Where do consultants create value now that AI can write a strategy in an hour?
Since jumping back into the consulting world, I've been talking to consultants and CEOs about AI, and that question keeps coming up, along with its companion: what should consultants be paid to do?
Many of the answers focus on speed. Consultants can research, plan, and turn ideas into assets faster than ever. But speed can be dangerous. If the same beliefs and habits continue to influence how a business operates, AI simply helps the company get to the wrong place faster.
The bigger opportunity for consultants isn't speed. It's context: understanding what moves the business, what leaders believe, what's rewarded, what people avoid, and what no one in the room wants to challenge.
When that context stays the same, a new strategy just gets folded into the old rules of engagement. I saw this play out a few years ago with a client who tried to bring carpet buyers into a new digital model.
The CEO believed the marketing team could build enough awareness and interest to drive demand on its own. The strategy was built on the wrong assumption about how buyers would change their behaviour. Leadership treated it like a marketing problem when it was a trust-building problem.
The company didn't need more marketing. It needed salespeople who could build credibility and relationships with targets, such as interior designers, over time. The realization came too late because the CEO was anchored in how things had always been done in the carpet business.
That was the real issue. The company had to challenge its own belief that buyers would change because a new digital model existed. And anyone who has tried to change buyer behaviour knows how hard that is.
Before recommending a direction, a consultant needs the bigger picture: the competitive landscape, the product's real strength, the customer base, and the go-to-market motion.
But the deeper work is understanding what leaders believe about the market, what the company has been built to protect, what the current model assumes about customer needs, and which conversations never reach the boardroom.
AI struggles with this part. It requires a specific, on-the-ground understanding of an organization: conversations with key stakeholders, a clear read on the company's best customers and most dangerous rivals, and a sense of what's making it succeed versus what's holding it back.
Once a consultant sees what is shaping the business, they can help leaders challenge the thinking and build a strategy that reflects how the company operates or how it needs to operate. From there, go-to-market execution has a real shot at succeeding because the strategy is grounded in how the business functions.
Only then does AI become useful, giving consultants more leverage to turn strategy into work: building content plans, structuring campaigns, and creating initial versions of sales and marketing assets without handing everything over to an agency, a freelancer, or an internal team.
But that leverage is also where consultants can fall into a trap. More output doesn't mean more progress. If consultants use AI only to produce more assets, content, campaigns, and workflows, they can help a company get things done without helping it get better.
Going forward, consultants will create value by helping leaders assess whether the company's thinking, behaviour, and decision-making support the strategy. A company chasing a sharper focus but still rewarding activity over focus has a problem that no plan will fix.
A strategy built to move upmarket doesn't mean much if the company still chases every lead that comes in. A strategy built on strong positioning only works if leadership is willing to make choices that narrow the audience, which is a harder thing to sit with than it sounds. Companies change when leaders are open to challenging things that produce the same results, year after year.
Some consultants will keep selling strategy as a standalone service. But demand for that type of service is shrinking. The market is moving toward context, and consultants need to step back and understand how the business works before telling it what to do next.
AI can create the plan, accelerate work, and help consultants produce more, but it cannot decide what a company needs to tackle, how, or when. That's where consultants can earn their money: helping CEOs see what keeps pulling the business back to the way it always operated.
The future of consulting is not faster plans or faster execution. It's about helping companies find the sacred cow running their business and asking whether they're willing to slaughter it.
