01-16-2025 APPLIED AI
Consultants beware, AI is coming for your job
The management consulting industry transformation provides not just a snapshot of the changes AI is driving but also a blueprint for how economies will adapt.
[Source Photo: Xu Haiwei/Unsplash]
BY Lauri Pietinalho, T. Alexander Puutio, and Matt Statler6 minute read
The Singularity—a future where AI exceeds our human capacity for cognition— may no longer be a distant horizon. Currently, in almost any cognitive task, AI is matching, and often exceeding human accomplishments.
For many observers, this prompts a question that is as urgent as it is unsettling: In a world where AI can generate insights and outcomes at blazing speed, what’s left for humans to do?
As we’ve explored the dimensions of this question at NYU Stern through research and teaching, the management consulting industry has emerged as the ideal benchmark for understanding what lies ahead for all of us. The industry’s transformation provides not just a snapshot of the changes AI is driving but also a blueprint for how economies will adapt to this new reality. And no, it’s not all doom and gloom, or a tale of human obsolescence even if it is perfectly clear that AI can now do much of what the “smartest people in the room” should accomplish.
Instead, what we’ve identified is an opportunity for humans to return to craftsmanship roots and excel again in the areas that make our species truly special.
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The future is here and unevenly distributed
Nowhere is the arrival of the singularity more evident than in our Consulting Capstone course, where seniors tackle complex, real-world business challenges.
The extent to which both our students and clients leverage AI in their engagement is growing with each iteration, and AI is increasingly becoming a seamless extension of their natural capabilities. In the past, it took weeks to arrive at an engagement plan and set of hypotheses, while today students mix pre-built solution frameworks and lessons from past cases with AI tools to generate insights and roadmaps all in the span of one class session.
For the next generation, answers are the new commodities and immediate access to insights are table stakes.
All of this raises a pressing question: What kind of a career are we preparing them for?
What role can we expect our students to take in a world where AI can hold conversations, anticipate needs, and deliver insights, optimizations, and strategic recommendations at a pace and quality that surpass theirs?
Answering these questions properly requires a reassessment of what makes management consultants valuable to their clients in the first place, as well as a determination of where AI is likely to carve out its role in the consulting value chain.
Answering this also uncovers the fate of the broader skilled labor economy. If even strategy consultants can be replaced, then maybe there truly are no knowledge-based roles safe from disruption.
To understand what lies ahead we’ll need to begin by understanding more clearly what management consultants actually do for their clients.
Disruption lies ahead
Asking management consultants to explain what they actually do for a living might make for a great running joke online, but there’s no reason to doubt whether the profession brings value to those they serve.
In fact, seeing how the industry generated revenues of $385.1 billion in 2023 in the United States alone, they are clearly engaged in something others find worth their hard-earned dollars.
In a very technical sense, clients call in management consultants to help with three main functions:
- Providing a set of extra hands
- Lending credibility to decisions and processes already underway
- Delivering innovative, strategic insights that cannot be generated in-house
As of today, all three are under existential threat by AI.
ChatGPT launched to the general public in November 2022, bringing about the current AI wave that we are yet to see swell to its final proportions, let alone crest. However, foundational AI models are quickly establishing themselves as powerful tools in the consultant’s arsenal, if not entirely passable replacements.
We see the evolution of AI in management consulting is unfolding in three distinct stages (and we’ve passed through the first two).
In the first stage, both consultants and their clients begin experimenting with publicly available AI tools, such as large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude with a view of doing what they do today, but faster.
Next, the integration becomes deeper, and the focus moves from task to outcome automation. Work processes begin to adapt to what AI needs to excel when working with humans, and the early adopters become more like AI-human hybrids, or Cyborgs and Centaurs as coined by our colleagues at Harvard Business School.
In the final stage, both management consultants and their clients will operate as human-AI Agent ecosystems, solving problems in unison. Some are already all-in with creating the agentic future of business, including blue chips like IBM with their Watsonx Orchestrate and newcomers like Fetch.ai in areas outside consulting, and it won’t take long until we see vertical AI solutions that target management consulting as well.
This is the agentic future that awaits all knowledge-based workers in all of its supercharged, automated, and devastatingly efficient glory.
A return to what clients value most
Our economy will be disrupted by AI. The changes will be deep, structural, and long-lasting, in ways that will both mirror and exceed what globalization and the expansion of free trade accomplished, only this time in years instead of decades.
However, we don’t foresee a future where AI leaves humans with nothing but crumbs on the table. We’re confident in saying this because we see a future where management consultants will play a key role, even after they are no longer the “smartest” and most cognitively capable entities in the building.
Just like management consultants, the AI onslaught will take us all back to the first principles of business, and in each case, those principles are fundamentally grounded in personal relationships and the human capacity for creativity, empathy, and connection.
More importantly, they are built on a sense of understanding and value that only humans can create when working together.
As AI encroaches on the toes of the knowledge workers, it is not only taking over tasks that used to belong to Patagonia-vested associates at Bain or BCG, it is revealing what the true value of most white-collar work has been all along.
The real reason why leading management consultancies are remunerated handsomely for their time isn’t that no one else could arrive at the same answers.
Instead, we argue that the true value of management consulting has always been in the act and experience of advising itself, the intricate dance of ideas, concepts, and a multiverse of paths forward that are built on the relationship between the advisor and advisee.
Defaulting to corporate jargon, management consulting has always been about engagement and client success more than the answers themselves.
It’s the dialogue and relational perspective-shifting that brings about the unique human knowing, involving also the unconceptualized senses of what truly matters, as consultants accompany clients through a myriad of possibilities of which many are possible but one in particular feels just right.
This is consulting’s true essence, and as long as AI knows everything but understands nothing, there will always be room for humans in consulting. The same is true for most other knowledge-based tasks as AI strips layers of mundanity from the work we all do.
The rise of the authentic advisor
In a sense, the future of consulting circles back to what it always should have been: a practice built on relational trust, deep listening, and a genuine investment in clients’ long-term success.
AI may manage data and generate predictions, but only humans can meaningfully engage in the nuanced decision-making required to align technology with a client’s unique goals and values while also making the output authentically theirs and trustworthy.
As we tell our students, it’s this intimate process of guiding clients through uncertainty that will distinguish them in the era of intelligent machines.
This means consultants must also embrace their role as ethical and strategic stewards more deeply than they have today. The real frontier lies not in the Singularity, but in building advisory relationships that embody judgment, morals, ethics, and integrity in ways that technology cannot match.
It’s the same for everyone whose brain does the heavy lifting, and we see no sense in fearing or avoiding a future where we all get to go back to what made working with other humans so great in the first place.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Lauri Pietinalho is an organizational philosopher and advisor exploring collaborative organizing and the role of human work in the age of AI. More
T. Alexander Puutio, PhD is a founder, author, and professor. More
Matt Statler, PhD is a philosopher, professor, and musician who teaches ethics, leadership,p and consulting at NYU Stern School of Business. More
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