AI Is Changing Consulting — Here’s How to Future Proof Your Career

The consulting industry is having its “internet moment.” Artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI, is no longer a side experiment. It is reshaping how firms work, how clients buy advice and services, and how consultants create value.

If you are an early career consultant, this shift is both exciting and unsettling. You may be wondering:

• Will AI take over the work I do now?
• What skills will still matter when clients can ask ChatGPT for free?
• How do I make sure I am still valuable in five years?

In my opinion (as an optimist), the good news is that consulting is not disappearing. But it is evolving fast. Those who do not evolve will become irrelevant. If you understand the trends and adapt early, you can position yourself as the type of consultant clients will fight to work with.

Let’s explore what is happening and how to future-proof your consulting career.

1. What AI Is Really Doing to Consulting

The hype can make it sound like AI will replace every consultant overnight. In reality, AI is automating parts of consulting, not the whole profession.

According to insights from McKinsey, BCG, and Bain:

• Research and Analysis – AI can now pull market data, run competitive analysis, and summarise academic research in minutes. Tasks that once took a team of analysts a week can now be done before lunch.
• Slide Creation – AI-powered tools are producing solid first draft PowerPoints from bullet points or datasets.
• Scenario Modelling – Machine learning can run thousands of simulations faster than any Excel wizard.
• Idea Generation – Generative AI can spark creative strategy options by surfacing unconventional insights from huge data sets.

For strategy consulting, this is a big deal because much of the entry-level workload has historically involved these exact activities.

2. The Big Shift: From Doing the Work to Making It Matter

If AI can now do much of the “grunt work,” what will clients pay consultants for? The answer:

• Interpretation – understanding what the data actually means in the context of the organisation, its politics and people.
• Framing the Problem – helping clients define the right question before they rush into solutions.
• Synthesis – combining AI-generated insights with lived experience, human judgment, and business acumen.
• Influence – getting senior stakeholders to buy in, change behaviour, and act.

BCG calls this moving from analysis to sense-making. In other words, AI can give you answers, but it cannot offer clients confidence. That is where you come in.

3. Why Consulting Is Not Going Away

Some fear that if AI makes research and analysis instant, clients will not need consultants. But clients have always been able to get information. The internet didn’t kill consulting. Neither did Excel, Google, or data visualisation tools.

Consulting has never just been about the data. It is about: