Generative AI Strategy How Consulting Companies Help You Stay Ahead

If statistics indicate, the consulting business is expected to grow to an unprecedented USD 290.86 billion industry by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of 4.87%. This clearly tells us that businesses are increasingly seeking expert advice and guidance by hiring consultants who can help them solve their mission-critical problems and overcome barriers to growth.

The demand for consultants is not the only thing that's increasing; so are the expectations of businesses, which are expecting agile outcomes and faster results. This can be quite a daunting task if consultants stay clung to traditional consulting approaches.

If you are a consultant or part of a consultant firm helping businesses grow in their specific niche by overcoming strategic challenges, then there are a ton of insights and takeaways for you on how you can leverage generative AI (Gen AI) to your advantage to make your consultancy agile and meet expectations.

In this article, we will contrast the traditional approach to consulting with the modern AI-driven approach. Then, we will discuss some use cases, processes, or systems that can be enhanced by Gen AI so that you can focus more on solving mission-driven problems while Gen AI does the heavy lifting for you.

What's holding Consulting Firms Back?

As a consultant, you face the daunting task of addressing high-level business challenges. This requires extensive research, as well as strategic and creative thinking, before you can craft a plan that delivers results.

While many businesses understand the time and effort involved, some lack patience and expect faster outcomes, this is often where consulting encounters the most friction.

From initial research to identifying and pinpointing flaws to mapping out processes that eventually form a strategic plan, consultants have to do a great deal of groundwork, sometimes taking months to complete. A significant portion of this time is spent on grunt work, which, if delegated or automated, could save valuable time and be reinvested into planning and execution to accelerate results.

Consultants themselves aren’t to blame. Traditional consulting workflows are structured in a way that makes it extremely difficult to speed up the process or make it agile.

Here’s a quick overview of a traditional consulting workflow:

1. Discovery phase requires a lot of time in gathering and understanding the client’s current dynamics, such as their goals and objectives, their constraints and challenges, and the market trends they’re in, to grasp the pulse of their market fully.
2. Once the groundwork is done and the information is gathered, a strategy is planned with clear deliverables, goals, KPIs, and a timeline for the completion of each task.
3. The above two steps, which require the most work, finally pave the way for implementation, where companies execute the plan laid by consultants to drive the anticipated results.
4. Lastly, there is the reporting phase, where monthly, quarterly, or yearly, you analyze and assess the wins and losses, the bull’s-eyes and marks missed, to realign and redefine the strategy and get back at it.

The work behind this four-step process can take up to months, but this can be significantly reduced with the use of Generative AI. In the coming section, we’ll explore how.

How Gen AI Can Make Consulting Agile

Businesses that were initially skeptical or, at worst, frightened by Generative AI have accepted it as an integral part of their overall business strategy. In fact, according to a study, businesses these days that hire consultants prefer the ones who use AI in their processes than the ones who don’t. Why? Agility. Businesses need faster outcomes.

A Quick Overview of Gen AI

For a quick recap, Generative AI, aka Gen AI, is a form of AI that allows you to generate content in multiple formats, such as text, audio, video, and more, within a few prompts. It’s a type of semi-supervised machine learning technology in which an AI model is trained on both structured and unstructured data to produce similar outcomes when prompted with a use case.

Let us try to explain it through an example :

Example:
Gen AI in the Consultancy Discovery Phase

🧠 Situation:

You're working with a logistics company that's struggling with operational inefficiencies. You’re in the discovery phase and need to:

• Understand their business model
• Identify process bottlenecks
• Benchmark against industry standards
• Draft an executive summary of your initial findings

💡 How Generative AI Helps

✅ 1. Automate Competitor & Market Research

Prompt to AI:

“Summarize the key trends in logistics and supply chain for mid-sized companies in the U.S. in 2024. Include technology adoption, major bottlenecks, and average industry benchmarks.”

AI Output: A concise market brief you can plug into your report or use to guide stakeholder conversations.

✅ 2. Analyze Client Input Automatically

Upload transcripts of stakeholder interviews or customer feedback. Prompt:

“Summarize the key pain points mentioned in this interview transcript and suggest potential causes based on logistics best practices.”

AI Output: Quick summary of common issues (e.g., delays, warehouse confusion, manual tracking) along with possible root causes.

✅ 3. Draft the Discovery Report

Prompt:

“Based on the client’s logistics setup, the identified challenges, and the current market landscape, create a 1-page executive summary with bullet points under: Challenges, Opportunities, Initial Recommendations.”

Boom—you’ve got a report skeleton that’s 80% done.

🎯 End Result:

Instead of spending hours compiling documents, writing summaries, and formatting insights, you delegate that to Gen AI and focus on:

• Asking sharper questions
• Validating assumptions
• Having better conversations with stakeholders
• Building trust and delivering insights faster

This is just one of the many ways you can use generative AI tools like ChatGPT to delegate heavy-lifting tasks like the one mentioned above to free up the time you need for creative and strategic thinking and to deliver outcomes faster.

In the following section, let’s explore some of the ways you can harness the power of Gen AI as a consultant to make your consultancy approach agile and to accelerate your outcomes.

Gen AI Use In Consultancy Workflow

By this point, we assume you have enough understanding of Gen AI to help you start thinking about how you can use AI to accelerate your workflow and deliver results faster. Now, we’ll illustrate a few more examples to widen up your thorough process.

Gen AI In The Discovery Phase 

The initial research and groundwork required in the discovery phase can be delegated partly to AI. You can ask Gen AI to create survey questionnaires for your initial marketing research to gather information, or you can use Gen AI to review existing documents to analyze data and spit out key takeaways, which, if you do manually, can take you hours to go through each document.

Gen AI In The Planning Phase

Once the homework is done, instead of you putting in the time to type every word and sentence in the strategy document, you can just feed all your findings to Gen AI and ask it to create strategy documents, proposals, or work plans, which it can do within minutes—even after multiple revisions and iterations.

Gen AI in the Implementation Phase

A very important part of implementation is getting the entire team on board with the newly defined processes and systems. You can use Gen AI to help create playbooks and training materials the team can use to adapt to the new plan you, as a consultant, have devised.

Gen AI in Reporting

Lastly, every month, quarter, or year, you can feed dashboard reports to Gen AI and use it for data analysis to figure out valuable trends and success metrics that you can report to the stakeholders.

Build Your AI Bot For Consultancy

What we’ve stated above are just a few of the many ways Generative AI can accelerate and make your consultancy business agile, which in today’s fast-paced business landscape isn’t a choice but an absolute necessity.

One very significant use case of Generative AI for consultancy is building your own custom AI bots that are trained on your proprietary data and are knowledgeable about any and every trick in your playbook. Instead of you going through your knowledge bank again and again, you can just prompt that custom bot of yours to pull up that information, and then you can use that to do your consultancy work for your clients.

Next Steps

We recommend trying out some examples yourself to experience the potential of Gen AI and how it can make your work 5x better and faster. It’s completely normal if you require further guidance and help on this subject, and if that is the case, we can help you. You can connect with our AI expert to book a free strategy session on using Gen AI to prepare your consultancy business for today’s business landscape.