by Daniel Gomez, CMC
In management consulting, using an AI agent like ChatGPT can feel like having a highly capable yet inexperienced junior associate on your team. It’s intelligent, fast, and works hard, but it’s prone to mistakes and requires constant supervision to be truly effective. Understanding how to best use this eager associate’s talents can help consultants navigate its strengths and limitations while maximizing its potential.
Where to best use your associate: Early scans, efficiency, and structuring deliverables
AI shines when it comes to synthesizing vast amounts of information, generating ideas, and completing repetitive tasks. Imagine being tasked with analyzing reports for a client in an industry unfamiliar to you. An AI tool can scan hundreds of documents, summarizing key trends and surfacing insights quickly. This allows you to focus your energy on interpreting those insights and tailoring findings for your client’s unique needs. Just like you would with a junior associate, you would still need to check any figures and quotes.
When it comes to repetitive tasks, AI offers unmatched efficiency. For instance, AI can reformat raw survey responses or standardize financial figures in minutes, saving hours that can be redirected toward analysis and strategic thinking.
Another area where AI adds value is in generating draft frameworks for deliverables. Whether it's outlining a client presentation or structuring a report, AI can provide a solid starting point to build upon. However, just as you’d review and refine a junior colleague’s work, these drafts demand careful and thoughtful editing to ensure accuracy and alignment with the project’s goals and your audience.
Where AI falls short: Interpersonal dynamics, strategic foresight, and inherent technology risks
AI struggles with ambiguity and the nuanced interpersonal dynamics central to consulting. While it can generate a list of options for a problem, it cannot anticipate how stakeholders will react to each choice or adapt its recommendations based on subtle verbal or non-verbal cues noted in a client meeting. These are the situations where good consultants excel, leveraging emotional intelligence and intuition to navigate complexity and adapt solutions.
Another AI gap lies in strategic foresight. While AI might extrapolate data trends, it lacks the holistic understanding to envision how shifts in one area (e.g., regulatory changes) could ripple across a client’s business. Here, your experience and ability to synthesize information from diverse inputs and to contextualize them remain irreplaceable.
There are also significant risks inherent to the technology behind AIs. AIs have an occasional tendency to produce incorrect or misleading information —a phenomenon aptly named “hallucination.” For example, an AI might create a convincing but entirely fabricated market analysis. Without rigorous fact-checking, such errors can lead to flawed recommendations, reputational risks, and even legal liability. AIs are also only as current and unbiased as the data they’re trained on. If you’re analyzing customer demographics or market trends, AI might inadvertently ignore recent data or reinforce existing biases. Addressing this requires both awareness of the issue and conducting deliberate steps to counter it, such as cross-referencing outputs, inputting diverse information sources and applying your own critical judgment.
Supervision: Guiding your eager associate for success
Treating AI like a new associate or research assistant offers a useful mental model to guide effective interactions and maximize its contribution. You wouldn’t delegate a critical analysis or client presentation to a junior team member without guidance, and the same applies to AI. Always provide clear instructions, validate outputs, and double-check sources.
Also, take AI prompt writing seriously. Educate yourself in prompt engineering (the art of writing AI prompts) in the same way you educated yourself to use other tools (like Excel). It makes a substantial difference in the quality of the output if you write “analyze market trends” compared to specific instructions such as: “Summarize the top three emerging trends in renewable energy based on reports from 2023.” A well-crafted prompt ensures more relevant and accurate results.
So where does this leave us?
I used AI to create the first draft of this blog. Did I provide detailed instructions to the AI agent to generate something close to what I envisioned? Certainly. Did I invest time in thoroughly reviewing, restructuring, and refining the AI’s suggestions? Without a doubt. However, using AI allowed me to write this in less than half the time it would have taken me before, greatly increasing my productivity.
By treating AI as a capable albeit junior associate, management consultants can harness its strengths while mitigating risks. The key lies in striking the right balance between delegation and oversight—a dynamic that, when mastered, can enhance how we deliver value to our clients.
About the Author:
Daniel Gomez, CMC DG Business Transformation Inc.
Daniel Gomez is a member of the Canadian Association of Management Consultants (CMC). His education
includes a B. Eng. (Electrical Engineering) from U.C.R. and an MBA from McGill University. He is a Business
Transformation consultant specialized in business transformation, business architecture (TOGAF), change
management (PROSCI), and project management. With 20+ years of experience working in complex
transformations in the public and private sector, Daniel has developed extensive experience working at all levels
of the organization to deliver successful organizational change. His experience ranges from industry wide
restructuring (i.e. opening the electrical generation market to open competition), to deployment of large ERP
solutions (SAP, Workday), to aiding organizations implement business changes, conduct strategic planning,
complete organizational redesigns and streamline processes.
