time. Proposals can be more precisely tailored to client needs without the manual effort that customization typically requires.

For consulting firms, these efficiency gains translate directly to improved margins—or to the ability to deliver more value to clients without increasing fees. A consulting team that can complete thorough competitive analysis in a morning instead of a week can either take on more engagements or go deeper on the ones they have. Either way, the firm wins.

But the opportunity extends beyond individual productivity. Consulting firms that build systematic AI capabilities across their teams can fundamentally improve how they operate. Consistent workflows that ensure quality. Knowledge capture that makes institutional expertise accessible. Research processes that surface insights competitors miss. These aren't marginal improvements—they're structural advantages that compound over time.

We work with consulting firms across practice areas—strategy, operations, technology, human capital, and more. Our focus isn't on helping you become an AI consultancy; it's on helping you use AI to be better at whatever kind of consulting you already do. Whether you're a boutique strategy firm or a mid-sized generalist, AI can help your people deliver more valuable work to clients while improving your economics.

AI Challenges & Opportunities for Consulting Firms #

Research and Analysis Acceleration. Great consulting starts with thorough research—market analysis, competitive intelligence, industry trends, client-specific context. This foundational work is essential but time-consuming. AI can dramatically accelerate it without sacrificing depth or quality.

We help consulting teams build research workflows that leverage AI effectively. This includes training consultants on advanced research techniques, establishing processes that combine AI-generated insights with human judgment, and creating templates and frameworks that ensure consistency across engagements. Teams we've worked with report 40-60% time savings on research-intensive phases of projects, freeing capacity for the higher-value analysis and synthesis that clients actually pay for.

Deliverable Quality and Efficiency. Consulting deliverables—presentations, reports, recommendations—are how your expertise becomes tangible for clients. They need to be polished, comprehensive, and persuasive. But creating them is often tedious and time-consuming, with significant effort going to formatting, consistency, and refinement rather than insight development.

AI can improve both the quality and efficiency of deliverable development. We help consulting firms implement AI-augmented workflows for creating presentations, structuring reports, and refining recommendations. This might include automated first-draft generation from research notes, consistency checking across large documents, or intelligent formatting that maintains brand standards. The result is deliverables that look better and take less time to produce.

Proposal Development. Winning new work requires proposals that are both compelling and customized to client needs. But proposal development is notoriously time-intensive—often pulling senior consultants away from billable work to craft responses that may or may not win.

AI can make proposal development significantly more efficient. We help firms build proposal workflows that customize content based on client context, generate initial drafts from previous successful proposals, and ensure consistency across sections developed by different team members. The goal is proposals that are more tailored and persuasive, produced in less time and with less senior involvement.

Knowledge Capture and Reuse. Consulting firms accumulate enormous institutional knowledge—past deliverables, research findings, methodologies, client insights. But accessing this knowledge is often difficult. It lives in email archives, file shares, and the memories of partners who may or may not be available.

AI enables more effective knowledge capture and retrieval. We help consulting firms implement systems that make institutional knowledge searchable and actionable—so consultants can quickly find relevant past work, leverage proven methodologies, and avoid reinventing approaches that colleagues have already developed. This improves both efficiency and quality by ensuring that every engagement builds on the firm's collective experience.

Client Communication. Consulting relationships depend on clear, responsive communication—status updates, meeting preparation, follow-up documentation, interim deliverables. These communications take time, and the quality varies depending on who's writing them.

AI can help standardize and accelerate client communication without losing the personal touch. We help consulting teams develop communication workflows that draft updates, summarize meetings, and prepare client-ready materials more efficiently. The goal is communication that's consistently high quality and takes less consultant time to produce.

Margin Improvement. Ultimately, all of these capabilities drive toward the same outcome: better economics for your consulting practice. When consultants can complete research faster, produce deliverables more efficiently, and leverage institutional knowledge more effectively, the same team can deliver more value—either through higher quality work on existing engagements or through capacity to take on additional work without expanding headcount.

We help consulting firms quantify these economics and prioritize AI investments based on margin impact. Not every AI application delivers equal value; we help you focus on the ones that matter most for your specific practice and business model.

Our Approach #

Consulting firms need AI capabilities that fit how consultants actually work—fast-paced, client-driven, and often project-based. Our approach is designed for this reality.

Individual Capability. We train consultants on AI tools and techniques they can apply immediately to their work. Our programs are role-specific: junior consultants learn research and analysis acceleration, mid-level consultants learn deliverable development and client communication enhancement, senior consultants and partners learn workflow optimization and quality review techniques. Training emphasizes practical application to actual consulting work, with exercises built around realistic scenarios from your practice.

Team Workflows. Beyond individual skills, we help you build AI-augmented processes for common consulting activities. This includes research workflows, proposal development processes, deliverable creation approaches, and knowledge management systems. We work with your teams to design workflows that fit your firm's culture and quality standards, then help implement and refine them until they're embedded in how your teams work.

Governance and Standards. Consulting firms have reputations to protect. AI use needs to align with client confidentiality requirements, professional standards, and your firm's quality expectations. We help you establish governance frameworks that enable AI adoption while managing risk—clear policies on data handling, quality review processes for AI-assisted work, and guidelines that ensure client trust is maintained.

Knowledge Transfer. Our goal is to leave your firm more capable than we found it. We don't want to create ongoing dependency; we want to build internal capabilities that sustain and grow after our engagement ends. This means documenting workflows, training internal champions who can continue to advance AI adoption, and creating resources your teams can reference as they continue to develop their skills.

Our consulting firm engagements typically start with understanding your practice and identifying where AI can have the most impact on your specific workflows and economics. From there, we design a program that addresses individual training, team processes, and governance—all focused on helping your consultants deliver better work to clients while improving your margins. The destination isn't becoming an AI firm; it's becoming a more effective, more efficient version of the consulting firm you already are.