AI in Management Consulting
What skills will consultants need to thrive in an environment where artificial intelligence (AI) is ubiquitous? Will AI make the consulting profession obsolete? How is AI impacting the consulting profession today?
These questions and many others were addressed on 6 June in an online event organised jointly by the British Academy of Management (BAM) Management Consulting Network and CMCE. The event explored the opportunities and threats from AI facing management consultants by showcasing cutting-edge research into the application of AI in management consulting and its implications for the profession.
The event comprised three online sessions. In the first, Joe O’Mahoney, Professor of Consulting at Cardiff Business School, presented the findings of his research into the current use of AI in professional service firms and shared his thoughts about how it might develop in the future.
AI is already in widespread use within the professional services sector: not just generative AI, but also expert systems, machine learning, neural networks, computer vision and natural language processing. These islands of AI are increasingly being integrated, with the most effective architectures allowing for adjustment as a result of learning. AI agents, bots programmed to complete a specific task, have come to the fore over the last 18 months. Bots communicating with each other are typically much better than a single AI entity at carrying out tasks. In the near future, it is likely that communicating agents will be able to execute whole processes, but at the moment AI applications are fragmented.
As an example, Joe discussed the work of partners in a consulting firm. At present, only one third of partners’ time is spent selling, the rest goes on pre- and post-sales activities. AI can handle many of these: it could pre-identify prospects, convert them to leads, prioritise them, and pre-analyse the personality and history of the first priority lead to populate a script, leaving the partner just the task of making the call. AI agents can record the call and subsequently transcribe it and enter the key takeaways into a CRM system.
Applications of AI are achieving average human levels of ability in tasks such as handwriting and speech recognition, language understanding and reading comprehension. By next year they are likely to be as good as the top 20% of humans. AI is already better than good lawyers, doctors, and accountants, although not as good as the best, and it is already making obsolete jobs such as interview transcription, translation, and data entry.
Management consulting will be impacted more slowly than other professions, because organisations are very complex and the human aspects are important, but entry level jobs will be the most vulnerable to substitution and the number of roles at the base of large firms will shrink. Big firms remain confident of their talent pipelines, at least in public, because they aim to retain the best of the best, but as the traditional consulting career path (‘grinders’, ‘minders’, and ‘finders’) requires different skill sets at each stage, there is a risk that narrowing the talent pool will reduce the quality of staff available to fill partner roles. Major AI-driven changes in the consulting profession are likely to take between two and ten years, but after that all bets are off.
Joe finished with a few words of advice on implementation and a useful checklist for where to start. He emphasised that AI is not a silver bullet. Organisations should remember to develop the skills needed to use AI. In essence, it is another technology implementation.
In the second session, Dr Kos Zachos of the National Centre for Creativity enabled by AI (CebAI) at Bayes Business School demonstrated Business Sparks, an application developed by CebAI to help managers of SMEs (and consultants working with them) think more creatively about solving business problems and develop their business models to take advantage of opportunities or mitigate threats. Business Sparks provides an interesting proof of concept of how AI can be used to support and enhance human activities, in particular creative thinking, rather than automate them.
In the third and final session, Professor David V L Smith and Adam Riley MBA reviewed the critical skills that will be needed by management consultants to flourish in an environment where AI is well established. AI tends to work in silos; David and Adam argued that interdisciplinary skills to deal with complex business problems, taking into account their human dimensions, will be at a premium. They described seven constellations of skills which would enable consultants to thrive in a world of AI.
Video of all three sessions of the event can be found here.
Dr Karol Szlichcinski is an Associate Director of CMCE and a Fellow of the Institute of Consulting.
