Will AI replace consultants? Perhaps those whose greatest value was the answer

Artificial intelligence is changing consulting faster than many consultants would like to admit. Market analysis, research, strategic scenarios, and action plans that until recently required many hours of work can now be produced with AI support in a matter of minutes. Does this mean the end of strategic consulting? I don't think so. I do think, however, that it may mean the end of a certain consulting model in which the greatest value was the answer.

Just a few years ago, access to knowledge was a significant part of a consultant's advantage. They came to the company with methodology, experience, access to data, and the ability to put it all together. They analyzed the market, competition, and organization, and then a strategy, presentation, recommendations, and a list of next steps were created. The client received a diagnosis and an answer to the question: what should we do?

This model made economic sense for years largely because getting a good answer was expensive. It required access to information, time, the right tools, and competencies to combine very different sources into a coherent whole.

Today, this very element of the equation is beginning to change.

What is AI changing in the work of a strategic consultant?

A small business owner can now sit down at their computer in the morning and use AI to analyze sales data, research competitors, look for market trends, create several development scenarios, challenge their own assumptions, or prepare a first draft of an action plan. Until recently, some of this work would have required the involvement of several people or an external consultant.

Of course, this does not mean that every answer generated by AI will be good. Technology does not automatically know the context of the organization, does not possess all the knowledge hidden in people's heads, and can produce answers that are wrong yet sound very convincing. The quality of the result still depends on the data, the way the question is asked, the context, and the competencies of the person who can evaluate what they received.

Despite these limitations, something fundamental has happened: the cost of obtaining a probable answer has dropped sharply.

And as a strategist, I think this is very good news, because it forces my industry to ask itself an uncomfortable question: what exactly is the client paying the consultant for if access to knowledge is no longer a scarce good?

The hardest moment begins after the strategy

For eight years of working with entrepreneurs and organizations, I have repeatedly observed a similar paradox. Companies very rarely suffered simply because no one knew what should be done. Much more often, the hardest part began a moment later, when one option had to be chosen from several good possibilities, or when a decision meant giving up something in which time, money, and emotions had previously been invested.

Sometimes the team knew the direction, but daily decisions still led them elsewhere. The company had a strategy, but new ideas constantly won out over consistent implementation of what had already been agreed. Other times, the decision was rationally obvious, but required changing the way of working, having a difficult conversation, or admitting that something that had worked a year ago no longer served the organization today.

Sometimes it was much simpler: the owner knew perfectly well what they should do, but for some reason had not done it for six months.

And then another answer changes little.

We can create further analyses and recommendations, but the problem ceases to be the question 'what can we do?'. Much more important becomes: 'What are we choosing and are we ready to bear the consequences of that choice?'

And this is a completely different kind of work.

Can AI create a company strategy?

That depends primarily on what we call strategy.

If strategy for us is a document containing market analysis, goals, recommended actions, and a plan, AI can already very effectively support its creation today. It can analyze large amounts of information, compare different scenarios, catch dependencies we hadn't noticed before, challenge our assumptions, and based on available data indicate the solution that seems most rational.

Except that for me, strategy is not a document.

Strategy is a set of conscious choices about where the company wants to play, what it will not do, where it will direct limited resources, and what consequences of these decisions it is ready to accept.

And here things get much more interesting, because AI can help us see possibilities and better understand the consequences of each of them, but ultimately someone has to say: we choose this path. Someone will later have to communicate this decision to people, direct money and time toward it, give up other possibilities, and maintain direction when the first difficulties appear along the way.

It is precisely at this point that the leader's responsibility begins.

A business owner does not need more of everything

This change particularly interests me in the context of small and growing companies. Their owners now gain access to analytical capabilities, automation, and knowledge that until recently were available primarily to large organizations and expensive advisory firms. This is a huge democratization of opportunity and one of the reasons why I am so interested in AI.

At the same time, I see a certain paradox here. If creating another idea, analysis, plan, or solution variant costs us less and less, we can produce them almost endlessly. The problem is that an organization's resources are not infinite. People still have a limited number of hours, the budget still has its limits, and the business owner's attention is one of the most limited resources of the entire system.

That is why I feel that in a world of answer abundance, selection will become increasingly valuable. Not the question of what else we can do, but the decision about what we will consciously not do now, so that the things that really matter have a chance to be implemented.

What is the difference between a consultant and a strategic partner for the CEO?

I ask myself this question more and more often in the context of my own work. I am less and less interested in the role of someone who enters a company to 'know better'. I am much more interested in being a strategic partner to the business owner.

For me, the difference is not just in the name. A consultant can analyze a problem and recommend a solution. A strategic partner also stays close to what happens afterward: helping the owner look at the situation from a distance, challenge their own assumptions, choose from several possibilities, see the consequences of decisions, and later maintain direction when the organization naturally begins to return to its previous ways of working.

This is not about making decisions for the CEO or taking away their responsibility for the company. On the contrary. It is about creating conditions in which they can consciously bear that responsibility.

Why does a CEO need a thinking partner if they have AI?

Perhaps precisely because AI gives us so many answers.

Running a company can be a lonely job not because the owner has no people around them. The problem is that not every doubt should be transferred raw to the team, not every decision can be democratized, and not every fear about the company's future should automatically become the fear of the entire organization.

A space is needed where one can say: 'I don't know', 'I'm not sure about this', 'I see three possibilities and each has its price', or simply 'something doesn't add up here, but I can't name it yet'.

AI can be an excellent tool in such a process. I increasingly use it myself in this way: to broaden perspective, work with scenarios, analyze information, or confront my own way of thinking. However, this does not change the fact that technology does not share responsibility with the leader for the consequences of decisions, does not know the entire history of relationships between people in the organization, and does not experience what will happen at the table when the decision has to be turned into reality.

That is why I do not see the future of consulting as a choice between human or AI. A much more interesting model seems to be one in which the leader, strategic partner, and technology meet, and each brings a different value to the process.

Will AI replace strategic consulting?

I think AI will replace part of the work for which we previously paid consultants. And that is very good.

I see little point in selling a client many hours of work on something that, with a properly designed process, humans and technology can do today faster, cheaper, and sometimes even better. This does not mean, however, that the need for strategic thinking disappears. I even suspect the opposite will happen.

The more options we have, the more important the ability to make choices will become. The easier it is to create a plan, the more consistency in its implementation will matter. The more answers we can get instantly, the more important the ability to ask the right question will become.

And the more work we hand over to technology, the more interesting the question becomes for me: what remains the responsibility of the human?

At siClaro, we recently summed up our response to this change in a very simple sentence:

We don't come to take the wheel. We sit beside you.

We bring an external perspective, strategic experience, tools, and technology. We help cut through the noise, see the real problem, and translate the decision into action, but the wheel remains where it should be — in the hands of the person running their company.