The analysis your team spent weeks producing is now available in minutes. That reprices the whole engagement.
What’s happening
McKinsey's internal AI tool, Lilli, is used by 72% of its 45,000 employees and processes over 500,000 prompts per month. The research, benchmarking, and analysis that used to fill the first several weeks of an engagement are now handled by AI in hours. McKinsey estimates this redirects roughly $12 million per month in consultant capacity from research to higher-value work.
Ascentra Labs, adopted by three of the top five consulting firms, delivers 2-4x faster due diligence. The tool doesn’t replace consultants. It replaces the research layer that justified weeks of billing. When due diligence that took a month now takes a week, the engagement value compresses unless the firm changes what it sells.
The client side is moving just as fast. Corporate strategy teams are using AI to produce their own market analysis, competitive landscapes, and scenario models. The output isn’t consultant-quality, but it’s good enough that clients question whether they need a consulting firm for the analysis phase at all. The data and the analysis aren’t scarce anymore. The judgment about what to do with them is.
Why the obvious responses don’t work
“Produce higher-quality analysis”
AI quality is already good enough for most decisions. Clients aren’t paying for perfection in research; they’re paying for decisions. The marginal value of better analysis keeps shrinking while the cost of producing it stays high.
“Offer AI-augmented analysis at lower cost”
You’re competing with tools clients can access directly. Cheaper analysis is competing with free. There’s no sustainable floor on analysis pricing.
“Add proprietary data sources”
Data moats are temporary. What’s proprietary today gets commoditized fast. A competitive advantage built on data access has a shorter shelf life every year.
What’s working instead
CB Insights frames the shift as ‘service-as-software’: consulting firms codifying their expertise into repeatable platforms that deliver ongoing value instead of one-time analysis. The firms capturing this sell decision infrastructure. That means AI-powered tools built on their methodology that clients use continuously, with senior consultants providing interpretation and strategic guidance on retainer. The engagement becomes ongoing, the revenue recurs, and AI actually increases the value of the offering.
The pattern is the same across every firm that gets this right: they stop optimizing the old model and build new offerings around what AI cannot do. The Workshop is the facilitated day we do this work with you. You leave with 2–3 new offerings, specified and priced. Your team or an implementation partner builds and tests them with named clients.
Other pressures on Consulting Firms
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