Why trust these gold-seeking buffoons of questionable expertise? Overpaid as they are by gullible clients who really ought to know better, consultancy firms are now getting paid for work done by non-humans, conventionally called “generative artificial intelligence”. Occupying some kind of purgatorial space of amoral pursuit, these vague, private sector entities offer services that could (and should) just as easily be done within government or a firm at a fraction of the cost. Increasingly, the next confidence trick is taking hold: automation using large language models.
First, let’s consider why companies such as McKinsey, Bain & Company, and Boston Consulting Group are the sorts that should be tarred, feathered, and run out of town. Opaque in their operations, hostile to accountability, the consultancy industry secures lucrative contracts with large corporations and governments of a Teflon quality. Their selling point is external expertise of a singular quality, a promise that serves to discourage expertise that should be sharpened by government officials or business employees. The other, and here, we have a silly, rosy view from The Economist, such companies “make available specialist knowledge that may not exist within some organisations, from deploying cloud computing to assessing climate change’s impact on supply chains. By performing similar work for many clients, consultants spread productivity-enhancing practices.”
Leaving that ghastly, mangled prose aside, the same paper admits that generating such advice can lead to a “self-protection racket.” The CEO of a company wishing to thin the ranks of employees can rely on a favourable assessment to justify the brutal measure; consultants are hardly going to submit anything that would suggest preserving jobs.
The emergence of AI and its effects on the consulting industry yield two views. One insists that the very advent of automated platforms such as ChatGPT will make the consultant vanish into nursing home obsolescence. Travis Kalanick, cofounder of that most mercenary of platforms, Uber, is a very strong proponent of this. “If you’re a traditional consultant and you’re just doing the thing, you’re executing the thing, you’re probably in some trouble,” he suggested to Peter Diamandis during the 2025 Abundance Summit. This, however, had to be qualified by the operating principle involving the selection of the fittest. “If you’re the consultant that puts the things together that replaces the consultant, maybe you got some stuff.”
There would be some truth to this, insofar as junior consultants handling the dreary, tilling business of research, modelling, and analysis could find themselves cheapened into redundancy, leaving the dim sharks at the apex dreaming about strategy and coddling their clients with flattering emails automated by software.
The other view is that AI is a herald for efficiency, sharpening the ostensible worth of the consultant. Kearney senior partner, Anshuman Sengar, brightly extols the virtues of the technology in an interview with the Australian Financial Review. Generative AI tools “save me up to 10 to 20 percent of my time.” As he could not attend every meeting or read every article, this had “increased” the relevance of coverage. Crisp summaries of meetings and webinars could be generated. Accuracy was not a problem here as “the input data is your own meeting.”
Mindful of any sceptics of the industry keen to identify sloth, Sengar was careful to emphasise the care he took in drafting emails using tools such as Copilot. “I’m very thoughtful. If an email needs a high degree of EQ [emotional intelligence], and if I’m writing to a senior client, I would usually do it myself.” The mention of the word “usually” is most reassuring, and something that hoodwinked clients would do well to heed.
Across the field, we see the use of agentic AI, typically the sort of software agents that complete menial tasks. In 2024, Boston Consulting Group earned a fifth of its revenue from AI-related work. IBM raked in over US$1 billion in sales commitments for consulting work through its Watsonx system. After earning no revenue from such tools in 2023, KPMG International received something in the order of US$650 million in business ventures driven by generative AI.
The others to profit in this cash bonanza of wonkiness are companies in the business of creating generative AI. In May last year, PwC purchased over 100,000 licenses of OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise system, making it the company’s largest customer.
Seeking the services of these consultancy-guided platforms is an exercise in cerebral corrosion. Deloitte offers its Zora AI platform, which uses NVIDIA AI. “Simplify enterprise operations, boost productivity and efficiency, and drive more confident decision making that unlocks business value, with the help of an ever-growing portfolio of specialized AI agents,” states the company’s pitch to potential customers. It babbles and stumbles along to suggest that such agents “augment your human workforce with extensive domain-specific intelligence, flexible technical architecture, and built-in transparency to autonomously execute and analyze complex business processes.”
Given such an advertisement, the middle ground of snake oil consultancy looks increasingly irrelevant – not that it should have been relevant to begin with. Why bother with Deloitte’s hack pretences when you can get the raw technology from NVIDIA? But the authors of a September article in the Harvard Business Review insist that consultancy is here to stay. (They would, given their pedigree.) The industry is merely “being fundamentally reshaped.” And hardly for the better.