The analysis your team spent weeks producing is now available in minutes. That changes what consulting is worth.
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 does not 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 is not consultant-quality, but it is good enough to make clients question whether they need a consulting firm for the analysis phase at all. The scarce resource is no longer the data or the analysis. It is the judgment about what to do with it.
Why the obvious responses don't work
“Produce higher-quality analysis”
AI quality is already good enough for most decisions. Clients are not paying for perfection in research — they are paying for decisions. The marginal value of better analysis is shrinking while the cost of producing it stays high.
“Offer AI-augmented analysis at lower cost”
You are competing with tools that clients can access directly. Offering cheaper analysis is competing with free. The race to the bottom on analysis pricing leads nowhere sustainable.
“Add proprietary data sources”
Data moats are temporary. The data that is proprietary today is commoditized tomorrow. Building your competitive advantage on data access is building on a shrinking foundation.
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, not one-time analysis. The firms capturing this are not selling research or reports. They are selling decision infrastructure: AI-powered tools built on their methodology that clients use continuously, with senior consultants providing interpretation and strategic guidance on a retainer basis. The engagement never ends, the revenue recurs, and AI makes the offering more valuable, not less.
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. That is the work we do in the Workshop.
$15,000
Fixed fee. Two days. 2–3 offerings ready to test with real buyers.
30 minutes with Shawn Yeager. No pitch.