The impact of AI on the professional services craft

McKinsey wrote at the start of 2025 – prompted by Reid Hoffman’s book Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future – that “Almost all companies invest in AI, but only 1 percent believe they are at a mature stage. Employees are rapidly experimenting with AI, but company leaders are not yet ready to provide a strategic steer” and that “This transformation will take some time, but leaders must not be dissuaded. Instead, they must advance boldly today to avoid becoming uncompetitive tomorrow.”

So, inevitably I wondered what the current AI wave would do to my field of work: professional services – IT consulting. Here are some changes I see coming up:

The End of “Grunt Work”

Traditionally, junior consultants spent hundreds of hours on data cleaning, secondary research, and slide deck formatting. AI will drastically reduce the need for these so called “junior”-tasks:

Research: Instead of a week spent analysing 100’s of sources, AI can analyse and summarise massive amounts of literature in minutes.
Formatting Tools now exist that can turn a rough outline or a spreadsheet into a client-ready PowerPoint presentation, complete with brand-compliant formatting.
Reuse: Consultants can use GraphRAG (Graph based Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems to query a firm’s entire historical knowledge graph, ensuring they don’t “reinvent the wheel” for every project.
Sample code: For technical consulting, AI can help write code samples (based on best practices and existing Github code repositories.
Compliance: Similarly, GraphRAG can be used to ensure that any advice delivered is inline with the standards and methodology that the company pre-scribes.

The New Business Model

If a task that used to take 100 hours now takes 10 minutes, the billable hour model collapses. Consulting firms are pivoting in two directions:

Fixed-Fee Engagements: Charging for the answer or the result rather than the time spent getting there.
Productisation: Building proprietary AI software that clients subscribe to, creating recurring “SaaS-like” revenue for the consulting firm.

The above will make typically expensive consulting engagements less resource intensive (read: consulting firm headcount will decrease) but also more affordable, allowing the consulting firms to move into market segments that typically could not afford expensive consultants.

On the other hands, customers that used to rely heavily on external consulting, might also consider to ditch the consulting firm but keep the headcount and bring the skills in-house.

The New Consultant Skill Set

As AI handles the “what” and the “how,” the human consultant focuses on the “so what?” and the “what now?”

Skill Category	Old World	AI-Enabled World
Analysis	Data gathering & Excel modeling	Prompt engineering & verifying AI outputs
Communication	Creating slide decks	Strategic storytelling, executive presence, driving change.
Problem Solving	Pattern recognition based on experience	Nuanced judgment in “gray areas” where data is thin
Client Interaction	Periodic status updates	High-touch emotional intelligence and change management

Risks and Hurdles

The above transition isn’t without friction. Firms are currently navigating several “blind spots”:

Data Privacy: Ensuring client trade secrets aren’t fed into public LLMs.
Tool selection: Picking the best tool for the job is still challenging.
Hallucinations: AI has been known to provide flawed recommendations.
Adoption challenge: Consultants need to overcome reservations towards LLMs.
Talent Gap: Without junior consultants, how will we develop senior consultants.

Conclusion

There is little doubt the Professional Service trade will be drastically impacted by the recent developments in AI. Consultants and consulting firms will have to adapt to survive and tackle the many hurdles that stand in the way of AI fully boosting consulting productivity.