Start with the honest bit: AI helps. First drafts arrive in minutes. Desk research that used to eat a week now takes an afternoon. Interview tapes summarise themselves overnight. A small firm can cover ground that used to need a team, and nobody misses the eleven o'clock rewrite.
Used as a supplement, it is simply better tooling. A consultancy that refuses it is choosing to be slower and more expensive, and no client is paying extra for that.
But look at what the tools are actually absorbing. The first bad draft. The market model built cell by cell. The survey data cleaned row by row. The long afternoon lost inside a company's filings. That is precisely the work junior analysts used to be handed. And it was never just production. It was the apprenticeship.
Judgement in this trade is built by doing the low-status work badly and getting corrected. You learn to distrust a market-size figure by assembling one yourself and watching a director pull it apart in front of you. You learn what a weak interview sounds like by sitting through your own. If the machine does the assembling, the distrust never forms. The output gets better. The person does not.
The risk to the industry is not that AI replaces consultants. It is that AI replaces the path that made consultants worth hiring. A firm can run lean on seniors and software for years. Then the seniors retire, and there is nobody behind them who ever built anything by hand.
We split the work deliberately. AI speeds up coverage, drafting and synthesis. That is the supplement. A person still designs the research, sits in the interviews, builds the model that matters and defends the number in the room. That is the apprenticeship, and it stays.
This is not nostalgia for grunt work. Some inefficiency is training. Strip all of it out and you are eating the seed corn.
In ten years, the firms that kept the apprenticeship will own the judgement market. The ones that did not will be selling prompts.
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